Thought For The Day - 20 March 2022

The boys basketball games ran into the usual "60 Minutes" slot, so I was able to catch the second segment on usurious single-house rental fees. Turns out, the report focused on the Sunbelt states and young folks moving there for 'the lower taxes and business friendly environment'. The signal couple, of J-ville Fla. had been in 'their' rental house for about a year. The initial rental was $1,000/month, but was raised to $1,400 in the second. Simple arithmetic makes that a 40% increase in one year. The boy allowed as how he was able to 'negotiate' $1,300.

Neither the boy nor the girl noted that the lax taxing is unlikely to compensate for $4,800 in lost discretionary funds. She did say that the increase had impacted their 'lifestyle'. As someone once coined, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch".

The report also interviewed some real estate folks who claimed that the problem was that there hasn't been much home construction in the wake of the Great Recession. Bullshit. Geezers are dying off, freeing up lots of houses, they just happen to be, mostly, in the Blue states where the geezers died. (I can't wait for 'The Villages' to become a ghost town.) That's one reason the real estate moguls have been able to stock up. The problem is that the knucklehead young folks are flocking to states without proper infrastructure. Not to mention: not enough water in most of the southwestern said states, and more than enough from tornados and hurricanes in the southeastern states, and a chaotic electric grid in Texas.

And, by the bye, Boeing decided to stick it to their unionized Blue state workers by building a new plant in South Carolina to assemble their fancy new plastic 787. Hasn't worked out so well, in that the Rednecks can't seem to figure out how to make one that works.

American population cohorts continue to breed smaller numbers of young ones. The young folk, like the lemmings they are, move to the least viable parts of the country. The South uses more of available resources than any other area, including demands for energy.