In Florida, home of the rabid we-hate-gummint crowd, developers can seize your condo and pay you cents on the dollar. Don’t like it? Move to some pinko place like New York or LA.
Watch: Floridians forced to sell their homes at huge losses http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2015/2/6/florida-condo-law.html via DuckDuckGo for Android
Fueled by investors seeking better returns, the sub-prime auto market has been heating up. The lenders find people with marginal credit ratings and put up the money for them to buy cars at high interest rates. The loans are then packaged and syndicated to investors. The problem is that those packaged loans may be much more risky than their “ratings” would suggest.
You may not own such loans directly, but they could be in your portfolio through a mutual fund or pension fund. Even your bank accounts could be at risk if you carry a large enough balance.
“If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.” (attributed to Warren Buffett)
Investment Riches Built on Subprime Auto Loans to Poor – NYTimes.com.
The state of California and the city of San Jose have evicted the residents of a tent city. The results were predictable:
Residents of the neighborhood in Central San Jose that abutted the Jungle were glad to see the encampment go. But dismantling the Jungle is already creating new problems. Just days after the Jungle was torn apart, San Jose police and other city departments began fielding calls from people in different neighborhoods complaining of former Jungle residents setting up camps near them. Some ended up in a Walmart parking lot before being booted. Others were congregating near the airport, also under threat of eviction. At least one hospital reported an upsurge of emergency room visits from former residents of the Jungle, sick from weathering the elements, having misplaced medications in the eviction.
I don’t have an good solution to the problem of homelessness, but it seems obvious that evicting people will only destabilize their lives and move the problem to someone else’s neighborhood. It sounds a lot like externalization to me.
via ‘Some sort of hell’: How one of the wealthiest cities in America treats its homeless.
In the old days, a company would save money through integration — which meant owning every part of their business from raw materials, parts manufacturing, assembly, distribution, all the way through sales and marketing. But in the New Economy, it’s cheaper to outsource.
Amazon outsources its JIT (“Just in Time”) delivery to LaserShip. Then LaserShip turns around and outsources to so-called “independent contractors.” The independent contractors are just employees without benefits. They buy their own uniforms, buy their own vehicles, pay their own gas, file their own taxes. Benefits? LaserShip doesn’t provide them and their non-employees can’t afford them on the buck or so they get for delivering a package.
I haven’t seen any data, but I’m guessing that it works for Amazon like it does at Walmart: the employees are subsidized by the food stamp and welfare that we pay for.
The economists call it “externalization.” I call it “screwing the taxpayer.”
Amazon’s Enormous Same-Day Delivery Growth Comes At A Price.
Here at the lavish Biteme World Headquarters and Auto Showroom, we were much heartened by economist Gene Simmons’ recent announcement:
The 1 percent pays 80 percent of all taxes. Fifty percent of the population of the U.S. pays no taxes. The 1 percent provides all the jobs for everybody else. If the 1 percent didn’t exist, there would be chaos and the American economy would drop dead.
Gene Simmons a/k/a Chaim Witz a/k/a The Demon in his pre-economist days
Imagine how disappointed we were to hear that Simmons was wrong. It turns out that the 1 percent pays much less than 80% of all taxes. And much less than 50% of the population of the U.S. pays no taxes.
I don’t know where Simmons got his figure for the jobs created by the one percenters, but of about 140,000,000 total US employed, 20,000,000 are employed by government.
Unfortunately, Simmons won’t be getting that Nobel Prize in economics this year, but he did rate 4 Pinocchios from the Fact Checker.
4 Pinocchios for a rocker’s off-base claims about taxes and the ’1 percent’ – The Washington Post.
See also Cecil Adams’ “Do the rich pay very little tax? Wouldn’t a flat tax be fairer?”
After years of worrying that African-Americans suffer from the negative effects of welfare dependance, the RINO-controlled House Appropriations Committee has done a complete about-face and passed a budget bill that directs more nanny-state school lunch funding to the white children of the Appalachian region.
BiteMe applauds the RINOs for their new “welfare is good for you” stance. Huzzah!
House GOP Wants School Lunch Program To Feed Only ‘Rural’ Kids.
Since 2008, airlines have been charging for things — like checked bags — that were once included in the ticket price. More recently, some have begun offering packages with some of the once-free services added back into the cost of a ticket but at higher prices.
But what’s truly evil is that the airlines don’t want to disclose the real price in their advertising, making comparison shopping nearly impossible. Cute, huh?
To address the inequity, the United States Department of Transportation has proposed a rule requiring that passengers be provided detailed information on fees for a first checked bag, a second checked bag, advance seat assignments and carry-on bags.
Apparently full disclosure terrifies the airlines. Airlines for America, the industry trade association says that the “proposal overreaches and limits how free markets work.”
So they think that a free market works by hiding the price from the buyer? Bite me!
via Proposal wants airlines to be upfront with hidden charges | New York Post.
See also The Columbian and the Washington Post.
Here at BITEME, we love the Department of Numbers. But we have to call them out when they use a misleading graph like this one:
Here, they’ve set the baseline for the Y axis at 95 rather than zero, in order to exaggerate the rise in home prices and borrowing costs. Without the statistical manipulation, the lines would have been nearly flat — and boring.
Real Home Prices and Real Borrowing Costs Since the Bottom | Department of Numbers.
Basically, Amazon US pays its Luxemburg subsidiary inflated fees for the right to use its own software. The effect is to move large chunks of Amazon’s profit to countries where the tax rate is lower. The cool thing is that, apparently, both Microsoft and Google do the same thing.
Wal-Mart operates a similar scheme:
As the world’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. pays billions of dollars a year in rent for its stores. Luckily for Wal-Mart, in about 25 states it has been paying most of that rent to itself — and then deducting that amount from its state taxes.
My question is: how do the rest of us get in on these scams?
Something Fishy Has Happened At Amazon Over The Last 2 Years.
In a story that is becoming increasingly familiar, the below market-rate tenants of a NYC building are denied access to the building’s new pool.
Public Advocate Letitia James, Council Member Mark Levine and Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal have been working on legislation that would prohibit such disparities. Not so Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who is enthusiastic about the gentrification of her borough.
At least the regulated tenants don’t have to use a separate entrance.