Tag Archives: housing

Did the Stagflation of the 70s Ever Exist In the First Place?

by ErickaFontenot Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a conversation with Dean Baker recently, I learned something interesting. This won’t be new to anyone deeply familiar with inflation statistics, but it was new to me. Maybe it will be new to you too.

The general subject is the stagflation of the 70s, which ushered in supply-side economics and the Reagan era. More specifically, the issue is the measurement of inflation during part of this era. Housing costs are incorporated into the CPI by measuring rents, but prior to 1982 it was done by directly measuring the price of buying a house. In an era when interest rates were steady, this didn’t matter much, but when interest rates went crazy in the mid-70s it made a big difference, overstating inflation by about two percentage points. If you correct for this, and also take a look at exactly when the worst periods of stagflation occurred, you get this:

If you correct the inflation figures and account for the two oil shocks of the 70s, the period from 1970-85 looks remarkably steady. Inflation and GDP growth are both running at about 4 percent for nearly the entire time.

I don’t have the chops to relitigate this, but the question it raises is: Did stagflation ever even exist? Was there anything seriously wrong with the economy of the 70s other than a pair of oil shocks we had no control over? Would the economy have recovered normally after the second oil shock even if Paul Volcker hadn’t created a huge recession? Feel free to litigate in comments.

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Did the Stagflation of the 70s Ever Exist In the First Place?

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Studies Show: Marijuana Does Not Make You Stupid

by ukiczp43 Posted on February 22, 2016

We’ve all seen those old Public Service Announcements on the dangers of marijuana: poor decision making, laziness, stupidity general uselessness. Further stoking this ideology, stoner stereotypes in film and television show us drooling teens and college studentslaughing over nothing, stringing together incoherent lines of thought and binge eating very, uhm, interesting food choices.

However, not one but two new studies have furthersmokedthe notion that smoking pot makes you dumb. One Journal of Psychopharmacology study focused on a large group of British teenagerswhile the other, perhaps more interesting, focused on the cognitive function in sets of identical twins one using marijuana, and one drug-free. Twin studies tend to be more reliable as they focus on subjects with identical genetic makeup, offering up more conclusive results.

While methods differed, results in both studies were the same: Marijuana use has no impact on overall levels of intelligence.

While marijuana fans can use these findings as an excuse for a celebratory toke, it’s important to note that this has been an ongoing discussion, and that these findings are not ground-breaking.

A study published in 2011 led by Robert Tait at the Australian National Universitylooked at the long-term cognitive effects of marijuana use in 2,000 subjects between the ages of 20 and 24. The scientists followed participants for 8 years, at the end of which they concluded weed consumption had no concrete measurable impact on cognitive performance.

A similar 2014 University College of London study showed that marijuana use does not impact your IQ. However, while the London study showed no ill impact on overall smarts, it concluded that marijuana use can affect your ability to actively learn; Scientists in that study found a 3 percent drop in test scores on school exams taken at the age of 16 among the test group. (Interestingly enough, the study also noted that alcohol usenot marijuanawill indeed impact your overall levels of intelligence.) However, way back in 2001 Harvard researchersnoted that learning impairments among marijuana users diminish within 28 days of smoking cessation.

So if it doesn’t make you dumb, what does it do? Aside from medical treatment for ailmentslike glaucoma, epilepsy, anxiety and more,the plant has been shown to improve creativity, relieve stress and promote alternative ways of thinking you can thank weed for that aha! moment.

It’s important to note that weed isn’t merely for teenaged stoners. The age range of cannabis users is as vast as the reason they use, and the country-wide consumption of the plant impacts everything from politicsto the housing industry.

While you don’t necessarily need to smoke the plant to feel its benefits (apparently you can juice it, too), news of cannabis’ non-effect on intelligence has many fans lighting up.

Related
Should Medical Marijuana Be Legalized For Pets?
10 Health Benefits of Marijuana
Masturbation: The Sexy Meditation Alternative

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Studies Show: Marijuana Does Not Make You Stupid

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China Finally Adopts Market-Based Value for its Currency, But We May Not Like the Results

by AdolphJanzen164 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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For years the United States has been complaining that China artificially undervalues its currency, which makes their exports cheaper and gives them a trade advantage over American firms. In response, China has gradually let the renminbi rise. By 2015, it had roughly reached fair market value—though not all American politicians agreed about that.

But then the Chinese economy started going sour. Exports were down. The stock market crashed. Growth slowed. What to do? Answer: devalue the renminbi. But instead of doing it by fiat, pretend that you’re merely responding to market forces:

Every morning, Beijing sets a target for the trading of its currency against the U.S. dollar, then allows investors to buy and sell the currency for 2 percent more or less. Tuesday’s change relaxes the government’s control over setting that rate. The midpoint will now be set at the market’s closing rate for the previous day.

….Now, market forces could pressure the currency to depreciate rather than appreciate, making Chinese products comparatively cheaper….In China, the depreciation will be a boon for exporters and heavy industry, but bad news for companies that depend on imported goods. Shares of Chinese airlines plummeted on Tuesday, as analysts predicted that the higher cost of oil in U.S. dollars would weigh on their earnings.

It’s convenient to have a market-based policy as long as that produces a devaluation of the currency. But will Chinese authorities stick to this policy even when it means the renminbi will appreciate? Good question.

So what does it all mean? Here are a few obvious thoughts:

This is yet another vote of no confidence in the Chinese economy. When you put together everything that Chinese authorities have done over the past six months, I’d say they’re close to full-scale panic.
Investors are likely to push the renminbi even lower, and this is going to make life harder on anyone in China with dollar-denominated debt. This includes lots of local governments who have been financing the housing boom, which means this devaluation could hasten the housing bust everyone has been waiting for.
This will be a political issue in the US, but a tricky one. China is manipulating its currency to its own advantage—boo! hiss!—but has also adopted a policy that allows the renminbi’s value to be dictated by market forces—which is what we’ve been demanding all along. It will be interesting to see how all the Republican presidential candidates decide to respond to this.

Generally speaking, I think this should be taken as bad news. The world economy remains fragile, and if the Chinese economy is falling into recession—as the Chinese themselves seem to believe—it will affect all of us. And not in a good way. Stay tuned.

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China Finally Adopts Market-Based Value for its Currency, But We May Not Like the Results

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Democrats Introduce Sweeping, Historic Bill to Protect LGBT Rights

by FredManifold32 Posted on July 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Members of Congress introduced on Thursday a historically comprehensive bill that would create federal standards to protect LGBT people from discrimination in housing, workplaces, schools, public accommodations, and financial transactions.

Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, but most states still lack laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people in other areas. “This means that while same-sex couples can today legally marry, tomorrow they could lose their jobs, be kicked out of a restaurant, or be turned down for a mortgage, just because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a cosponsor of the bill, said in Washington before its introduction in the House and Senate.

The Equality Act, as it’s known, would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin—to also include protections for LGBT people. Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who became the fourth openly gay member of Congress five years ago, cited staggering statistics to support the bill. He said 63 percent of LGBT Americans have reported experiencing discrimination at some point in their lives, and that 56 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have experienced discrimination when trying to get health care. “The current system, this patchwork of protections and lack of protections for the LGBT community in our states, is not working,” he said Thursday.

But the Equality Act will likely face opposition from Republican lawmakers. In 2013, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would have prohibited discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, passed in the Senate but died in the GOP-controlled House.

Only 21 states explicitly outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, and of those, 19 states plus Washington, DC, also prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity, according to the Human Rights Campaign. For a better sense of the fragmented landscape, check out the following maps on employment discrimination, housing discrimination, discrimination in public places, and credit discrimination, courtesy of the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based think tank.

Employment discrimination and sexual orientation/gender identity Movement Advancement Project

Public accommodations laws generally cover anywhere someone is when they are not at home, work, or school, including retail stores, restaurants, parks, hotels, doctors’ offices, and banks. – See more at: http://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws#sthash.yu3LZkag.dpuf

Housing discrimination and sexual orientation/gender identity Movement Advancement Project

Public accommodation discrimination and sexual orientation/gender identity Movement Advancement Project

Credit discrimination and sexual orientation/gender identity Movement Advancement Project

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Democrats Introduce Sweeping, Historic Bill to Protect LGBT Rights

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AFFH: What You Need to Know to Keep Up With the Latest Right-Wing Outrage

by VirgilioWjd Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Conservatives have a whole laundry list of stuff they’re outraged about: Benghazi, Fast & Furious, Agenda 21, Obamaphones, etc. etc. So what’s the latest from the right wing? Stanley Kurtz tells us:

Conservative opinion has been alive with outrage over AFFH for a month now.

Huh. Never heard of it. But a few minutes of Googling will get me up to speed. Hold on a bit.

OK. So it turns out that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlaws most of the obvious forms of housing discrimination, and has done a relatively good job of enforcing discrimination rules since then. However, it also requires the Department of Housing and Urban Development to run its programs in a way that affirmatively furthers fair housing. That is, if a local community is heavily segregated, it has to affirmatively try to reduce that segregation in order to qualify for HUD funds.

It turns out that HUD hasn’t done much of anything about this particular aspect of the law, and President Obama would like them to start. So a couple of years ago HUD started developing guidelines called, uncreatively, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” Last year they released a tool for assessing segregation and fair housing choice that can be used by community planners, and a few days ago they released the final 377-page rule.

That’s the basics. It’s surprisingly hard to get more because Google returns almost exclusively either (a) evaluations of AFFH by civil rights and fair housing groups, or (b) outraged rants from conservative outlets. Ordinary newspapers seem to have little interest (or, as Kurtz puts it, “The mainstream press has been straining to avoid AFFH”).

Obviously I’m not going to pretend to be an instant expert now that I’ve read half a dozen pieces about AFFH, but basically the concrete goals seem to be (1) providing communities with data regarding the racial, ethnic and income distribution of housing in their towns; (2) encouraging and funding affordable housing in prosperous areas; and (3) pressing communities to change zoning rules that promote segregation.

Will it work? Hard to say. HUD’s only tool for enforcing its guidelines is to withhold money for HUD programs if communities don’t comply. However, prosperous communities don’t get much HUD funding in the first place, which means HUD has little leverage in high-income suburbs. They’ll probably be able to almost entirely avoid the long arm of HUD tyranny.

Anyway, that’s that. Mostly I just wanted to let everyone know that this thing called AFFH is the latest outrage among the conservative base. It fits in perfectly with their hysteria over Agenda 21 and their general belief that Obama wants to round up every well-off white person in the country and pack them like sardines into high-rise buildings in big cities. Now you know.

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AFFH: What You Need to Know to Keep Up With the Latest Right-Wing Outrage

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You should be excited about this SCOTUS decision, too

by MapleValle Posted on June 29, 2015

You should be excited about this SCOTUS decision, too

By on 29 Jun 2015commentsShare

Amid big huzzahs for the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage last week, there was another, less-heralded 5-4 vote that also deals a stiff blow to decades-old discriminatory practices: The court’s ruling on a Texas case involving housing discrimination.

On June 25, SCOTUS found that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The court cited the legal concept known as “disparate impact” — the idea that policies can still be discriminatory (and therefore illegal) even if the discrimination is not intentional. Disparate impact is an important concept in civil rights law, since proving intentional discrimination is extremely difficult in court. Disparate impact, however, per the New York Times’ take on the news, “can be proved using statistics.”

As Brentin Mock pointed out in January, while this particular case specifically addresses housing discrimination — the plaintiffs argued that state officials were sanctioning too many subsidized housing developments in African-American neighborhoods, perpetuating the very segregation they were meant to address — its outcome has huge ripple effects on environmental justice, too. Zoning laws, which are typically responsible for the siting of hazardous waste facilities and other polluting industries, can be called up under the Fair Housing Act. And showing the disproportionate impacts of pollution on low-income communities of color in court is far easier, Brentin wrote, than proving “there was malice in the heart of the developer who placed the housing projects near the landfills.”

Still, bloggers and analysts maintain, the court undermined its own historic ruling by limiting the ways that the disparate impact claim can be used. According to Quartz, for instance:

Unfortunately, the court tempered its own ruling by limiting disparate-impact claims to cases where a law or policy raises “artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers.” That gives lower courts a lot of leeway in interpretation. And it said that purely statistical evidence of disparate impact isn’t enough; plaintiffs must also prove that a law or policy caused that impact, which will often be hard.

So, this is hardly the end of the road. But now that the nation’s highest court has finally, officially recognized disparate impact, it should be far more possible to address real injustices that do exist — regardless of whether anybody intended them to.

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The other big US Supreme Court Decision we should be celebrating is one no one’s talking about

, Quartz.

Justices Back Broad Interpretation of Housing Law

, New York Times.

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You should be excited about this SCOTUS decision, too

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Once Again, We Are Unlearning the Lesson of the Great Debt Bubble

by LynetteNettleto Posted on April 1, 2015

Mother Jones

Is this good news?

Millions of Americans unable to obtain credit cards, mortgages and auto loans from banks will receive a boost with the launch of a new credit score aimed at consumers regarded as too risky by lenders.

Here’s more:

The new score is largely a response to banks’ desire to boost lending volumes by increasing loan originations to borrowers who otherwise wouldn’t qualify, many of whom tend to be charged more for loans….The new score, which isn’t yet named, will be calculated based on consumers’ payment history with their cable, cellphone, electric and gas bills, as well as how often they change addresses and other factors.

….The new score could help applicants who don’t use credit often but are responsible with their monthly payments to get approved for financing….But many borrowers who don’t have a traditional FICO score are very risky.

….Besides increasing their pool of borrowers and loan originations, banks stand to earn more in interest revenue from riskier borrowers. Lenders charge higher interest rates and in some cases extra fees to borrowers who present a higher risk of falling behind on debt payments.

Color me deeply skeptical. Helping people who are denied credit simply because they don’t currently use any credit sounds great. And assessing them by their reliability in paying normal monthly bills sounds perfectly reasonable.

But I very much doubt this is really the target of this initiative. After all, people with no previous credit history already have access to credit. They just have to start slowly, with low credit limits and so forth. This new scoring system probably won’t change that.

What it will do is give banks an excuse to extend high-cost credit to risky borrowers—exactly the same thing they did during the housing bubble. As you may recall, that didn’t turn out well, and there was a simple reason: risky borrowers are risky for a reason. When banks start to get too loose with their lending standards they end up dealing with default rates much higher than they expected.

This won’t happen right away, of course. Banks will be relatively cautious at first. They always are. But just wait a few years and it will be a different story. Then the standards will be lowered just a little too far, the rocket scientists will do their thing, and we’ll be headed toward yet another debt crisis.

This is almost certainly a bad idea. We’d all like to see everyone get a chance, but there are good reasons to restrict credit to borrowers who are likely to repay. We should remember that.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle has a different take here. I’m skeptical, but it’s worth reading.

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Once Again, We Are Unlearning the Lesson of the Great Debt Bubble

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Three Cheers For the California Miracle!

by ad Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Oh dear. Here’s some bad news for Ted Cruz on his very first day as an official presidential candidate:

For years, business lobbyists complained about what they derided as “job killer” laws that drive employers out of California. Rival state governors, notably former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, made highly publicized visits to the Golden State in hopes of poaching jobs.

But new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tell a different story. Total jobs created in the 12 months ending Jan. 31 show California leading other states. California gained 498,000 new jobs, almost 30% more than the Lone Star State’s total of 392,900 for the same period.

Them’s the breaks. There’s no more “Texas Miracle” for either Cruz or Rick Perry. We’re in the middle of a California Miracle right now.

So how is Sodom on the Pacific pulling this off? Actually, that’s pretty easy to answer. California was hit hard by the housing bubble, while Texas wasn’t. So California’s economy took a big hit during the recession and the slow recovery, while Texas did pretty well—aided and abetted by a rise in oil prices.

Now everything has turned around. California is rebounding strongly from the housing crisis while Texas is suffering from the global collapse in oil prices. There is, frankly, nothing very miraculous about either story. It’s just the business cycle at work in a fairly normal and predictable way.

In fact, you may recall that there was never much of a Texas Miracle in the first place. It was mostly just PR bluster, as the chart on the right shows. The thick green line shows the unemployment rate in Texas compared to its neighboring states, and Texas is right smack in the middle—and it always has been. It’s better than half a dozen nearby states and worse than another half dozen. It is, sad to say, entirely average. That’s not something Texans are likely to take kindly to, but numbers don’t lie.

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Three Cheers For the California Miracle!

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Can Tiny Houses Help Fix Homelessness?

by RonnieThomson Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

More Coverage of Homelessness


The Shockingly Simple, Surprisingly Cost-Effective Way to End Homelessness


Heartbreaking Photos and Tragic Tales of San Francisco’s Homeless


How Does a City Count Its Homeless? I Tagged Along to Find Out


This Massive Project Is Great News for Homeless Vets in Los Angeles


Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Homeless Techie in Silicon Valley


Hanging Out With the Tech Have-Nots at a Silicon Valley Shantytown

In November 2013, June lived in a makeshift encampment of tarps and cardboard, squeezed between a road and a chain link fence in West Oakland, California. “It can happen to anybody, man,” he says of life on the street. “Up today, down tomorrow. That’s the way it goes.”

Come last winter, June upgraded from his ramshackle encampment to a pink wooden house with a tan door and shiny roof. The new house, which is just long enough for him to lie down inside, cost only $30 to build.

It’s one of about 25 colorful homes artist Greg Kloehn has fashioned from the massive amounts of garbage dumped illegally in Oakland—a city where a minimum wage worker would have to put in 150-hour weeks to afford a fair market, two-bedroom apartment. He uses whatever materials he happens upon—pallets, bed boards, sheets of plastic, dryer doors. One home has an umbrella and grill propped on its miniature front porch. Wheels accommodate the “nomadic life” of people living on the street, who relocate frequently to avoid cops and city cleanup crews. As Kloehn jokes, he builds “illegal homes out of illegal garbage.”

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Can Tiny Houses Help Fix Homelessness?

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The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow.

by PedroVerdon Posted on December 29, 2014

Mother Jones

Atrios has decided to force me to read Robert Samuelson’s column this morning. Thanks, dude. Here’s the start:

What is curious about the present understandable preoccupation with the middle class is the assumption — both explicit and implicit — that the system is “rigged” (to use Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s favorite term) against this vast constituency of Americans. In reality, just the opposite is true. The system is rigged in favor of the middle class. That’s a natural result for a democracy in which politicians compete more for votes than for dollars.

If you look at how the federal government spends and raises its money, the bias for the middle class and poor becomes plain. In fiscal 2014, about two-thirds of the $3.5 trillion federal budget went for “payments to individuals.” This covers 59 million Social Security recipients, more than 54 million Medicare beneficiaries (overlapping with Social Security), 68 million Medicaid recipients, 46 million food-stamp recipients — and many more.

This really doesn’t make sense. When we speak of the “middle class,” we’re nearly always talking about the working-age middle class. Samuelson surely knows this. But the only programs he calls out by name are specifically directed at the elderly and the working poor. Barely a single dollar of those programs goes to middle-class workers.

What’s the point of this pretense? Beats me. I guess it allows Samuelson to ignore the stagnant middle-class wages and skyrocketing upper incomes of the past 15 years, which is what nearly everyone means when they say the system is rigged against the middle class. And it allows him to make the truly chin-scratching point that during the aughts, the result of this soaring inequality was basically a massive and fraudulent loan program from the rich to the middle class that eventually—and inevitably—broke down, producing a massive economic recession. This, in Samuelson’s view, was “an intellectual, political and social climate that legitimized lax lending policies in the name of promoting middle-class well-being.” If that’s the way we promote middle-class well-being, can I please be transferred to a different class?

I don’t agree with Samuelson much, but this column is a real head scratcher. It’s not as if any of this stuff is ancient history. For more than a decade, income gains have been going almost exclusively to the rich; the housing bust, by contrast, was a calamity mostly for the working and middle classes; and government aid programs have been aimed largely at rescuing the financial sector and (in a pinch) helping the poor. The middle-class folks thrown out of work have gotten a few grudging extensions of our meager unemployment insurance and a slight expansion of our meager disability system, but that’s about it. This is not a “crisis of faith,” as Samuelson puts it. It’s a crisis of not having very much money.

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The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow.

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