When three quarters of your income goes toward housing, there is something seriously wrong with that situation.
That’s been going on for a while here.
In 1900, housing costs were 11% of the average American’s income. That number climbed steadily through the 1920s, then through the 1950s and 1960s, then really leaped upward starting in the early 1970s.
Let’s take a closer look at what happened. Land is a commodity fixed in quantity. No one’s making any more of it. We had steady population growth–but we had steady population growth through the 19th Century too, without horrifying levels of inflation in housing prices. The western frontier was closed–but that happened well before 1900. But since the Second World War we also had women joining the workforce, earning wages and competing with men, to buy the same commodities, resulting in enormous inflation and, since around 1972, wages that have been stagnant in real terms for the vast majority of the working population.
One of the places inflation is hidden is the continuous out-of-control housing price bubbles that the rest of society is held at bayonet point and forced to reinflate every time there is a correction, like there was in 2008, because all the home moaners who contribute to politicians’ reelection committees are constantly whining about “muh real estate values.” Add to this the phenomenon we’ve seen since the 1980s: Boomers buy ten houses to flip and twelve more to rent, then REEEEEEEE to their Congressmen for a bailout every time there’s a dip in the market. And now Black Rock Capital is on a mission, with twelve trillion dollars of cash burning holes in their pockets, to buy every house in Ameri-Kwa and force everyone to rent.
This isn’t sustainable, of course. The parasites are killing the host. Some of them will, of course, move on to another country to parasitize once they’ve sucked us all dry. There’s a reason they call them (((rootless cosmopolitans))). But some of them are going to wait just a little too long, try to collect rents just one more month before fleeing the country with suitcases full of other people’s money. The luggage full of gold coins is going to be just too heavy and they won’t quite make it to the boarding gates when they close and the last plane takes off.
There is ample historical evidence about what tends to happen next. In some countries it involves guillotines, in others, telephone poles and nooses. I’m not talking about what I think should happen, or what I think anyone should do. I’m talking about what history tells us about these situations.
