True story: Harold & Maude are a forty-something couple with two teenaged kids. Both are educated, both work in IT, both are fairly sophisticated, financially speaking.
It was from the Department of Finance of Mono County, informing them—in bold and capitalized letters—that they owed a “DELINQUENT AND UNSECURED PROPERTY TAX”.
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| The Road to Hell, by Paul Stevenson. |
Back in 2003, they bought a vacation condo, in Mono County, California—you know, where Mammoth Lake and the Mammoth ski resort are located, right next to Yosemite National Park. They bought the condo in mid 2003, then flipped it later that same year—they closed escrow the first week of 2004, with every t crossed, with every i dotted.
They went on with their lives: Work, vacations, kids, school, job, carpool—same-old-same-old, just like millions of other ordinary citizens.
Then one day in March of this year, they get a letter—a pretty frightening letter, actually.
It was from the Department of Finance of Mono County, informing them—in bold and capitalized letters—that they owed a “DELINQUENT AND UNSECURED PROPERTY TAX”.
The letter went on to inform them that they owed—in bold, italicized, underlined and oversized lettering (I’m not kidding)—$845.99.
Guess the letter had to put the figure in bold, italicized, underlined and oversized lettering so as to make it really clear how much was owed—and to whom!
Be advised, a lien has been filed, said the letter in conclusion—in oversized bold lettering. Since they no longer owned the property, Harold and Maude weren’t sure what the county had put a lien on—if not their former vacation condo, then their current home? Their children? Their souls? Who knows—just that something had a lien on it—so you better pay up, buster! Now!
I am a lawyer and those legal fees are imaginary. Law is a dead field. It's oversaturated. They can put a craigslist ad up and probably get someone to do it for $8/hr, or call up the local law school or county bar association and get the legal work done for free.
ReplyDeleteThe average lawyer graduating in the past 5 years has 6 figure debt and maybe makes about $50k a year---if they're "lucky." The higher education scam is one of the biggest scams we have going in our scam economy, and just watch that blow up.
Student loan debt is already approaching $1 Trillion. In comparison, TARP was $700 Billion. lol. You can't walk away from a student loan debt either. Half the population in the US is under 35 years old, and if you stick 25% of that population with debt like this they'll never be able to contribute to the economy, they're too busy paying loans and late fees. The interest payments, incidentally, are 7-8% and are calculated once a month but capitalization occurs daily, increasing the payment amounts such that most borrowers can't get ahead.
This is the USA now. Don't listen when anybody tells you that we need a more educated workforce or that the youth need to work harder or other garbage. Young men actually work 100 more hours now than 20 years ago but their purchasing power is lower.
The inherited and accumulated wealth of the past ,valued as the money form of value , including banker fiat paper issued as government and banker debts, is a claim by that money, invested as capital to a share of future wealth creation .
ReplyDeleteClaims that dominates the future generations of America beyond their ability to afford an education on credit at the level needed in modern society to make a living as productive for capital workers. With an expected first world high standard of living .
Because of the need to pay interest on their student loans as well as make a living too.
They are as a result junior Debt peons with debts that may take decades to pay off if ever as it is hard to find jobs
The issuance of that usurious credit for student loans ,said here to be a Trillion dollars ,was facilitated by government backing of the student loans by deficit spending. Creating a national educational debt sold to the bondholders at cheaper ,profitable, interest rates .
The mounting claims of past debts for interest and bond dividends as return for capital ,has as not been matched by an increased ability in productivity in industrial commodity wealth that allows both a rising standard of living and an ability to pay the amount of interest and dividends claimed by capital ,in an America de-industrialized by free trade capital that exported productive industry and jobs to the Third World.
America was a Ponzi economy running on credit , ,now insolvent because of its inability to keep up its contracted interest payments on past debts to internal and foreign capital
The economy is weighed down by past government ,commercial and private debts now at a level beyond the nations ability to repay the principal loaned ,or even the interest bill on those debts to keep the Ponzi turning over.
Housing , Property and the finance sector, where most Americans had invested their savings turned out to be a bubble ,that is an overvalued sector unable to deliver up expected mortgage dividend and rental incomes and /or realizable increased
property values at the expected levels.
Following the collapse of the money /credit markets in 2008 the losses of the financial sector were socialized and the housing mortgage supply sector, Fannie May and
Freddie Mac,as well as other dud sub prime bonds , were nationalized and put on the Treasury and Central banks books.
As government had insufficient tax revenues to pay for that out of current incomes because of its insane war and other debts the government turned to the printing press .
Counterfeiting money that had no matching wealth in the real world, even buying its own deficit spending debts in a scam between the US treasury the central bank and the banksters .So called Quantative Easing !
The issue of this fake money devalues already existing dollars and is bound to eventually result in massive inflation. This is partly the aim of the Federal Bank in order to devalue the massive debts in dollar terms and by exporting the inflation.
Dollars issued by America to foreigners to China ,Japan ,The Arab oil Sheiks etc
are a claim on the real world assets of America
Under the dollar hegemony system oil was priced in dollars, their was a demand for dollars by many countries to finance their oil imports.
America was able to run a trade deficit for decades . That is, its own imports were financed by a foreign credit supply. Foreigners were prepared to invest in America ,its Treasury bills and property bonds and finance its trade deficits as long as they had confidence that they would get a real value return on their investments in a strong dollar.
Past investors in dollar debts like the Chinese who provided vendor finance to America so they could afford to buy Chinese cheap labor commodities on credit as well as buying US government debt in treasury bills, are of course not to happy about seeing the values of their past invested savings devalued by inflation.
In fact they see it as outright robbery.