"Of course, if the program were subsidized from general revenue (in order to increase the discounts for buyers), it would represent a transfer from high-earners’ labor income to middle-class housing wealth. "
Sounds like a bit of equalizing of the upper/lower middle class divide you mentioned in a previous post?
Why should housing be a way to build wealth? I mean, people use it but it seems like a terrible idea. Housing needs constant investment to maintain and build its value. Increases in value are taxed immediately without liquidation through property taxes in most states. Tax perks for owning it decrease over time and are generally setup so that the wealthiest benefit the most.
It also made a lot more sense in a society where people started working at a company shortly after graduating school (high school or college) and worked there their whole careers. In an environment where you might change jobs regularly, then being bound to location decreases economic potential.
If you are wanting to build wealth, why not simply do a baby bond? Give every child 5k to 10k in treasury bonds (or even better a total market index fund). They can take out half the money when they turn 25 and the rest sometime later.
Most legal residents of the USA (and perhaps some others) already have a hefty chunk of wealth that they can't sell. The Feds will dole it out to them as income once they reach the age of 68 (or whatever it is these days). This does not seem to bother anybody to the left of Paul Ryan.
Adding investment accounts _on top of_ Social Security, rather than privatizing / replacing it and letting the Wall Streeters fleece people with individual accounts, would be an excellent way to raise personal savings.
You mean a sort of government-run 401(k) plan, investing in Treasury securities? Makes sense, though some form of incentive such as partial matching of contributions, or better a slightly boosted interest rate, would be needed.
I'm suggesting a government-run savings plan -- so yes _somewhat_ like a 401(k), 403(b), or IRA -- but with the individual contributors buying shares in a Sovereign Wealth Fund, which might hypothetically invest in anything. Probably a large portion would be in Treasuries. But have a look at Norway's national pension fund: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
What the writer fails to address is the fact that there are those groups of people who would be unable to maintain a mortgage. Americans as a whole always want more than they need. They depend on credit more than they should and they have a misconception of what wealth is. Than there is the issue with the ability to budget and manage expenses. If you spend more than you make and never save you will never succeed. If the goverment were to subsidize and help lower the cost of, yes it would help many families but in the long run how many people would default on thier mortgage. People need to look at the historical data of low income housing and the negative and positive outcomes. When promoting these programs. Anything given freely has no value. If they create this program there needs to be an HOA to protect those home owners who really want a home verse thos who will abuse the system and have negative affect to thier neighborhood. Just look at what happened in some lowincome housing in the past. Facts don't care about feelings
I'm always skeptical of any comment that features a statement like "Americans as a whole always want more than they need."
Just say to to American exceptionalism. Or, to put it another way, is there something in the water in Australia that renders Aussies better savers than Americans? Pretty unlikely. As the chart shows, America is a very, very rich place (3rd in average wealth) but Americans typically aren't so rich (22nd in median wealth).
That kind of disparity isn't due to unique DNA (nor, as Noah notes, is it mostly due to having a younger population). It's due to policy. If we're serious about enabling non-rich Americans to live lives of security and dignity, we should be doing some things differently.
As is abundantly pointed out in _The Millionaire Next Door_, most Americans don't want wealth; they want luxury goods, so they can *look* wealthy.
Some years back, it was rumoured that young Americans, when asked to list their assets, were likely to include the amount they could still charge to their credit card before reaching its limit.
«As people and companies keep piling into cities, the value of land goes up. That has been a pretty damn good deal for middle-class wealth!»
But rising land prices do not build *any* wealth, because land tract/housing unit rises in price from $300,000 to $500,000 the difference, $200,000, is not extra wealth, it is simply redistribution from the next owner to the current owner: the next owner is $200,000 worse off, and the current owner is $200,000 better off. An exactly identical way of "building wealth" would be for the government to declare that every existing banknote should now be "worth" twice its face value.
Increasing the prices of land is not just a pure transfer of wealth, but also a highly regressive one, because it redistributes from usually poorer people, those who own no real estate, to usually richer people, those who already own real estate.
What do you make of policies to distribute portions of company equity to workers, as another way to increase middle class wealth with a diversifed asset class?
Is there any evidence that, per this column, government-funded housing construction is counter-cyclical? Since it's primarily done at the state and local levels, I assume it would be the first on the chopping block during a recession.
This may be a dumb question but since it costs like eleventy billion dollars to build a bike lane in the US will it still be a good wealth creator if the government is selling the house way below even their insanely inflated building costs? Like spending a million to build a house that’s worth 500K and actually selling it for 300K seems like an inefficient way to generate wealth?
Noah are you familiar with the Miethauser Syndikat model in Europe? It's a decentralized network of cooperatively purchased/built/owned houses and apartment buildings. Small groups self-organize into an LLC to purchase or build a property to be collectively held and used. They are advised, assisted with financing and co-partnered with the "Syndikat" network who also is on the title to the property. The Syndikat thus can kill any move to sell the property back into the private market keeping the homes in a de facto social housing network in perpetuity. In all other aspects the LLC has autonomy over how the project is operated. Sure this has parallels to land trusts and non-profit housing in the US but isn't quite like any of them. Obviously not a government-driven large-scale housing scheme of the type you're envisioning...but interesting food for thought for hybridized private pursuits with a "social" purpose.
An important factor in international comparisons of measured median wealth is the retirement system. All else being equal, median wealth will be substantially higher in countries with savings-based retirement systems than in countries with with PAYGO systems. Singapore and Hong Kong in particular, IIRC, have forced-savings systems not only for retirement, but also for health care.
This isn't purely a measurement artifact (you can bequeath your retirement savings to your children, but you can't do that with Social Security), but it would probably be better to include NPV of PAYGO benefits in international comparisons of median wealth.
This should also be accounted for in measures of wealth inequality. Note the irony in the fact that the people raising a hue and cry over wealth inequality are largely the same people who blocked attempts to incorporate private accounts into Social Security.
Here is a simple way to think about housing returns: Start with a baseline that assumes both rent and price will rise at the rate of inflation over the long run. In this case, the real return from buying home is the rent to price ratio, minus maintenance costs. People often say maintenance is 1% per year, but I think this varies. So, if a $500,000 home rents for $1667 per month (4%) it has an approximate long-run real return of 3%. Compare this to the return on long-run TIPS, and you have an approximate risk premium for the investment. I think that ratio is typical for many places, some higher, some lower. With negative real rates, a long-run real return of 3% is excellent.
This assumes the real cost of housing does not rise over the long run -- what Robert Shiller often suggests -- but it is conservative for most places, especially cities, where scarcity and productivity generally increase over time (agglomeration externalities). It also assumes purchasing and holding with cash. If you can borrow for less than the expected real return, then leverage can increase returns substantially. You can do that today, and typically, almost everywhere. Then, of course, is the (likely unfair) ways the tax code favors homeownership.
So, while mileage will vary, I think Noah is correct that housing has a high expected return, even today. A lot of that comes from low real interest rates. It's hard to see that changing dramatically in the near future. And I think he's right on all other counts, too: this seems the most likely way for the broader population to enjoy growth in wealth.
Now step back and look at the broader housing picture. Building has not kept up with household formation. Inventories are dreadfully low and there is a lot of pent up cash. This is not 2009/2010. Home prices grew rapidly through COVID. While similar increases probably ought to be expected in 2021, accompanied by a boom in new home building, employment, and growth, I do fear it will further exacerbate inequality.
A national housing program akin to Singapore is a good idea. I doubt we'll do that. Maybe we begin by trashing homeownership a little less, loosening lending standards a bit, and finding reasonable ways to help people buy first homes. We don't want to repeat the same mistakes of the 2000s. At the same time, we ought to recognize that the collapse was probably more irrational than the bubble. I don't think the Fed will let a collapse like that happen again.
I’m skeptical that we can ask the housing asset class to be a “good investment” in the sense of having returns significantly better than inflation, and simultaneously keep it affordable for the working class to rent when young and buy when they want to. It just seems like this runs into a Piketty-Saez r>g sort of problem. Either the growth in the asset takes the median housing unit beyond the realm of being affordable to the median income, or the rent chargeable on the median housing unit precludes any saving on the median income; or you just stop deriving so much growth and income from housing. The latter seems healthier, and we have plenty of ways to encourage or even compel alternative forms of saving. You could institute postal banking to make sure every citizen has a place to save, and then effectively switch from an income tax to a progressive consumption tax by excluding from taxable income any money that is still sitting in a savings account at the end of the year. Add a few negative income brackets at the bottom, maybe add on a new layer of FICA tax that’s funneled into some kind of investment account, aggregated in a sovereign wealth fund.
I mean I get you’re saying that the gov’t is going to build and sell units below cost, but unless we arrest population growth that just means the public budget has to bear the escalating cost of the r>g problem, and while I think a gov’t can run a deficit indefinitely, the deficit has to be fixed or shrinking relative to the size of the economy as a whole.
I just think trying to use housing as an “investment” dooms you to either having it be a _bad_ investment, or seeing the cost of housing dominate the economy.
If we redistribute the value of land and allow people to cheaply cluster together so that they can be productive, we're doing well. Instead of trying to do r>g calculations in our heads, I think we should remain focused on those two objectives...
I mean, I'm certainly all for deregulating land use along the lines of what MattY was calling for in his post that you're partially responding to. Given that that's a precondition for _any_ solution, that seems like the first thing to focus on, and it's already a pretty big political lift. Biden made some noises in the campaign about holding transportation funding hostage based on cities willingness to Affirmative Further Fair Housing -- which is a reason to be optimistic about Mayor Pete (who was pretty good on land use issues in South Bend) becoming Secretary of Transportation.
In any case, beyond the first step of making it legal to build housing, it seems to me that both the baby bonds concept, and an add-on investment component to Social Security, are easier lifts than the Singapore solution. Both of these options look to me more likely to pick off independent and conservative-leaning voters, compared to "public housing". I'd certainly vote to give the Singapore solution a try, if it looked like there was a coalition that could win. (n.b.: I think you'd get farther in discussing it as "the Vienna solution", rather than Singapore, even if the truth was you were modelling more closely on Singapore... American racism sucks, but we go into political battle with the electorate we have, not the one we might want or wish to have.)
We're already seeing the second phenomenon to an increasing degree. No, not every place in America features onerous housing costs, but the high productivity areas pretty much all do, with negative repercussions to the national economy. Mitigating this situation alone would be reason enough to try Singaporean housing policy, in my view. Also, it seems unlikely in absolute terms owning a home the government helped you buy will end up being a "bad investment" for very many people, at least compared to the alternatives. After all, even if the house hasn't appreciated very much, at least owning one will decrease housing costs (no rent to pay) for most folks. And there's there forced savings effect (in the real world not many people who eschew a monthly mortgage payment have the self-discipline to plow that extra money into index funds).
"I think that over a decade later, the American commentariat has still failed to process what a tremendous blow the American Dream took in 2007-8."
You don't say. Couldn't possibly be because the American elite is just one large toxic group of sociopath's determined to prove to themselves that this is a meritocracy and they deserve their ill gotten gains despite how many times in recent history we've seen over and over just how impossible it is for elites to fail in any direction but up.
Seriously, in Obama's mind handing his campaign donors trillions of dollars as a reward for pressuring poor people with no income into mortgages they can't afford and selling them off as risk free assets to unwitting investors and blowing up the worlds economy in the process isn't anyone's fault. Just markets. In fact, the problem would have been doing anything besides intentionally maximizing the number of foreclosures on poor people. Holding the criminals responsible would "have required a violence to the social order."
'The American commentariat' is oblivious because they idolize the villain. If they didn't they never would have made it to their position of prominence. That and they knew that any and all criticism of Obama would be called racist by his cult of supporters, even describing his entirely voluntary decision to destroy the most black wealth in history. The public doesn't know who to blame, which is why we get Trump.
Have we been living in the same country? Absolutely no one in this country wants young people to do well. I honestly can't think of another country that wants to harm their young people more than the US. We just elected President the guy responsible for putting millions of young POC in jail for decades, mostly for the crime of being poor. The same guy who made bankruptcy impossible for people with student debt. The only person in the world who has experience getting elected at a time of immense hardship, especially for young people, and then immediately using that power to reward the criminals/campaign donors responsible and implying that anyone suggesting we use the IMF's (Of ALL PLACES) recommendations for fixing the damage was a wild eyed radical.
"Of course, if the program were subsidized from general revenue (in order to increase the discounts for buyers), it would represent a transfer from high-earners’ labor income to middle-class housing wealth. "
Sounds like a bit of equalizing of the upper/lower middle class divide you mentioned in a previous post?
Yep!!
Yesss reading comprehension!
Thanks for noticing that!! I worry that I write so much that it all sort of flows past the world...
I'm really enjoying it!
Why should housing be a way to build wealth? I mean, people use it but it seems like a terrible idea. Housing needs constant investment to maintain and build its value. Increases in value are taxed immediately without liquidation through property taxes in most states. Tax perks for owning it decrease over time and are generally setup so that the wealthiest benefit the most.
It also made a lot more sense in a society where people started working at a company shortly after graduating school (high school or college) and worked there their whole careers. In an environment where you might change jobs regularly, then being bound to location decreases economic potential.
If you are wanting to build wealth, why not simply do a baby bond? Give every child 5k to 10k in treasury bonds (or even better a total market index fund). They can take out half the money when they turn 25 and the rest sometime later.
Booker’s baby bond program is one of the best ideas anyone’s offered in decades and Dems should RUSH to implement it this year.
Most legal residents of the USA (and perhaps some others) already have a hefty chunk of wealth that they can't sell. The Feds will dole it out to them as income once they reach the age of 68 (or whatever it is these days). This does not seem to bother anybody to the left of Paul Ryan.
^^^ So much this.
Adding investment accounts _on top of_ Social Security, rather than privatizing / replacing it and letting the Wall Streeters fleece people with individual accounts, would be an excellent way to raise personal savings.
You mean a sort of government-run 401(k) plan, investing in Treasury securities? Makes sense, though some form of incentive such as partial matching of contributions, or better a slightly boosted interest rate, would be needed.
I'm suggesting a government-run savings plan -- so yes _somewhat_ like a 401(k), 403(b), or IRA -- but with the individual contributors buying shares in a Sovereign Wealth Fund, which might hypothetically invest in anything. Probably a large portion would be in Treasuries. But have a look at Norway's national pension fund: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
Why do you think this new housing wealth will not be susceptible to the same kind of recession as the 07-08 recession?
If most of the wealth of the upper class and upper middle class and is in equity, why move money from income, and not from equity?
All assets with high expected returns have risk.
What the writer fails to address is the fact that there are those groups of people who would be unable to maintain a mortgage. Americans as a whole always want more than they need. They depend on credit more than they should and they have a misconception of what wealth is. Than there is the issue with the ability to budget and manage expenses. If you spend more than you make and never save you will never succeed. If the goverment were to subsidize and help lower the cost of, yes it would help many families but in the long run how many people would default on thier mortgage. People need to look at the historical data of low income housing and the negative and positive outcomes. When promoting these programs. Anything given freely has no value. If they create this program there needs to be an HOA to protect those home owners who really want a home verse thos who will abuse the system and have negative affect to thier neighborhood. Just look at what happened in some lowincome housing in the past. Facts don't care about feelings
I'm always skeptical of any comment that features a statement like "Americans as a whole always want more than they need."
Just say to to American exceptionalism. Or, to put it another way, is there something in the water in Australia that renders Aussies better savers than Americans? Pretty unlikely. As the chart shows, America is a very, very rich place (3rd in average wealth) but Americans typically aren't so rich (22nd in median wealth).
That kind of disparity isn't due to unique DNA (nor, as Noah notes, is it mostly due to having a younger population). It's due to policy. If we're serious about enabling non-rich Americans to live lives of security and dignity, we should be doing some things differently.
As is abundantly pointed out in _The Millionaire Next Door_, most Americans don't want wealth; they want luxury goods, so they can *look* wealthy.
Some years back, it was rumoured that young Americans, when asked to list their assets, were likely to include the amount they could still charge to their credit card before reaching its limit.
Sure, only Americans like fancy stuff.
«As people and companies keep piling into cities, the value of land goes up. That has been a pretty damn good deal for middle-class wealth!»
But rising land prices do not build *any* wealth, because land tract/housing unit rises in price from $300,000 to $500,000 the difference, $200,000, is not extra wealth, it is simply redistribution from the next owner to the current owner: the next owner is $200,000 worse off, and the current owner is $200,000 better off. An exactly identical way of "building wealth" would be for the government to declare that every existing banknote should now be "worth" twice its face value.
Increasing the prices of land is not just a pure transfer of wealth, but also a highly regressive one, because it redistributes from usually poorer people, those who own no real estate, to usually richer people, those who already own real estate.
What do you make of policies to distribute portions of company equity to workers, as another way to increase middle class wealth with a diversifed asset class?
Is there any evidence that, per this column, government-funded housing construction is counter-cyclical? Since it's primarily done at the state and local levels, I assume it would be the first on the chopping block during a recession.
This may be a dumb question but since it costs like eleventy billion dollars to build a bike lane in the US will it still be a good wealth creator if the government is selling the house way below even their insanely inflated building costs? Like spending a million to build a house that’s worth 500K and actually selling it for 300K seems like an inefficient way to generate wealth?
Noah are you familiar with the Miethauser Syndikat model in Europe? It's a decentralized network of cooperatively purchased/built/owned houses and apartment buildings. Small groups self-organize into an LLC to purchase or build a property to be collectively held and used. They are advised, assisted with financing and co-partnered with the "Syndikat" network who also is on the title to the property. The Syndikat thus can kill any move to sell the property back into the private market keeping the homes in a de facto social housing network in perpetuity. In all other aspects the LLC has autonomy over how the project is operated. Sure this has parallels to land trusts and non-profit housing in the US but isn't quite like any of them. Obviously not a government-driven large-scale housing scheme of the type you're envisioning...but interesting food for thought for hybridized private pursuits with a "social" purpose.
An important factor in international comparisons of measured median wealth is the retirement system. All else being equal, median wealth will be substantially higher in countries with savings-based retirement systems than in countries with with PAYGO systems. Singapore and Hong Kong in particular, IIRC, have forced-savings systems not only for retirement, but also for health care.
This isn't purely a measurement artifact (you can bequeath your retirement savings to your children, but you can't do that with Social Security), but it would probably be better to include NPV of PAYGO benefits in international comparisons of median wealth.
This should also be accounted for in measures of wealth inequality. Note the irony in the fact that the people raising a hue and cry over wealth inequality are largely the same people who blocked attempts to incorporate private accounts into Social Security.
Here is a simple way to think about housing returns: Start with a baseline that assumes both rent and price will rise at the rate of inflation over the long run. In this case, the real return from buying home is the rent to price ratio, minus maintenance costs. People often say maintenance is 1% per year, but I think this varies. So, if a $500,000 home rents for $1667 per month (4%) it has an approximate long-run real return of 3%. Compare this to the return on long-run TIPS, and you have an approximate risk premium for the investment. I think that ratio is typical for many places, some higher, some lower. With negative real rates, a long-run real return of 3% is excellent.
This assumes the real cost of housing does not rise over the long run -- what Robert Shiller often suggests -- but it is conservative for most places, especially cities, where scarcity and productivity generally increase over time (agglomeration externalities). It also assumes purchasing and holding with cash. If you can borrow for less than the expected real return, then leverage can increase returns substantially. You can do that today, and typically, almost everywhere. Then, of course, is the (likely unfair) ways the tax code favors homeownership.
So, while mileage will vary, I think Noah is correct that housing has a high expected return, even today. A lot of that comes from low real interest rates. It's hard to see that changing dramatically in the near future. And I think he's right on all other counts, too: this seems the most likely way for the broader population to enjoy growth in wealth.
Now step back and look at the broader housing picture. Building has not kept up with household formation. Inventories are dreadfully low and there is a lot of pent up cash. This is not 2009/2010. Home prices grew rapidly through COVID. While similar increases probably ought to be expected in 2021, accompanied by a boom in new home building, employment, and growth, I do fear it will further exacerbate inequality.
A national housing program akin to Singapore is a good idea. I doubt we'll do that. Maybe we begin by trashing homeownership a little less, loosening lending standards a bit, and finding reasonable ways to help people buy first homes. We don't want to repeat the same mistakes of the 2000s. At the same time, we ought to recognize that the collapse was probably more irrational than the bubble. I don't think the Fed will let a collapse like that happen again.
I’m skeptical that we can ask the housing asset class to be a “good investment” in the sense of having returns significantly better than inflation, and simultaneously keep it affordable for the working class to rent when young and buy when they want to. It just seems like this runs into a Piketty-Saez r>g sort of problem. Either the growth in the asset takes the median housing unit beyond the realm of being affordable to the median income, or the rent chargeable on the median housing unit precludes any saving on the median income; or you just stop deriving so much growth and income from housing. The latter seems healthier, and we have plenty of ways to encourage or even compel alternative forms of saving. You could institute postal banking to make sure every citizen has a place to save, and then effectively switch from an income tax to a progressive consumption tax by excluding from taxable income any money that is still sitting in a savings account at the end of the year. Add a few negative income brackets at the bottom, maybe add on a new layer of FICA tax that’s funneled into some kind of investment account, aggregated in a sovereign wealth fund.
I mean I get you’re saying that the gov’t is going to build and sell units below cost, but unless we arrest population growth that just means the public budget has to bear the escalating cost of the r>g problem, and while I think a gov’t can run a deficit indefinitely, the deficit has to be fixed or shrinking relative to the size of the economy as a whole.
I just think trying to use housing as an “investment” dooms you to either having it be a _bad_ investment, or seeing the cost of housing dominate the economy.
If we redistribute the value of land and allow people to cheaply cluster together so that they can be productive, we're doing well. Instead of trying to do r>g calculations in our heads, I think we should remain focused on those two objectives...
I mean, I'm certainly all for deregulating land use along the lines of what MattY was calling for in his post that you're partially responding to. Given that that's a precondition for _any_ solution, that seems like the first thing to focus on, and it's already a pretty big political lift. Biden made some noises in the campaign about holding transportation funding hostage based on cities willingness to Affirmative Further Fair Housing -- which is a reason to be optimistic about Mayor Pete (who was pretty good on land use issues in South Bend) becoming Secretary of Transportation.
In any case, beyond the first step of making it legal to build housing, it seems to me that both the baby bonds concept, and an add-on investment component to Social Security, are easier lifts than the Singapore solution. Both of these options look to me more likely to pick off independent and conservative-leaning voters, compared to "public housing". I'd certainly vote to give the Singapore solution a try, if it looked like there was a coalition that could win. (n.b.: I think you'd get farther in discussing it as "the Vienna solution", rather than Singapore, even if the truth was you were modelling more closely on Singapore... American racism sucks, but we go into political battle with the electorate we have, not the one we might want or wish to have.)
We're already seeing the second phenomenon to an increasing degree. No, not every place in America features onerous housing costs, but the high productivity areas pretty much all do, with negative repercussions to the national economy. Mitigating this situation alone would be reason enough to try Singaporean housing policy, in my view. Also, it seems unlikely in absolute terms owning a home the government helped you buy will end up being a "bad investment" for very many people, at least compared to the alternatives. After all, even if the house hasn't appreciated very much, at least owning one will decrease housing costs (no rent to pay) for most folks. And there's there forced savings effect (in the real world not many people who eschew a monthly mortgage payment have the self-discipline to plow that extra money into index funds).
"I think that over a decade later, the American commentariat has still failed to process what a tremendous blow the American Dream took in 2007-8."
You don't say. Couldn't possibly be because the American elite is just one large toxic group of sociopath's determined to prove to themselves that this is a meritocracy and they deserve their ill gotten gains despite how many times in recent history we've seen over and over just how impossible it is for elites to fail in any direction but up.
Seriously, in Obama's mind handing his campaign donors trillions of dollars as a reward for pressuring poor people with no income into mortgages they can't afford and selling them off as risk free assets to unwitting investors and blowing up the worlds economy in the process isn't anyone's fault. Just markets. In fact, the problem would have been doing anything besides intentionally maximizing the number of foreclosures on poor people. Holding the criminals responsible would "have required a violence to the social order."
http://www.billmoyers.com/2015/02/14/needless-default/
'The American commentariat' is oblivious because they idolize the villain. If they didn't they never would have made it to their position of prominence. That and they knew that any and all criticism of Obama would be called racist by his cult of supporters, even describing his entirely voluntary decision to destroy the most black wealth in history. The public doesn't know who to blame, which is why we get Trump.
Have we been living in the same country? Absolutely no one in this country wants young people to do well. I honestly can't think of another country that wants to harm their young people more than the US. We just elected President the guy responsible for putting millions of young POC in jail for decades, mostly for the crime of being poor. The same guy who made bankruptcy impossible for people with student debt. The only person in the world who has experience getting elected at a time of immense hardship, especially for young people, and then immediately using that power to reward the criminals/campaign donors responsible and implying that anyone suggesting we use the IMF's (Of ALL PLACES) recommendations for fixing the damage was a wild eyed radical.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/the-empire-continues-to-strike-back-team-obama-propaganda-campaign-reaches-fever-pitch.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/
This country ONLY exists to keep billionaires rich and to murder as many poor people as possible in the process.