Housing Affordability

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section offered a number of ways to break the housing cost problem for folks on the lower end of our economic ladder, folks that include established families and newly graduated young adults. The most cogent way IMNSHO is this one:

The market badly needs deregulation to unlock capital. Tax regulations have frozen large swaths of our existing housing stock. And state and local land use regulations lock millions of acres of land out of higher and better uses by making it illegal to build starter homes on smaller lots.

Especially those starter homes on those smaller lots. Tax regulations, mostly on existing homes up for inheriting, can be handled directly and immediately by the Federal government. The land use regulations consist primarily of State and land use laws and local zoning ordinances, and those are the primary responsibility of the State and local governments. Still, the Federal government has considerable influence that it can bring to bear, from jawboning to financial carrots and sticks.

These starter homes and smaller lots are reminiscent of the Levittowns that were built right after WWII to open up housing for returning white GIs, and their rapid take-up both fired up the housing market and contributed heavily to the nation’s economic reconversion from war to peace and the associated private economic revival. The first Levittown house sold for $7,900, about $80,000-$85,000 in today’s money.

Today’s analog would be shorn of the racial bars and should be shorn, also, of ethnic and religious bars. But that larger target market would only enhance the salability and thereby contribute heavily to breaking the existing cost barrier.

Call them TrumpTowns.

Neville Chamberlain Reborn

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has gone to Beijing to bend the knee and sell his nation to the communist tyrant. Or is it Vidkun Quisling who’s alive and well on Downing Street?

…Britain’s gift to President Xi Jinping arrived early. The UK last week granted approval for China to build its biggest diplomatic outpost in Europe in central London. The question now is what Mr Starmer will get in return.

It’s not just the PRC’s biggest “diplomatic outpost” in Europe. It’s far bigger than it needs to be merely to house the PRC’s embassy to a middle tier nation. It’s the PRC’s biggest headquarters for an espionage operation that’s the most aggressive in the world, and one designed and now equipped courtesy of the estimable Starmer to spy on and steal from the UK, the EU, the EU’s constituent nations (including eastern European nations fronting on the PRC’s BFF Russia), and the United States. This spanking new and oversized embassy also will be the seat of efforts to spy on, harass, and ultimately kidnap Chinese nationals and emigrants living in the UK and throughout Europe.

That’s a huge supplicant’s offering to the Emperor.

What’s in this kowtowing* for the UK? Nothing at all. The PRC has offered nothing, and it has no reason to offer anything. The most the timid Starmer can hope for is to return to the UK with both hands still attached.

Starmer is moving to deliver one more gift to the Emperor: he’s going ahead with the British plan to surrender its Diego Garcia, along with the rest of that Chagos Island group to Mauritius. It doesn’t matter that the US has a joint use agreement with the Brits for the military base on Diego Garcia that nominally long outlives the surrender to Mauritius. With Mauritius in the PRC’s back pocket, the days of that joint use agreement are severely numbered. Just see the PRC’s attitude to other nation’s possessions and agreements in the South China Sea.

Starmer is no Winston Churchill, and the UK, a product of a number of recent governments of both parties, not only Starmer’s, is not the UK that faced down and ultimately contributed heavily to the crushing defeat of a different tyrant.

 

*In traditional China this ritual was performed by commoners making requests to the local magistrate…or by foreign representatives appearing before the emperor to establish trade relations.

Hardly Defiance

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reduced its vaccines for children recommendation from a schedule of 18 diseases to a recommendation of 11. The American Academy of Pediatrics still recommends children be vaccinated against 18 diseases. The Wall Street Journal calls the AAP defiant.

No.

HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr, and HHS’ CDC have all along recommended patients and parents of child patients consult with their physicians on ailments, treatments, and vaccines. Kennedy has emphasized that recommendation while he has had CDC scale back the recommendations.

Parents are heeding that CDC recommendation and are consulting. Pediatricians and their medical association are acting like physicians and treating their child patients rather than parroting those ancillary CDC recommendations.

Looks Like an Opportunity

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The People’s Republic of China looks like it’s facing a serious economic problem.

[The PRC’s] relentless pursuit of growth through manufacturing has also created a lopsided economy, with much of it stuck in a deflationary spiral. China’s GDP deflator, a broad price gauge, has been negative since 2023, a sign of inadequate demand at home.

And

The risk is that China could get stuck in a prolonged period of stagnation similar to what Japan experienced during the 1990s and early 2000s—a mindset that becomes ingrained over time and even harder to shift.

The subheadline summarized the problem well:

Exports drive growth while race-to-the-bottom competition from overproduction hits prices, profits, wages, and sales

That economic problem looks like an opportunity for us. The Soviet Union, faced with a stagnating economy and a burgeoning technology deficit relative to us that was epitomized by our ballistic defense system under development and then deployment, folded and disappeared.

The PRC has many technology and military advantages over us, but it’s faced with a similarly stagnating economy, even one threatened with sustained deflation, and with an obvious and worsening demographic condition. The PRC’s critical deficit isn’t technological or military; it’s its economic dependency on exports.

If the US and the West generally were to stop importing from the PRC, that would turn the PRC’s economic war against us to our advantage. We should be able to gain quite a number of concessions in return for resuming buying their output, even including the PLA’s withdrawal from the South China Sea, an end to the PRC’s constant, if low key, threats against Japan in the East China Sea, and a cessation of the PRC’s threats against the Republic of China.

Of course, to achieve that—and it would be best done were it done sharply rather than in dribs and drabs, the Trump administration would need to stop trying to work deals with the PRC and to stop coddling American businesses who bleat about the centrality of the PRC to their profits. The administration and American businesses would need to step up the pace of moving supply chains out of the PRC, even in some cases to begin that reorientation.

It would also be necessary to stop our tariff moves against Europe and to stop trying to obtain control of Greenland so we can persuade Europe to join us in no longer importing from the PRC and to move faster at reorienting its supply chains away from the PRC.

Governments around the world are complaining about an influx of cheap Chinese goods that could hurt local industries.

They just need a push and the removal of economic barriers within the West.

The potential gains, though, are enormous, not just economically, but for the order and the safety of all of us, for all the difficulty of taking either of those two steps.

Moderation in the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Recall how the Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger, ran on a platform of moderation and left of center politics.

In the first weeks of her office, this is a small subset of what she and her Party allies, who have majorities in both houses of the State’s legislature, have on offer.

  • HB968: Requires the use of ballot scanning machines in elections and explicitly bans hand counts “for any reason or purpose not specifically authorized for by law”
  • HB82: Extends the deadline for receipt of absentee ballots until three days after the election
  • HB111: Bars the state registrar from removing voter registrations except by request of an individual voter or direct reports from the Department of Elections
  • HB965: Commits Virginia to an interstate compact requiring that its electoral votes go to the winner of the national popular vote
  • HB244: Limits and reduces criminal penalties for robbery
  • HB1070: Limits the ability of prosecutors to mention prior convictions of a defendant during trial
  • HB1359: Requires the issuance of a firearm permit for all purchases
  • HB217: Bans the sale, purchase, or transfer of so-called “assault weapons”
  • HB24: Allows state authorities to select which states to share concealed carry reciprocity with instead of all states
  • HB916: Imposes further restrictions on concealed carry permit acquisition
  • HB7: Bars law enforcement officers from wearing facial coverings

This is Party’s conception of “moderate.” Party has gone so far left that it no longer recognizes what moderation is; it has no idea where the center of our nation’s political spectrum is.