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Get comfortable until Spring '08 (Bay Area)
invite response
2007 Sep 11, 8:30am 54,151 views 262 comments
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Glen, firstly, thanks for your patient response. You do have an excellent point, but this problem really is the issue of ‘itemizing’. The direct way to address this would be for all charitable contributions to be deductible, regardless of itemization. Letting the government take the $600 and piss it away on the Politico-Bureaucratic Industrial Complex is pointless, nor the answer to this problem.
This still won't solve the problem. If you are in the 40% bracket and I am in the 15% bracket then you are able to direct 67 cents on every dollar (40/60) which would otherwise be paid in taxes to the charity of your choice, while I can only direct 18 cents of every dollar (15/85) to the charity of my choice. There is no way around it as long as income taxes are progressive.
Are charities favored by high income taxpayers more important, dollar for dollar, than charities favored by low income taxpayers? If not, then you either need to advocate a flat tax along with eliminating the itemizer/non-itemizer distinction.
Bottom line is that the charitable deduction is a hidden benefit for high income itemizers, who are able to leverage their charitable contributions more than non-itemizers and low income itemizers.
Like most IRS rules, it is messy and opaque. The alternative is NOT to let the government collect more tax revenues to waste on boondogggle spending. The alternative IS to just lower taxes across the board and let people donate however they see fit.
Bruce,
Not at all! I are one (kinda?) My guitar heroes growing up were Buddy Guy, Albert (The Ice Man) Collins and Johnny Winter! I've just always felt that the music needs to stand on it's own two feet. Guys that suck on guitar (like me) won't fill bars (let alone stadiums). It's not that I suck THAT bad it's that I can't "deliver" w/consistency like an SRV or his multitude of clones. I've seen guys that do SRV better than SRV!
Guess that explains why I'm not an "opera fan". Oh and Dick Dale (King of the Surf Guitar) will be in PDX on the 28th!
Peter P Says:
> BTW, the only one thing about Ron Paul that bugs
> me a lot is his stance on capital punishment.
In theory it makes sense to kill all the violent scumbags out there to make the world a better place, but in reality capital punishment is a big waste of time and money that removes a very small number of guilty scumbags from the planet. Not even considering that capital punishment does end up killing a few innocent people every now and then, we would be better off spending the money that we give every killer to pay for a decade (or two) of court appeals to the cops to catch more criminals and put them in jail…
Randy H
2007 Sep 13, 6:33am
Retirement
This will be my last thread article. I trust that everyone will be happier with Allah and my other "haterz" of late than with I. I think I've offended a few readers and thereby caused too many complaints. For myself, life is too short to waste precious cycles. Anyone interested save for the Trolls are welcome to visit my blog from time to time.
Best of luck and regards,
Randy H
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I know other markets have already started correcting at a healthy clip. Others might even be nearing the end of the cycle. But much of coastal California, and especially the San Francisco Bay Area, have barely begun to see the downward hill in residential real estate prices.
It is my current opinion that nothing significant will break in prices -- and I mean significant -- until next Spring. In fact, I really don't expect the nicer areas of the Bay to start going down meaningfully until early Summer, '08.
My reasoning is that everyone who can, by any means possible, will hang on until next Spring's "selling season". They're being told by a lot of pretend "professionals" that they should hold out, that by next Spring the storm will be over and they'll get their price, or better.
There will, of course, be plenty of foreclosures and the sporadic forced-sales (divorce, job change, etc.), and some of those may be good deals on prices, but they'll be very hard to come by, in my estimation. Agents are doing everything they can to hide the real sales prices of those deals with some agencies outright not reporting those sales to the CAR statistics because they don't qualify as "standard sales". Foreclosures may not even be priced all that attractively. A lot of banks are still trying to figure out what to do with their growing inventory of houses on their balance sheets. Right now banks aren't really in a position to start marking down hard assets, and they don't have enough inventory to make a material difference yet anyway.
Cometh the Spring I expect that prices will be right around where they are today, maybe a few points lower, but nothing major. On the ground we'll all see the same old houses sitting there, or relisted, for the same prices they left off at after the Summer of '07. Then the real fun begins, as I finally expect by the end of Spring a number of sellers will capitulate and take their lumps. Once price cuts really start, then it should turn into more competitive pricing by sellers, each trying to out maneuver the other as they all chase each other down the market.
I should briefly qualify what I mean by "lower prices". I mean price cuts from the true peak, which given your specific area should be anywhere from Q4-2005 to Q4-2006, even Q1-2007 for a few super prime areas. Fantasy wishing prices listed between your area's peak and today are nonsense, and cuts off of those prices are essentially not cuts at all. Assume the price is listed at your area's peak price, and ignore any goofball premium some real estate party latecomer tried to squeeze out of the waning days. For example, there's a home here in Mill Valley the current owners bought the end of 2005 for $1.895mm, which they listed the Summer of 2007 for $2.45mm. In my mind, that home peaked at $1.895mm, and is at best likely to sell again for around $1.48mm, the price a nearly identical home on the block sold for in early 2005.
--Randy H
#housing