Property Tax Scams, Big Pharma Schemes, and Political Clashes

The Signal Hour Public Signal Hour
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Just watched this on Trump vs Musk:

The upshot is that Trump is transactional and forgiving, but brutal when you’re in his way, for as long as you’re in his way. He doesn’t really mean anything by it except “Move now, or I’ll hurt you until you get out of my way”.

Meanwhile, Musk holds grudges and feels utterly betrayed by Trump. He may let it go eventually or may not. The tech faction needs a new home. It’s willing to serve but not get strangled (e.g. Andreessen’s JRE appearance where the AI winners had been chosen and no others would be allowed), and it was also kicked out of San Francisco by the crazy woke.

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A request to Chris and Paul Kiker - The USdebtclock.org now shows the category titled DeFi bankless future. One definition is as follows: “DeFi is rapidly transforming the world of finance with a range of new tools for putting crypto assets to work. It offers opportunities beyond simply buying crypto on a centralized exchange. It allows anyone and everyone to build a decentralized, Bankless lifestyle.
I am wondering if maybe it is a route to get off this debit-credit fiat money system.
Could you and Paul Kiker perhaps address if this is worth further looking into?

Thanks

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That’s was the point I was making. Suburbia is NOT sustainable. The videos go into further detail. This video in particular breaks down the exact math of it all:

California is a bit of an outlier in that, though it generates lots of revenue from economic activity, it still finds itself in fiscal trouble, mostly due to corruption. When we look at suburbia in other states which don’t have the economic riches of California, the debt-fueled unsustainability of the suburban model becomes very apparent.

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Cool video. Amazing what some data and analysis can reveal.

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Be careful with this analysis…there a few problems…its heavily slanted… while its well put together and and has a logic train of thought and conclusion and im sure NJB means well…, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with this one…feels very cherry picked data and here is why i believe that

1st Government should not be measuring itself by tax revenue per acre, its not a business trying to make money. I mean look at the incentive here…what is the likely outcome?.. Obviously if you get rid of cars and roads and parking and stack citizens into high rises into less square feet you get higher tax revenue per acre… if thats you goal to maximize revenue… then pack em in like sardines…

Maybe if there is an inequity in services per zip code… change the property tax per zip code… oh wait they already do that… if its inbalanced … just realign the costs and let market forces take over…

in fact if you take a step back I believe this is actually an analysis slanted to be used as propaganda for counties to move toward 15 minutes cities…

your 1st subtle clue is in the 2nd video where the cartoon guy has an option to choose development based on climate change impact on his phone… yeah i know it goes by fast and easy to miss… but why is it there? I thought we were talking about asphalt and pipe $ expense…now i have a clear carbon reduction message instead

your second clue is how the poor neighborhood is subsidizing the rich one…I can tell you that is not the case in Portland… its the other way around… nicer neighbors here start in the double digits thousands property taxes

your third clue is how every answer to the problem is car-less 15 minute cities

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your fourth clue is no mention of rural solutions… I own a plan B out in rural… the county doesn’t maintain the road…we on the road do, the county doesn’t offer water the community has their own water district etc… same with the fire district…its community paid not county or city so if the rural population sprawled out even further than suburbia… and yet its all WAY cheaper than the city or suburbia.?.. in fact my taxes are 1% of that in in suburbia!. granted my house in suburbia is way nicer than my shop in rural but the lot size is the same… but still have the same infrastructure needs .wait how is that possible? according to this analysis it should be WAY more expensive than the city or suburbia the sprawl and roads and pipes are soo much longer…so much more infrastructure to maintain… soo much more cost… yet its not. So the expense of suburbia is not due to maintenance of roads and utilities… its due to something else…most likely graft much like the school bonds…

5th if this is true why are the taxes highest in the city center? and lower the further out you get?

your 6th clue is how were cities NOT BANKRUPT in the 50’s? road were still there, utilities were still there suburbia was still there… I think we are focused on a symptom not the disease

rest assured then the next analysis will tell you if suburbia is too expensive , then for sure rural is… i mean just think of the road expenses alone… everybody into 15 minute car less cities…

your 7th clue is its a all put together by strong towns non profit supported by grants ie an NGO and is given a huge captured media support… NPR? if Captured Media is behind you … you are not the resistance

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Finally they only focus on infrastructure cost vs tax revenue not all the services provided requiring tax revenue… thats a nice way to lie by statistics… there is a vast difference between services provided in portland vs suburbia vs rural…

portland has 10X required unwanted by the majority tax funded services,

and is 10x the cost of suburbia… there are infinite government programs and funding and buildings for equity underwater basket weaving training for indigenous handicapped quadsexual Atlanteans downtown… none of those programs are available in suburbia… just a real life example

we dont have multimillion $ taxfunded funded tree inspectors out here in suburbia

and dont get me started how impossible it is legally to remove a dying tree on your own property about to fall on your house

Portland tree inspectors getting a new boss and stripped of $2M to address complaints

if suburbia has more pipes…here is an idea raise the water bill… if it has more roads…raise the gas tax…I’m not sure the funding and expense model here was completely transparent…

Finally that town in Louisiana and all the others may really make be bankrupt due to graft or unfunded pensions…not pipe and asphalt…In Portland they collect tax revenue for the homeless to the tune of 1.2 billion $ a year… where do they spend it ? well we need a dozen administrators at ~500k a year + they spend an average of 1k PER tarp or tent for the homeless…which they can get over and over… a grade school kid could save portland over a billion $ and double the amount of tents and tarps for the homeless with two 1 minute online orders from harbor freight and Big 5…

Portland is bankrupt and does not have a 57% tax rate due to suburbia sprawl infrastructure cost of roads and pipes its due to massive graft and waste on socialist programs.

And Eugene Oregon in the video? my daughter went to school there…my uncle live there is whole life…suburbia wasn’t a $ problem 20 years ago and it hasn’t changed that much, Eugene its a mini carbon copy of Portland…its not the roads and pipes that is the problem…its all the socialist programs and graft…

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Thanks for sharing. I’ve watched related NJB videos in the past.

What it comes down to is aligning expenses with revenue to cover them. That means in the long run rising costs or lowering expenses (reducing services or making them far far cheaper). The two cases would be cities for the former (denser population) or rural areas with fewer services. The in-between suburbs are at risk.

Then add in peak oil to exacerbate the issue, and people will eventually segregate into cities or rural areas.

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DeFi and crypto in general were built to compete with central banks and provide an alternative. That is a declaration of war on every government on the planet so most people in crypto are loathe to say it outright. Because it is an existential threat to governments and centralized finance those entities have gone to great lengths to suppress and subvert crypto. An example being the total unusability of BTC right now. A far cry from what Satoshi described in his white paper.

As it stands actually using crypto to get outside of the rails of society is probably not feasible. For the above reasons the broad perception of crypto is that of a degenerate casino, or as a replacement for gold. It’s the most volatile asset class in the history of civilization so it’s not an easy place to put savings you might need access to on short notice. There are options in DeFi that maintain their (fiat) value in stablecoins, but most of those are poisoned. They have effectively become the CBDCs that various people have been warning us against. For example, USDT has frozen hundreds of millions of tokens in just the last year. So despite the lack of fluctuation in value stables expose you to other existential risks.

But there are still projects that are seeking to address these issues. More people and companies are willing to accept crypto as payment but the number is still small. There is still a subset of people pushing to be able to simply use crypto to live their lives. Aaron Day is one such that is also a friend of PP. A project he talks about called Zano seems to be trying to pick up the torch BTC dropped. There are also vendors that sell prepaid credit cards for crypto, which allows some direct use of crypto as a pseudo day-to-day option. I think the limits you can get on the cards are fairly small though. There are also attempts to create decentralized stablecoins that are algorithmically managed, but those have thusfar been failures or the teams behind the projects have twisted the original into something, again, like a CBDC. Hope remains in this area though.

I think that should give you a better idea of how DeFi might fit your needs. There are plenty of other things in crypto to talk about well beyond the CEX side of things, but more far afield.

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You’re right, yours is a place where stocking density, which still matters, is approaching zero.

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I’ll check again. I almost bought a place in Palestine with a barndo and 35 acres with an ag tax of $355/year. I went with the 52 acres and nothing on it instead right down the same road.

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Having worked in software for coming up on 3 decades, one thing is consistent. Data is really hard. Simple framing for complex data should always be questioned. Mostly, data quality sucks, how well data can transfer from one meaning to another sucks, and almost no one wants to work on that side of the problem - because it’s hard work.

Anecdotally, I once worked on a health assessment (questionnaire) system which needed to move from static layout to flowing. I found out the data included print annotations which did just that. As I used that data, it took me months of work to clean it up and we still didn’t end up using it because there were just too many weird things about it.

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That was a powerful and eye-opening discussion. The way you connected property taxes, personal struggles, and national economic instability really puts things into perspective. It’s alarming how policies meant to support can actually burden the most vulnerable—especially the elderly. Appreciate you and Evie highlighting the human impact behind the numbers.

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I so hope I’m wrong in your case. We were crest fallen when we looked at 10 acres we could afford then were told that county would subtract one acre from the ag extension land and tax the acre with a new house on it at near DFW prices per year. If I remember right, it was north of Clarksville, TX. The small house with two acres nearest to Palestine was a shocker as well. Again, I hope it’s wrong in your case.

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Thanks for taking the time to watch the videos and comment. I’ll try to address the main points you brought up:

  • Sure, if people are packed like sardines, that would solve the financially unsustainable sprawl problem. It’s irrelevant whether this is desirable or not. It only matters whether or not it is within the means of a town or city. If a city finds that it has to depend on outside largess - federal or state subsidies for example - then it should make efforts to increase density of living arrangements, just as a family might have to move into a smaller apartment if it falls on hard times and the rent is too high.

  • If you are skeptical about the credibility of the author of these videos - perhaps he is being sponsored by people who are promoting 15 minute cities - then take it from another voice who is familiar to most of us - James Kunstler. He has been railing against suburbia for over 2 decades, and championing walkable communities. He wrote a book - “The Long Emergency” (2005) - and also featured in an interesting documentary - “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream” (2004). He knows a lot about the subject, and has been a tireless advocate for higher-density living arrangements, especially in light of the energy realities of the future. There is also a movement called the “New Urbanism” which has been around since the 1980s, pre-dating the 15-minute-city idea by decades. They’ve advocated for walkable communities for decades.

  • Fair enough. Rural life can be cheaper, with lower maintenance required. But rural life does not put the infrastructure through its paces; wear and tear is not as severe as in regions of heavy use. Most importantly, rural life is not scalable. The million-or so city-dwellers cannot be told to spread out into rural lots. We DO need high-density hubs of thick economic activity, with short travel times between places. As a matter of fact, in the above-mentioned documentary “The End of Suburbia”, James Kunstler goes into the history of suburbia: It was intended as an idyllic marriage between city life and country life, offering the services and conveniences of the former and the livability of the latter. It basically WAS an effort to migrate towards rural life. But it morphed into a kind of cancerous abscess, draining society of more and more of its resources just to build out and maintain the infrastructure for basic living - resources which might have found better use in increasing the productive output of the economy. Just think about how much of the US economy is just the housing market.

  • In some places, the rich may subsidize the poor; in some places the poor subsidize the rich; in some places, business-activity subsidizes suburban living. The important thing is that, putting aside these local inequalities, the city itself should be self-sufficient. The one line it should avoid crossing is having its entire existence subsidized by the state, by the country, or by debt-fuelled suburban growth. Then its fate is no longer in its own hands and it will collapse when these subsidies dry up.

  • “how were cities NOT BANKRUPT in the 50’s” - Suburbia-at-scale really got started around the 1940s and 1950s. It hadn’t grown into the monstrous proportions that we see today. It was not the great big drain on public finances that it is now. Also, oil was way cheaper and more abundant back then. Society had a much higher EROEI. It could perform energy- and resource-intensive activities without too much of a cost. Things have changed. We are now at peak oil and peak resources. We don’t get as much bang for our buck as we once did.

  • I already made exceptions for places like California and Oregon - leftist epicenters of degeneracy. There, the destruction is due to corruption and ideology. California happens to have wealth-generating assets such as the tech-giants, Hollywood and agriculture, which allows it to be wasteful for longer without consequences. However, other states which are not as crazy as California also face the problem of unsustainable municipalities, simply because of the suburban model of living. I’m no fan of 15-minute-cities but the future for most people will be higher-density-living.

  • I can understand the frustration at seeing these infuriating outlays on wasteful pursuits - overpaid administrators, useless educational programs etc. But we really need to do the cold and impartial math on how much is spent on what. While the outlay on DEI is probably too much (let’s say $2B), the larger issue by far is simply the cost to maintain the entire living arrangement (let’s say $100B) versus the revenue it generates (let’s say $75B). Just recently, we got to see an example of cost-cutting and efficiency being undone by larger systemic problems - Elon Musk put his life and businesses on hold to found DOGE, and he uncovered massive fraud and waste, and thankfully put an end to it. But after all that, all of his efforts were undone by the “Big, Beautiful Bill”. He saved the taxpayer maybe $50-$200B. The bill will cost taxpayers over $5T.

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What does this look like in future taxes? Trump promised taxcuts. But wouldnt increased spending usually demand higher taxes(along increased interest costs)?

This also shows in those mad half a billion school “repair” programs, which mean more sqft and nicer stadiums mean higher maintenance costs will soon ensue or they degrade faster and may need new 1Bn school “repair” to overhaul it again in just 10 years by lackluster maintenance budget.

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I just hate it when Trump goes after individuals publicly. It’s so petty. Not good optics for the Office of the US President.

Here’s a recent bombshell analysis from Jeff Childers connecting dots between Centene, the SS mega drop in payments and the Deagle Report:

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The tax-cuts don’t really mean anything. Deficit spending inflicts the tax of gradual inflation, which people don’t respond to as strongly as they do to higher overt taxes. Hence one of the reasons why government partakes in deficit spending.

This also shows in those mad half a billion school “repair” programs, which mean more sqft and nicer stadiums mean higher maintenance costs will soon ensue or they degrade faster and may need new 1Bn school “repair” to overhaul it again in just 10 years by lackluster maintenance budget.

As Chris always says, perverse incentives produce perverse outcomes. Once a public fund is made available to private contractors, they will do everything to milk it for all its worth. Education is perhaps one of the single-largest rackets in the US. It’s absurd that college education should cost upwards of the annual incomes of many families, but this is the result of government getting involved and offering student loans, grants and the like. The people being paid will hike their fees to take advantage of government largess.

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AMEN!

Let us just have the government stop borrowing! If it doesn’t come out in taxes, it’ll just grind you down in inflation. In many ways, I see taxes as primarily to stop inflation from making life difficult for the government.

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Wasn’t familiar with James Kunstler so I watched this

sorry even more on the other side of the fence now… I guess we will have to agree to disagree

he is very passionate, strong emotion , hates the suburbs thinks they cause depression, hates cars, strip malls and asphalt… its so ugly it haunts him daily he really loves pretty architecture… ok I get it… old squares in old Europe cities are pretty and fun and our architecture today isn’t

his speech was so full of passion, theater and human yet pretty void of facts or data “other than peak oil”… goes so far as to say America isnt worth dying for our soldiers in war and cause for because single family homes are so ugly cause depression… you honeslty think a single soldier anywhere had that thought as the worst thing about America with their dying breath his childhood home design?

yet he shows a picture of the strip mall and roads 2 miles from “His home town” Note I guess his is not living in a high rise in Brooklyn then… he is happy living in a small town. but you? you can go live in a 15 minute city…

maybe i picked a bad video but not only did he not sell me, he turned me off even more…

Club of Rome/WEF has been pushing this since ~1972 for early 80’s doesn’t make it separate or original

the whole peak oil will require us all to live locked down in 15 minutes cities conclusion, leaves out one small detail… The Amish dont use hardily any oil, no cars etc… yet how many of them live in 15 minute sardined packed city high rises?..

None

I’m ok with the local community and better architecture and local agricultural part and even the problem of less energy,

but the ONLY solution is 15 minute prison in “pretty” concrete jungle part is where i check out…

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Sub-urban, middle-class (not working class (sic)) Are we really talking about class warfare? Can we be nice to Jeff Bezos and get paid?
Anyway, here is a good Chris Hedges interview with a socialist.
Will Zohran Mamdani Empower or Betray the Working Class? (w/ Kshama Sawant) | The Chris Hedges Report

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“The End of Suburbia” (2004) is on Youtube:

Highly, highly recommended viewing. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Kunstler till now. Chris has interviewed Kunstler a few times. Videos are here on PeakProsperity.

Kunstler and the above documentary are well-known to the Peak Oil crowd, from back in the early 2000s, when Chris Martenson and others got started on the subject. Kunstler famously said in the above documentary: “The whole suburban project can be summarized succinctly as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. America took all of its post-war wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future.”

The Amish dont use hardily any oil, no cars etc… yet how many of them live in 15 minute sardined packed city high rises?

Their way of life is not scalable to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of people. Their numbers match the carrying capacity of their land, even with primitive methods of farming. This is not the case with the rest of the population, who lives in cities and must be fed with cheap food grown through intensive agriculture, and must be housed in higher density arrangements. Another important considerations is that they are very insular; they don’t participate in the larger society and therefore don’t have to deal with the most pressing issues of the day - economic competition and foreign enemies for example. They essentially live a sheltered existence, protected by the society around them.

Again, I want to reiterate that I am also against 15-minute cities, which are maliciously contrived to deny us freedom of movement. (They already have pilot programs in places like Oxford, England, though I’m not sure what became of them.) But walkable communities which are built to a more human scale are a different matter. They’re built to reduce energy consumption and encourage civic participation, not to deny people freedom of movement.