Comments on: You Can Kiss $2.84 Trillion in Housing Equity Goodbye: The Continued Decline in Real Estate.

By: Reena

Reena — Sat, 10 May 2008 04:35:51 +0000

Very funny “surfaddict” - I run a gas station.
No I am not bitter for not owning any stock in ExxonMobil, etc.

I have only been here since 1986… just a very spoiled european
kid that was taught that the world is one’s playground.
And so I decided to play for a while.

I love California and settled here around 1989.

Born “workaholic” and there is no place like “America” to
make a workaholic feel at home.

Reena

By: Hank Jestor

Hank Jestor — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:09:39 +0000

missedthebubble :
Great ideas, lets increase taxes on things that will be paid by poor people. Your a genius. Don’t tell me, lets also cut capital gains taxes. Everybody knows that the rich don’t have enough money to re-invest.
How about debtors prisons? We can use the people imprisoned to create low cost goods for export. Man once I get started I can come up with all kinds of good ideas. I know, we can wall of inner cities and force them off of welfare and then bus them to the suburbs to work menial labor jobs. Oh, we already did that.
The crisis we are facing is because nobody listened to Jimmy Carter in 1980. He had solid ideas on reducing oil dependency, remember (55 mph speed limit) and the Great U.S. elected a ponzi scheme fool instead. Trickle down my leg economics and Free-Trade are the problems.
Ronald Ponzi Reagan.”Hey lets increase spending and decrease taxes” sounds like a ponzi scheme to me. The chickens are coming home roost.

By: surfaddict

surfaddict — Fri, 02 May 2008 23:39:57 +0000

Reena:

Are you bitter that you haven’t purchased any stock in oil companies, hence havent shared in the profits?

Go back to Europe if its so great.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:04:37 +0000

Reena,
you are right on. We have absolutely BLOWN our public transit in most cases. I would not be opposed to using PT at all for lots of stuff like airport transit. I travel 20 to 30 weeks/year and just getting to the airport in LA is a mess. We have a train (green line?) that when I first heard was going to run from ‘near’ OC to LAX. unfortunately instead of going directly to lax, it veers to El Segundo where you have to schlep bags to a shuttle bus to the airport. I realize that there are factors that I am unaware of as to WHY this was designed this way, but pretty much everyone I know avoids using this because of this pain/hassle alone. So we drive to the airport, creating more congestion, using more fuel wasting more money, resources etc. Ifwe build a solid, CONVENIENT transit system, we will use it.

By: Reena

Reena — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:07:40 +0000

Check out Exxon/Mobiles 1st quarter Profit Statement…
Once again a record profit in the billions…
With one gripe from Exxon… because of the high crude oil prices
it wasn’t very profitable to produce gasoline in it’s refineries…
so they cut back production. Which of course makes the Supply
go down and the demand go up…. and the price go up.

Exxon couldn’t take a loss in refining (which was only one small part
of their operation) therefore it cut back and got their profits anyway
from the higher prices it could charge claiming that the “supply” was low.

Cutting out the gas taxes this summer will not change the picture but
will lead to an even higher budget deficit. And don’t be fooled, not every
penny of those taxes are really used to fix our roads and bridges.
Alot of it goes for who knows what… 18.7 cents per gallon of gasoline sold
in the United States is a huge amount of money - those roads would have to be
gold plated by now. (Add to it your DMV fees, registration, etc…

And to tell us that we should be using the Bus to get to work…l
I have news for you… unless you live downtown Sacto. most of our cities
don’t even have sidewalks to walk on. Most European countries have
a public transportation system that puts you anywhere in town with a bus
running every 10 minutes from bus stops that you can reach on foot within
10 minutes (and yes, you will be walking on a regular maintained sidewalk)
even in very small communities. Matter of fact most European’s don’t need
a car to get to work. (Trust me, I grew up over there… I could make it to work
within less than 30 minutes using a bus that took me to the Tram station and the trains were running every 10 minutes… We don’t even have school busses because our (european) public transportation system is so advanced that all school children can make it to school on time even when they live 15 to 20 miles away from their school.
Our american public transportation system is literally non-existent when compared to European standards and this makes us so vulnerable. Most of us simply can’t leave the car parked and take the bus. So to demand from us to cut back on driving is ridiculous. We still need to get to work. There are people that drive hours every day just to commute to work. There is no alternative…
we may be able to cut out the vacation traveling but we need to get to the store
and we need to get our kids to school and we need to get to work! And we can’t do it on foot!!! I have to be at work by 6 a.m. … guess what , the nearest bus station is 3 miles from my house, the busses don’t start running until 8 a.m. and the 11 mile trip to where I need to be would take in average 2 1/2 hours because
the bus doesn’t just go there straight but has numerous other places to visit first.

This situation is so frightening… we can’t function on any alternative right
now. The goods have to be delivered to the stores by Truck and people
need to get to work to make a living.

We don’t need to feel threatened by terrorist attacks - just mess with our fuel supply and watch what happens…

Reena