The Gay Republican #10 - Bitch, I didn't Know This Was A Crack-House

Scratch what I said last time; I’m tired of mowing somebody else’s lawn.

With both interest rates and housing prices falling, I started house-hunting about two weeks ago. Nothing too fancy; and certainly nothing like my dream estates in La Cañada Flintridge, but something manageable, something charming, and something to call my own…

And of course, it has to be in Pasadena.

I actually found one. It is in Pasadena, and it’s totally affordable, but it’s on the northwest side. Which, if you know Pasadena, means that it’s in a less-than-desirable area. However, the actual crossroad that the house is on is reasonably well-maintained. The houses are all bright 1920’s-era cottages that can only be described as “… so cute.” And the roads are lined with mature trees that arch over; filling the air and dusting the streets with buds and leaves. It’s quaint. It’s idyllic. It’s me.

The only catch is that the house that I’m considering is itself an absolute wreck. Seriously; maybe a former crackhouse. It’s a stain.

If the neighborhood is Cindy Crawford’s face, this house would be her mole… if her mole were enormous. And hairy. And had its own mouth from which it shouted expletives at passers-by.

I contacted the realtor, and got pre-approved for financing. My ducks are in a row. But before I made a firm offer, I decided to bring out my uncle Dan, who owns a construction company in Ontario, to see what the house would need, realistically. After spending about 7 minutes on the property, he had a short piece of advice: “They’re still asking way too much for this house. Make a lowball offer, scrape it, and build new.”

The only difficulty with that bit of advice is that a construction loan is a lot harder to get than a conventional mortgage, because you’re asking the bank to finance something that doesn’t exist yet. They want a bigger down payment.

But Dan had another idea: “Go poke around Pasadena City Hall; there’s probably some grant money for first-time buyers or depressed areas or even ‘green’ construction or something.”

I cocked my head, thought for a second, and shot back, “Is it hypocrisy when liberalism benefits ME?”

He just shrugged.

So, feeling like Pat Buchanan signing up for food stamps, I started researching – on the web, at first – what programs might exist to help buy this house. As it turns out, there are indeed several aid programs for homebuyers; some offered by the City of Pasadena, some offered by the State of California, and some even from HUD.

But they’re all for low-income borrowers.

Apparently, the City of Pasadena feels that the way you un-depress a depressed area is to fix it so that the same people who depressed the area in the first place actually own the houses. This makes about as much sense as federalizing all the airport baggage screeners on September 12th, 2001.

“Let’s take the same guy, give him a raise, and put him in a Federal uniform.”
Thanks, George; I feel SO much safer.

Now, while I definitely believe in the “pride of ownership” effect (“People do not destroy that which they own”; a corollary that exposes one of the many fatal flaws of communism), it still doesn’t make sense to me to give houses to people who couldn’t afford to buy even run-down houses sans help, since that probably also means that they won’t be able to afford to maintain them, much less fix them up.

My senior year at SC, I had a macroeconomics class. The professor, of course, was a flaming liberal, so I had gotten used to tolerating an ankle-deep level of bullshit for the sake of a passing grade. But one day, he set out to define an “ideal income tax” structure, and one of the criteria he cited as fact was, “The tax must be progressive.”

(In case you don’t know, “progressive” means that if you have more income, you not only pay more tax, but you pay a greater portion of your income in tax.)

I raised my hand and proceeded to protest.

“How can you just say that, by definition, the ‘flat tax’ idea is bad? That just doesn’t pass the sniff test; plenty of reasonable people think a flat tax is a good idea. How can you, with your piece of chalk, simply dismiss it as a matter of definition?”

(A “flat tax”, by the way, is an arrangement where everybody pays the same percentage of their income in tax.)

I proceeded to argue with him until he changed his “ideal tax” definition from “progressive” to “not regressive” (which would be a tax structure where people with lower income pay a greater percentage of their income in tax).

A partial victory for conservative thought in the hostile territory of academia, perhaps, but nowhere near all that needs to be said on the matter.

Here’s a newsflash: everything priced in dollars and cents is “regressive.” The $8 or whatever that Target charges for a twelve-pack of Charmin Ultra costs you a greater fraction of your income if you make $32,000 per year than if you make $600,000 per year.

Does that mean that Target’s toilet paper pricing unfairly gouges the poor? You could say that, but it would make about as much sense as saying that laws discriminate against criminals.

THAT’S THE POINT.

That may sound cruel, but the free market is tough love. Economic inequality is, in fact, the reason for capitalism’s overall prosperity. It’s a motivator.

If the price of everything were indexed to income, then what would be the incentive to work hard and earn more income? Why not just be unemployed? Then everything would be free!

Or rather, it WOULD be… until everybody realizes that everything is free if you have no money. So everybody stops working, so nothing gets produced, and the “free” stuff dries up. And then everybody’s poor.

*** That’s the promise of socialism: We can all share misery equally. ***

In the opening scenes of the movie “The Skulls”, Joshua Jackson’s character, Lucas McNamara, is being quizzed by a professor on whether America is a class-based society or the meritocracy that we hope it is. He answers, “I believe that it’s both… It’s been my experience that merit is rewarded with wealth, and with wealth comes class.”

Now, I know it’s tough to believe in this era of Paris Hilton, but here’s a fact: wealth correlates with virtue….

Hear me out.

In a very basic sense, if you have a dollar in your pocket, it means that:

1) you worked to earn that dollar, and
2) you had the discipline not to spend it.

And the fact that you don’t have a second dollar means that you either:

1) didn’t work enough to earn that second dollar, or
2) didn’t have the discipline not to spend it.

So it’s not a bad thing that having more money means having more spending power. It’s actually quite good. That’s how the market economy rewards economic virtue.

Ergo, when you create schemes that award money, or goods, or anything to people simply because they don’t have them, you may be acting on the cause of charity, but you have to be careful the extent to which you do it. Because breaking the link between money and purchasing power is a dangerous thing. It perverts the fundamentals of the market economy.

Need an example? How about student financial aid?

Everybody wants an education, right? (It’s almost like health care; we think we all have a “right” to go to college now.) So, for years, the government has been handing out free money to people to go to college largely on the basis that they simply don’t have it and they want it.
Well, if you’ve checked out the nosebleed tuition rates lately, you can see the result of that policy.

Here’s a novel thought: If you’re going to make the liberal argument that the middle class is waning in real terms (which I’m NOT, but if YOU are), look at 40-something middle class American parents, who thought, when their kids were born in 1990, that if they could save a grand or two every year, they could send them to a nice college. Where are they now?

Frantically pouring over thick state and federal student aid documents to see if there’s any way they can get on the same dole that the poor are on.

Lesson: It’s the big-hearted, well-intentioned, check-writing liberalism that wound up putting college outside the reach of those who weren’t:

1) already wealthy, or
2) poor enough to qualify for some government cheese.

This brings me back to my housing situation.

I am NOT bemoaning the lack of some kind of “gay yuppie down payment assistance program” from the City of Pasadena. Because, while it might help me out right now, it would be ill-conceived, undeserved, short-sighted, and unfairly injurious to non-beneficiaries; It would address only one narrow complaint while worsening the broader problem.

In other words, it’s what a liberal would want.


My idea is simply this: Get rid of all these stupid aid programs, and just let the chips fall where they may.

Maybe prices would be more reasonable, and maybe I’d be a homeowner.

Or maybe I still wouldn’t. But if I weren’t, it wouldn’t be because the economically undeserving had been ushered to the front of the line.