why and why?

Why did I post on the housing bubble and why did I spend the time posting at all?

1. The housing bubble if you live in England is really important, in fact it drove me out of England, it really is that serious.

I spent 1.5 times as much on rent in 8 years as it would have cost to build the house I was renting, but I didn't have the option. I got fleeced and left the country with nothing, for the US where there isn't much if any housing bubble.

2. The housing bubble is simple but has the same ingredients as the other scams that are going on pretty much World-wide.

The ingredients are that the rich make a fortune out of it, and they easily persuaded the Silent Generation, when they dominated the votes, to legislate it into being so they too would get rich and punish the younger generation, and made them feel good about doing it too, and right as well.

3. Posting on CF is stimulating because I have to be careful what I write and how I write, otherwise someone always seems to spot the error and call me on it.

4. I don't read the media but have noticed in past when I did that it frames things in a way that causes the reader to reach particular conclusions and gets them to pat themselves on the back for a successful comprehension of the article and leaves them thinking they reached the conclusion themselves.

They talk about how much of the value of Britain is in the housing stock, but don't mention that it is a transfer of wealth from the young to the old or that it destroys Britain's competitive position. The media is owned by the rich and read by the old so those are the two categories it likes to keep happy. The straight truth is seldom seen.

The original claims about free trade was it would allow the consumer, who is king, to select the best value for money from what the entire World has to offer.

And that everyone would benefit from it.

That the British working class would have to work harder for less money to compete, the pay gap between the working class and the middle class would grow, and quite rightly so, and the middle class went for Thatcher and her kin, and in the US for Reagan.

I explained to a right wing Thatcherite that it couldn't work. To compete the Briton's pay would have to fall to 75 cents an hour (50 pence), and never mind greed, nobody could live in Britain on that.

The really big problem was housing. A one bedroom flat (apartment) in Oxford shire England starts at the very bottom at 125,000 pounds depending on exact location, it is tiny and is the minimum two people could live in. Add children and it would be legally overcrowded.

Insurance plus mortgage plus life insurance plus heating plus council tax, I'll take a wild guess of 10,000 pounds a year.

Work 2,000 hours a year and housing alone is 5 pounds an hour.

Ten times the 50 pence per hour pay you would have to be on to compete with China.

The rich don't want housing to go down so

Who are they trying to kid?

Simple arithmetic shows the Neo Liberal Free Market is going to be a slaughter. Britain is going to lose money hand over fist with no chance of ever competing.

1. I wasn't cherry picking, I lived in Oxfordshire. Also there is a correlation between job opportunities and house prices so in areas with low house prices the economics are not likely to be wildly different. I'm not going to spend forever picking at the details because the overall financial argument is so clear-cut.

2. VAT is a tax against imports and where administratively viable exports from the country have VAT refunded, thereby helping exports and increasing the prices of imports.

Reducing VAT or increasing consumer spending are both the wrong way to go. We need the countries that are trashing us in the competitive free market to increase their consumer spending and for us to do the opposite.