Why belabor the obvious? JD Vance is a disgusting phenomenon, even in a collection of worthless, vile politicians. There is something vaguely nauseating about him although he is saying or doing nothing. His looks? Well, not his fault, you can say. Besides, looks can be deceiving, although his resemblace to a third-rate flunky in a college you thankfully didn’t attend is probably not misleading. Yes, JD does stimulate the gag reflex like few others in the Trump Administration can, although Stephen Miller comes a close second. After all, we cannot all be the worst product of random tryst between a Neanderthal and a particularly odious ex-girlfriend, although Miller makes one wonder if Himmler somehow eluded cyanide in 1945? Nor have I read Hillbilly Elegy. Are there SparkNotes? I hear that can get you through Yale these days: as an intellectual diversity admit.
But look, let’s get to the point. Vance has given us a testable economic hypothesis: housing is expensive in the United States because we have 30 million illegal immigrants pushing up prices. Fine. Let’s think about this.
Typically, economists think of prices being determined by supply and demand. There is a market for housing, so we might start by thinking about stuff that affects the supply and demand for housing. We keep it simple. You want complicated? Go to an economics journal. You can have all the Greek letters and mathematical squiggles you want. But basically, it’s all the same story.
Try to keep supply and demand separate in your head, although that, too, is an oversimplification. The demand for housing (a composite of various places people live) clearly depends, at least, on the number of people who want housing and the means they have of paying for it. Well, the ad-Vanced thinkers say “Hey, libtard, you keep saying that immigrants are people too. And there are a lot of them in places like Texas. Don’t they matter?” Well, of course, especially in places like Harris county, Texas, where Houston is situated. But the broader question is, in general, do immigrants–legal or otherwise–carry the most weight.
Well take River Oaks, a nice subdivision. It is mostly white (64 percent) with a median household income of $120,000 per year. The state of Texas would be more like $42,000 (depending on household size). You know who lived in River Oaks? Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, the energy trading company that went bust (sending Andy to jail) in a $2.5 million casita.
Now does Andy look like an illegal to you? Like of Juan and Maria fame? Uh, uh. I’m sure Andy had housekeepers, gardeners, leaf blowers and assorted domestics to keep him in the style to which he was apparently accustomed. You think Juan and Maria were in the running for Andy’s place–or that they had anything to do with its market value, aside from help maintaining it? C’mon. You know better. There is a study by a guy at Duke that suggests immigrant demand adds $2,000 to the price of a house in Harris County. $2,000–not $2 million. If it were the other way around, Fastow would have been doing his own lawn instead of figuring out ingenious ways to cook Enron’s books. Or I’d be there begging for a job. And I’m not. So, face it, JD’s just so story is designed to appeal to the peasant covetousness of his followers in the hollows of Appalachia. Not a serious attempt to explain why housing is costly in the United States. $2,000 is peanuts, not serious money, but who said Vance was a serious person, for God’s sake?
Around 1980, a gentleman named Landon Jones wrote a book called Great Expectations (catchy title). It was a kind of a popular thing that thought a bit about what the passage of the Baby Boom generation through the US economy would probably do to wages, prices, you know, the stuff that a serious economist should have been thinking about rather than why Keynes was wrong. In any event, Jones figured the more or less simultaneous entry of 75 million new souls (the Baby Boomers)( into labor and asset markets was bound the have some predictable effects as they aged. Like housing markets, for instance. What happens as that group enters the labor market, saves, and goes on to buy property. Guess? Yes, an increase in demand raise the price of housing relative to other stuff.
Why? Because Rome wasn’t built in a day, silly. It takes time to expand housing supply. Even then, you have your antigrowth nuts, NIMBYs, zoning Nazis, and places like San Francisco on a peninsula which just ain’t gonna get any bigger–it ain’t Houston, friend. Without putting too fine a point on things, the long-run supply of housing is subject to rising costs. Do you remember that boring Econ 101 class where some nerd tried to show how such a market adjusted to increased demand? Rising relative prices!!! What does this have to do with illegal immigration. Honestly? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You could see it coming half a century ago if you were breathing (or not watching the NFL on six channels as we now do). There may be a number of qualifications, fine points and subtleties with which we can dress the analysis up, but honey, can you say supply and demand? And the you wonder why Trump and Vance are running America into the ground? You voted for them, blockhead. Because illegal immigration, right? Stunad.
If you’re like me, it helps to see this stuff
So here. The evil bureaucrats at the Treasury Department (we still have one, amazingly) have done the work of showing the Boomers aging out. Because there are so many of us, we are absorbing more and more of the households. We got more assets from years of earning and can outbid the younger cohorts at the bottom of the pyramids. You following this? It has nothing fundamentalyl to do with immigration, pace that fascist nitwit Vance. He’s full of it. Surprise!
By the way, if you choose to hate Boomers, go ahead. I didn’t start the fire, as Billy Joel sang. I didn’t ask Hitler and Tojo to start a war and mess with the sex lives of otherwise innocent Americans who would then make up for lost time after the shooting was over. I didn’t ask to be born in 1951. You got it. If not, GFY.
Now, on to where immigrants do matter: the labor supply. First, understand that half the cost of putting up a house is labor. Say 40 to 50 percent. So if you raise labor costs in construction by 10 percent, you going to push up housing prices 4 to 5 percent, which is a Hell of a lot of money on a forty year mortgage. So anything that reduced the supply of labor in construction is gonna make housing more expensive, right?
Well it turns out that immigrants, legal, illegal, who knows, have a lot to do with the labor force in construction. How much?
Well lookie there. A lot. And in places like Texas, Lord, even more. So why would you want to run off immigrants (the ICE-man cometh) who are the backbone of the labor force in construction when you are worried about rising costs? It makes zero sense. Zero. You reduce the labor supply you drive up costs–and then say immigrants are to blame. No, idiot. They are the solution. You got it backward. And then add to that Agent Orange has steeply raised the tariff on lumber from Canada to about 35 percent! You know how you frame a house? Duh. With lumber. And then you have the nerve to blame immigrants for rising housing costs when you are doing just about everything you can to drive those costs up.
Hey, a lot of Americans are obviously dense. But I’m supposing you are not one of them. These fucktards in the Trump administration are the problem, not Juan and Maria. Actually, Juan and Maria are the solution. But you’d never know that by the toxic spew coming out of the Trumpers, Vance included.
So do yourself a favor. Wise up. Get these people and their God-forsaken policies out as soon as you can. They have already done a lot of damage and hurt a lot of innocent people. Please do not help them to screw even more.
Ok? I could say a lot more, but, for now, take this in. You have been had, maybe. Fix it. We’ll continue with this stuff on immigrants next time.
This Game Is Over, Salvucci Sez 