He’s not using the I didn’t know it was wrong defense (that was earlier) but the my lawyers told me it was fine defense (his previous lawyers, not these two).
So, I don’t think these statements matter to his current defensive strategy.
Honest question, is that a defense that has ever actually worked for crimes this serious? I can understand something like “Your honor, I totally thought I could park there because a police officer said it was fine, but then the parking enforcement wrote me a ticket!” But not “Your honor, a very Bigly smart man said I could totally disenfranchise all of America and it is very cool and very legal!”
It was a trap by the special counsel set by… getting him to hire terrible attorneys? I would think that more a consequence of the magnitude of his crimes + his history of nonpayment, leaving only desperate lawyers willing to be the next in line trying to defend one of the most obvious criminals in recent history and humiliating themselves in the process
Zoning laws affect what you can build where. But a quicker route to increasing the supply of homes (this lowering prices) is to levy high taxes on single family homes that the owner does not live in.
Single family homes have become an investment opportunity for corporations and wealthy individuals. When vast sums find their way into a market, prices can go up sharply. Corporations, private equity funds, and the like cannot inhabit a home. And a person can only inhabit one primary residence (>50%). So if people (or companies) want to own homes as rental properties, they’d pay higher taxes. Some would sell those extra homes, reducing Demand and putting them on the market, increasing supply. The additional taxes some would pay to keep the extra single family homes could fund housing-related programs like section 8, redevelopment of depressed areas and so forth.
Can anyone with experience in housing policy with in? Would this work? Aside from pissing off rich people?
Perhaps, but the prevalence of single family homes is a huge problem itself. They generally bring in less in tax dollars than they cost the city to maintain, since it’s more road, sidewalk, sewer, etc. for one household. My tax dollars as someone who lives in a multifamily building subsidize others in my city who have one household on much larger properties. I don’t want these people to have more tax breaks and incentivize more of that to be built.
No, it wasn’t. They were saying the TAXING STRUCTURE for single family homes NEAR CITIES or close suburbs is bad. Single family homes out in the country or in smaller towns are fine. The density isn’t needed there. Single family homes in suburbs could be fine, if the taxes paid for denser housing that is needed to support a larger city. People in New York are able to live in the city because of dense housing availability or easy access to commuter trains to get farther out where less dense housing exists. People in Los Angeles/Houston/Atlanta don’t have great public transport options AND don’t have much high density housing, so the sprawl is horrendous (along with the associated car traffic). If the taxes for single family homes in Los Angeles were higher than for condos/townhouses, then the city could fund either higher density housing (which are actually banned by local zoning laws in some neighborhoods, since nobody wants an apartment building next to their single family home) or better public transport for people living farther out of the city.
Lol are you my wife? She’s like, “We need space so we’re not looking into the neighbor’s windows.”
And 100% of the time, I think she’s implicitly opting to pay an additional 2-3 hundred thousand dollars (where we are) just to be on an .5 acres of land, living on 15% of that half acre, and utilizing like 5% of it on a daily basis.
We don’t need that much space. We shouldn’t be laid on top of one another like sardines in a can, but we also don’t need to waste as much space as we do for real comfort and fake status. There’s a lot of transformation between the urban dispersion of the Southwest (where I live and everything is far away from everything else) and the urban density of Manhattan.
So your wife sees at as simply a status thing it sounds like, that is stupid. I need space because I have dogs, I like to have backyard parties, and I genuinely think I would hate my life if I opened my front door into a hallway.
I also hate big cities. Anything over 20k is too much population for my liking.
Further: legalizing density doesn’t mean that you personally are forced into them. There will always be a market for detached single family homes, especially if you don’t value being in a city anyway.
This is a huge problem with suburban devlopments (single family homes, strip malls, box stores). Almost all of them rely on denser parts of the cities to maintain themselves. Unlike the denser parts of cities, the commercial zoning often struggles when the original business leaves, unlike denser areas that are more flexible. Not only do these developments cost more to build and maintain, they often don’t provide for as long and can be costly/resistant to redevelpment due to suburban zoning and NIMBYism.
The issue is there’s nothing stopping house owners from increasing the rent they charge to cover their costs. There needs to be enforced rent control in order for the profit margin to be squeezed.
That’s a different argument. The point here is that extra money (even if it is paid by the renter) then goes into the city funds to build more high density housing and more public transit to get from lower density areas to the higher density areas.
The consequences of that would be tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people like me quickly losing their place to live. Lots of people can only afford to live right now because they're fortunate enough to know somebody with a second place which they can rent at below market rates. Most of the neighborhood I live in was bought and built in the late 80s, and is now the de facto retirement plan for dozens of military members who bought these places. No one idea fixes anything entirely, but I think the zoning ideas are the most widely and quickly effective, without destroying lives of average people.
Home prices without corporate/wealthy investments would quickly fall due to the increase in supply and a decrease in the purchasing power of the average buyer. They would eventually stabilize at prices that people like you could afford.
Rent for multi-unit buildings would also fall as more renters could afford to buy a home.
Those who purchased homes as rental units would still be able to recoup most of their investment by selling the place. They could then invest somewhere that is not hoarding resources and causing other people to suffer.
You wouldn’t lose your place to live. Your place to live would become for sale on the open market for someone like you to buy, and if tens (hundreds?) of thousands of those places went up for sale at once then someone like you could afford to buy it. Having necessary housing for other humans be a retirement plan is kinda fucked up.
This is the root of the problems with housing. We stopped building cities the way cities were built for thousands of years to try a new method. Even after proving that method costs more, uses more land, and is socially isolating, that method is promoted.
I personally think corporate greed helps keep it this way as this type of development promotes more spending. You have to buy a car, gas, insurance and you have to use it to get anywhere. This lets those “I’m already here so I’ll get this” or “I dont wanna drive again so ill buy more” mindsets flourish. Single family homes often leads to everyone owning a lot of stuff as well, private pool, private lawn equipment, private playground for your kid to play alone.
Developer greed also plays a role as buildings are built to be the most profitable, not the most useful, even most new SFH developments are massive, luxury homes. Developers won’t build smaller, affordable homes because they get less money per square foot of developable land.
I don’t think the “corporate greed” argument is that relevant here, not having to buy all of those things means someone has more disposable income, so spending I don’t think really changes, it’s just you spend less on necessities and more on “fun stuff” so to speak. There’s not much imperial evidence to support it either way, and most of the opposition to zoning reform comes from NIMBys who are scared of any changes in the neighborhood and maybe a little bigoted.
Speaking of which - developers: They have good reason to support denser housing, they’ll get higher returns on selling more houses or apartments on the same land. The reason houses are built huge and expensive is that zoning laws specify large minimum lot sizes, forcing developers to sell what few homes they can build for higher prices. Single family zoning creates artificial scarcity (again mostly out of bigotry and paranoia). If developers weee given more freedom to build what they want, it would be most economical for them to build transit-oriented rowhouse developments. This was standard practice a century ago, but since then it’s mostly been banned.
Unfortunately, the political climate favours corporations over public opinion, so corporations have the real power to change our policies. I doubt they would want anything that helps local busniesses thrive (like density and transit) and reduces our dependancy on products like gasoline, cars, and bulk processed foods. Building in a way that the only convenient option is to drive to whatever strip mall is close to you ensures that the corporations in the strip malls and big auto/oil still get your money while they are subsidized by cities/governments.
This seems rather conspiratorial in my opinion, though it’s probably true in a few cases, I doubt it’s the majority. I think a lot of the pushback is from older people who are resistant to the idea for a variety of reasons, and they also happen to be more civically active in a number of places.
I see far more evidence do the latter than the former.
Ditto on pushback coming from private citizens rather than big corporations. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, NIMBYs in my neighborhood killing a proposed denser construction project. The “greedy” development firm wanted to build, the NIMBYs killed it. The article itself even mentions this, this is democracy doing its thing:
Homeowners wielded huge political influence to block any changes they believed could hurt their property values.
Blaming corporate greed is a stupid take. If only we relax NIMBY zoning laws, then the “corporate greed” of developers would automatically incentivize them to build all the dense housing we need (they are in fact very happy to build denser smaller lots if allowed to, contrary to what fire retardant claims), and finally start increasing the supply of housing in order to lower market price.
I wonder if you can no longer breastfeed while on this drug. I also hope there really is no terrible health risk that gets found once it starts being used. Drug companies don’t have the best track record for helping mothers out…
I still am baffled at how some people like this become so massively famous. They’re not interesting, they don’t do anything interesting, and somehow they get famous for ‘being famous’. Every time I see Cenat streaming on Twitch it’s something incredibly boring and stupid and yet 70,000 people are watching. What the actual fuck?
It’s the same reason we got all those let’s play screaming youtubers in the 2010s.
They appeal to much younger and more impressionable demographic of young teens and children that are easily entertained through what most adults would probably label as annoying and very shallow content.
Good, we don’t need to destroy the world more than we already have, especially when it would mean fucking over Native Americans again. But the fact that we have to do this in order to protect people and the planet is ridiculous. It shouldn’t be an idealism for human lives to matter more than corporate profits.
It’s honestly baffling to me that big business isn’t making a major push for universal healthcare so they don’t have to worry about health plans anymore.
Bigger the company = easier it is to have this settled. If you have this settled you can attract and retain talent that smaller companies can’t. Besides, you can just take it out of their salaries.
Next up will be these tech companies offering company script to buy things at the company store while paying that rent to the company room. You know, to help transition into the new indentured working environment.
…why does the U.S. need more workers in the first place? With real wages being largely stagnant over the last four decades, who is producing what for whom?
The US, like most other developed countries, needs a constant influx of workers because the population is getting older on average. Boomers will soon be completely out of the labor market, and the smaller, younger generations will not be able to sustain the economy and society without extra hands.
It’s times like this that I just want to stare at the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, and just contemplate what kind of policy changes could possibly solve our upcoming labor shortage?
If only Lady Liberty could speak, she might have some ideas. I guess I will never know.
/s
Edit: I’m also a big fan of higher wages. And I suspect US immigration levels won’t bounce back quite as high with a ploicy change, after years of racism in our news. We’re going to feel that consequence pretty strongly, I suspect.
It’s mainly because of the infinite growth paradigm outpacing the rate of population growth. If only investors had realistic goals, we could avoid all this.
As often as he projects… i’m kind of wondering if he’s had people murdered… like the time he accused Joe Scarborough of murdering his intern… i remember thinking holy shit… start searching trump properties for buried bodies… i mean shit he buried his ex wife on a golf course.
I mean he wouldnt do it himself. He’d hire a hitman. Which then he’d short the hitman on paying him. Its the trump way to never pay the ending fees on a contract. I dont think he himself has had a direct hand with murder. But I 100% believe he’s a child rapist. He talked fondly of jeffrey epstein, and went to his parties, and commented himself on the young girls at the parties.
They’re talking about Katie Johnson on this list. It was strongly rumored at the time that she dropped it because she and her family got death threats.
Some of the things in her story don’t really add up, particularly the bit about it being in Epstein’s apartment, and “identifying him” on TV years later on television. Accusations like this that wind up being false are extremely, EXTREMELY common.
Also, the chances of her knowing Epstein off hand but not Trump especially in 1994 are incredibly low. Epstein was a nobody in 1994, no chance were those two friends at the time.
Not saying it didn’t happen, but why would trump be hanging out in Epstein’s raggedy ass apartment to begin with?
Lol. Lmao. Was that an attempt at comedy? Not about to get into this conversation. If you think I’m defending trump then there has to be some kind of barrier between us. I’m not defending trump, I’m attacking the accusations against him that were thrown by people who only wanted to get Hillary in office.
You realize he’s being investigated right now, nothing like this has come out and no charges related to this have been pressed since the investigations began.
I vehemently hate politicians, but there are only two things worse in a political position of power than that: tyrants and businessmen.
Yes, Epstein was “not a nobody” in 1994, but he sure as shit was not famous as fuck either, especially compared to trump at the time. He didn’t have an endless amount of wealth in 1994, try 1996. The fact that her case was one of the few that were ever dismissed are also telling considering the fact that Epstein still ended up going to prison for the rest of his (rather short) life. Epstein was a filthy evil piece of shit, but that would have been the case even if he was not an acting pedophile.
Let’s shift over to the case itself because that’s the main point here, not Epstein.
Personally, I think her case was a ploy set up to attack Trump while he was running for office, and she lumped in Epstein because of his several other charges coming on throughout that time period. The fact that it conveniently came at a time where she “recognized trump” over twenty years later but knew Epstein offhand is a bit suspicious don’t you think? Wouldn’t it have been the latter? And considering the fact that Epstein had been receiving charges since 2005, why would she wait until 2016 specifically to charge Epstein (and trump along with him)? At a surface level, it really didn’t seem like this case was about Epstein so much as it was Trump.
Don’t confuse what I’m saying with defending Trump. I’m playing devil’s advocate because truthfully both parties are evil, and every election there are baseless claims thrown out like this because both are willing to say anything and everything to try and get their candidate elected, Trump included.
No, worse its witness intimidation. Essentially tampering “you should x” intimidation “I’ll do x” one effects current witnesses while the other implies they’ll go after current and potential witnesses.
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