And, yes, I lived there. Once.

Talk about motivation...ugh.

... $130 / week is equivalent to $563 / month.
... with minimum wage = $ 7.25 hr X 160 hr / month = $1,160 / mo

$563 per mo / $7.25 per hr = = 77 hrs of work / month
$563 per mo / $1,160 per mo = 48.5 % of income for rent

This is even higher than the map shows for KY, maybe due to including water bill.

In the chart key it say "hours per week."

Hmm, then I'm still confused. Maybe they're saying your rent shouldn't be above 25% of your gross. :confused:
I am sure working for minimum wage sucks, though.

yes it sure does. Especially when is manual labor and you had been making 4x that.

It's for a 2 bedroom unit at fair market price

Fair market for a place including bedbugs, cockroaches, mice, trashy neighbors, shootings, etc...or fair market for a safe and clean facility?

It's been 15 years since I lived in an apartment, and the rent then was $950 for a 2BR. So I just pulled up craigslist so see what rents are now.

Wow. I don't know if I would be able to afford to live here if I had to rent. It would not be easy.

He he... I think we paid $250 all included for our last rental. Major elbow grease in lieu of money and they never raised the rent on us.

Amazing that my mortgage payment for an entire house is so much cheaper than the rent of a 2BR apartment today. When we were buying the place, I was nervous that our mortgage was going to be more than what we were paying in rent at the time, but our agent kept telling us that rents keep going up, but the mortgage payment stays the same. Turns out he was absolutely right.

It's kind of embarrassing. I pay less for housing than some of the kids right out of college coming to work here.

So here's a question. Why can't you deduct rent from your income taxes the way you can deduct mortgage interest payments? Seems like the poor get a double whammy there.

Not just the 'poor.'

Non-homeowners make up for homeowners' deductions, like those with no dependents make up for child deductions.

When I was a DINK (double income/no kids) it seemed that we were 'dinged' a lot, then we got some breaks, but not much. Those breaks were still better than any breaks I've ever received. The most significant one of late was the 'making work pay' credit which saved me 400 bucks. That's gone now too.

Yeah. That was a bad choice of words. Sloppy on my part.

But it seems like the more money a person has, the more the system is set up to favor them. I understand that in this example, the government wants to encourage home ownership, and I'm glad they do. But another way of looking at it is that they penalize renters.

Because every rental does still have an owner, and that owner is deducting the mortgage interest from his taxes. So at a minimum, you'd have double deductions on the same house. But what would also then happen is you'd have people renting their own houses to themselves, or renting it to their spouse filing separately or whatever, so they could take the deduction twice.

The trick is to always look at everything from a scumbag mindset. Fraud is easy if you're looking for ways to do it.

What about your property taxes? Surely those have gone up over the years, probably at a rate similar to the amount rent has gone up? At this point my dad's property taxes are far, far higher than the mortgage on his house, and when he's ready to retire he'll have no choice but to sell the house because the neighborhood has gotten too nice for him to keep paying the property taxes on it.

Good point; there's also major maintenance and renovation costs, which can be significant. I haven't really tracked it, but I bet we spend between $5,000 and $10,000 per year on things like furnace repair, new roof, etc.

JFC.

Don't you mean KFC?

5-10k/yr@KFC! Call the medics.

The mortgage deduction looks like a scam from where I'm sitting.

I have to say, while I like taking the mortgage deduction myself (I got mine, Jack!) I don't think it's really that effective at promoting homeownership like it's supposed to. I mean, who says to themselves, "Weeeeelllll, we're on the fence about buying a house, such a big commitment and all... Wait, what's that? At the end of next year, our total tax bill will be reduced by a relatively small percentage of the interest payments we will be making on this house? Oh shit, sign us up today!"

Besides that, I think promoting homeownership is a wasted initiative to begin with. They have it backwards: homeownership is associated with stable and productive families, yes, but it's an effect, not a cause. You can't just give someone a house and all of a sudden they're a paragon of civic duty and filial responsibility.

WSS^^^

Yeah, the taxes keep going up. But while there was a huge jump during the real estate boom a decade or so ago, they have stayed pretty steady over the last decade.

I don't know about Virginia, but in Texas they're only allowed to raise your property taxes by a certain percentage each year, to help keep the established homeowners from being forced out during housing bubbles. But if you live in a place long enough, it'll still catch up with you in the end.

Our neighborhood was subject to part of the housing crash, and our house is currently still appraised at less than we paid for it (though not less than we actualy owe on it, fortunately,) but we like that because we know it'll go back up eventually, we have no intentions of moving, and in the meantime it means our property taxes are lower.

When the bottom fell out of the market, our real estate taxes didn't really go down. The assessment went down, but the government raised the tax rate to keep the tax amount pretty level. And then as assessments have crept up slowly, they have lowered the tax rate.

Kentucky Fucking Christ? That don't make no sense.

:D

The only thing that surprises me here is the last five words.

Yes I am. :p:

Those bastards!

How can you ever "own" a house if you have to keep up payments to the government for it? You never really have it free and clear. They call this the American dream? :confused:

Taxes are on the property, not the structure upon it.

I wish...

Oregon puts separate values on land and it's improvements (e.g.,house)
and bases the taxes on both.

Same here in Washington.

In Montana you just shoot the tax collector and then buy the cops off with with meth and the mineral rights for your property.

I was completely wrong. From what I've read since, all states take into account the dwelling or "improvements."

Way too big to post, unreadable if downsized enough...

The War On Drugs

Very interesting, but, there are no given sources.

Another reason to annex Mexico. We're losing the illegal drug industry to those bastards south of the border. They took our jobs!

Attachment 38201

Congratulations. You've just been Rick-rolled by a pie chart!

:lol2:

Interesting information - how we spend money now vs. 1949. From here:

https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012...-americans-buy

Attachment 38210

Wow Pete - Thats hard to believe. Apparel & Food down???

Absolutely. Everyone ate real food then. It was like eating an exclusively organic, grass-fed diet, for everyone, because that was the only thing that existed. Our grocery bill isn't quite 40% of our income, but it's close.

.

..

Wherdja gettit?

Google search or an article?!?!?! Damn if I can remember now. :(

ETA ... I remembered IM's trick with the "save as" and looked it up..
Link here

I didn't get it there, but that is the apparent original location.

While the press cheers on every sign of private sector job creation, little attention is being paid to public sector job destruction.
As the Economic Policy Institute reports, while there has been an increase of some 2.8 million private sector jobs since June 2009,
public sector employment (federal, state, and local governments combined) has actually fallen by approximately 600,000.
This is a very unusual development as the figure below reveals.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, if the percentage growth of public sector employment in this recovery
had followed past recovery trends, we would have an additional 1.2 million public sector jobs and some 500,000 additional private sector jobs. A separate reason for concern about this trend is that lost public sector jobs generally means a decline in the services
that we need to sustain our communities. The withering away of our public sector during a period of expansion should worry us all.

link

Classic, when the heck did you become a big-government socialist? ;)

lol.

And 2/3 of those 600,000+ jobs were held by women.

I know a number of teachers who will be unemployed in the Fall regardless of talent.

If a shitstorm develops over this, please begin the shitstorm in a more appropriate thread, so we don't hijack this one. I thought I'd seen a Trayvon Martin Shooting thread, and would have posted it there, but, I couldn't find it.

I didn't make this, I didn't even go looking for it. And I've lost the link.

I did find it interesting, even if I don't completely understand the numbers:

Attachment 38555

..

from here

Maybe a not so scientific survey...interesting though.

from collegehumor

Attachment 38928

Could someone explain the spliff/joint/blunt distinction?

Spliffs usually have a rollrd heavy paper mouthpiece.

Blunts are usually cigars (or cigarettes) hollowed out and filled.

A spliff around here is when you use the diagonal rolling technique. As opposed to a straight up joint. Supposedly leaves no roach.

A blunt uses a emptied cigar paper, or, alternatively, a wrap. A wrap is just an empty (sometimes flavored) cigar paper that was never a cigar.

YMMV

urbandictionary.com says

Around me the term has been used to indicate a comically large joint perhaps even rolled with newspaper.

As your webmaster, I advise against smoking newspaper.

http://cellar.org/2012/huge_joint.jpg

Just goes to show you can't get a definitive answer from dopers. :haha:

cuz they all forgot.