I’ve now reached the age where I can spend 110 percent of my time maintaining my disintegrating body and material possessions (where the house is Exhibit A!). As part of this effort, I’ve had two dental crowns for summer 2023 as well as an old filling that needed to be replaced. I found a Tufts-trained dentist down here who is a refugee from the Maskachusetts lockdowns. She has the CEREC machine for milling same-day crowns:
What does this cost? If you’re a working class chump with less spending power than someone on welfare… more than $2,200 per crown. What if you’re a laptop class member with dental insurance? The “negotiated rate” scam in dentistry is not quite as absurd as in medicine, but the total revenue for the dentist then becomes $1,200 and the patient must pay $500. In other words, those with substantially greater financial resources pay less. What about those who have chosen to refrain from work? If they’re back in my dentist’s old neighborhood around Boston… crowns are free through MassHealth (Medicaid). What about in New York? As of 2023, the 5 million New Yorkers receiving taxpayer-funded health insurance get free crowns, implants, root canals, etc. (NYT)
Whom does that leave to go down the cheaper road of extraction? The working class chumps who fund Medicaid via their tax payments and who therefore can’t pay the $2,200 per crown retail price. These will be the Americans with missing teeth.
State Farm says “A rule of thumb is to set aside 1%-4% of your home’s value for a home maintenance fund”. Aside from the fact that this is a huge range, it seems questionable. If a house is brand new, for example, it will be worth more but shouldn’t cost as much to maintain. Does “home’s value” include the land? If we want to use a percentage of “value” should we start with what it would cost to rebuild the house at today’s prices?
Also, I’m not sure that these formulae are valid for keeping a house in like-new condition. People in our part of Florida will either bulldoze a house after 20-30 years or do a major renovation ($100-200/ft), often back to the studs.
State Farm considers costs for the roof, HVAC, water heater, garage door opener, windows, and appliances. But this list isn’t complete and if you had all-new items in all of those categories your house could still be extremely shabby.
Our sojourn thus far in a 20-year-old house has taught me a lot about life limits. I recently learned about the thermal expansion tank attached to the water heater. This prevents excessive pressure from developing in a house’s water lines if the system is sealed off from the municipal water supply via a backflow preventer (see Supreme Court saddens the guys working at our house today). As soon as our backflow preventer was rebuilt, we began to notice that sometimes water pressure was initially high when opening a faucet. Our next-door neighbor is a senior engineer for a Detroit automaker and my go-to source for everything related to the house. He said that he’d had the same problem when his thermal expansion tank had failed internally. We looked at our water heater (installed 2020) and there was no tank at all! (Due to the failed backflow preventer, any excess pressure was previously absorbed by the city water supply.) The plumber who put a tank in said they cost $300 and last 2-5 years (they have a one-year warranty). So that’s an extra $75/year in maintenance reserve, perhaps.
If we consider furniture to be part of the house, and we want a house to look good, we need to budget for replacement of all furniture every 10 years (usually not cost-effective to reupholster). Online estimates of furniture cost are 10-50 percent of the house value. If we take the bottom end of this range for cheap-ish furniture and assume that the furniture costs 10 percent of the house value, that’s 1 percent of the house value every year as a furniture renovation budget.
Backyard pools here in Florida have a life expectancy of about 20 years (leaks can develop; tiles start to come apart). They cost about $25,000 to rehab every 20 years and the pump and heater can die sooner, so that’s probably $1,500 per year amortized.
You’ll want to paint inside and out every 5-10 years if you want the place to look sharp. That won’t be cheap!
People in nicer houses seem to do complete kitchen and bathroom renovations every 15-20 years. Those are $100,000+, so at least $7,000 per year if you want to avoid a period of shabbiness and people walking in saying “this kitchen could use a renovation”. (Of course, hardly any cooking is done in these dream kitchens, but somehow the cabinets and appliances still manage to fall apart over time!)
In order to remain competitive, hotel owners are required to do complete renovations periodically. Every room is rebuilt, refurnished, etc. Every wall is painted and every floor gets a new carpet, tile, or other flooring. If you want to live in a house that isn’t shabby, you need to do the same thing and I suspect that will cost more than 4% of the house value per year. But how much more?
Or I wonder if we could take the cost of a complete rebuild of the house and multiply that by 4 percent. Building a mediocre house in South Florida will cost about $1 million (about $350/foot for 2,500′ plus another $100,000 for the pool). The maintenance budget for a 2,500′ house is thus $40,000 per year.
Here’s what I came up with…
Cost
Expected life
Cost/year
State Farm items
tile roof
$60,000
30
$2,000
hvac
$20,000
12
$1,667
water heater
$1,500
10
$150
windows
$60,000
20
$3,000
furniture
$100,000
10
$10,000
swimming pool rehab
$25,000
20
$1,250
pool filters/heaters
$5,000
10
$500
$150/ft renovation
$375,000
20
$18,750
Annual total
$37,317
Note that the $150/ft renovation is intended to include the kitchen, bathrooms, and all appliances. It would also include flooring and paint. The total comes out pretty close to $40,000/year and there is nothing in the budget for mid-cycle painting, unexpected repairs, or unknown unknowns.
In other words, if someone got a 2 percent mortgage a couple of years ago, his/her/zir/their annual maintenance budget could well be larger than the mortgage, an unexpected result for many.
The typical homeowner, of course, won’t do the renovation every 20 years, so he/she/ze/they will spend less and also live in an increasingly decrepit house (or move!).
For calculating inflation, the BLS uses the fictitious “owners’ equivalent rent” (OEI). Home maintenance costs rise with the price of labor, which in turns rises with the cost of health insurance and, thus, at a higher rate than overall CPI. I wonder if inflation is understated partly because it assumes that Americans will live in ever-shabbier houses. The shabbiness wouldn’t be compensated for in OEI because owners aren’t likely to notice how crummy their house has become compared to a new house (boiling frog syndrome, another false premise of Science).
In other words, our houses cost us way more than we think, either explicitly in money if we do keep them up or implicitly in shabbiness if we don’t, and that might lead to inflation being understated (since we would have to spend a lot more to maintain our lifestyle).
Prices are rising more slowly, but consumers fixate on how much lower they were before the pandemic, a problem for Biden.
Inflation has fallen sharply in the past year. The economy remains strong. Yet Americans remain deeply unhappy about the economy, often citing inflation. It continues to weigh on President Biden’s approval and re-election hopes.
Peasants aren’t sufficiently grateful, in other words, for all of the good things that the Party has done for them. They don’t credit Joe Biden for increasing their chocolate ration to 20 grams, for example.
I wonder if there will be spontaneous pro-Biden rallies to show gratitude for the lower airfares and car prices after the latest union contracts work their way through the system. CNBC:
I’ve got my mother’s AOL account password and try to log in every day or two to clear out the spam, unsubscribe her from all of the scam mailing lists that she’s on, etc. Considering that mom says she’d vote for Joe Biden even if he were a mental vegetable and/or dead, it is a little strange that she is on rightwing.org‘s mailing list:
The folks behind this are bravely defending “the American way”:
Where are these rightwing warriors based?
Glendale, California! In other words, every day they are paying taxes to keep Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, DEI programs, gun safety laws, and welfare schemes going.
I find this even harder to understand than my mom being on their list!
I was chatting with an Ivy League graduate who is a loyal Democrat and who follows the mainstream media. He shared that he had learned from news articles that the recently deceased Dianne Feinstein was the first female U.S. senator and, therefore, a true pioneer for her gender ID.
The first female U.S. senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, represented Georgia for a single day in 1922, and the first woman elected to the Senate, Hattie Caraway, was elected from Arkansas in 1932. Fifty-nine women have served in the upper house of the United States Congress since its establishment in 1789.
A gun owner with a concealed carry permit who wanted to deny her subjects the right to carry guns, Ms. Feinstein was also an early crusher of 2SLGBTQQIA+ dreams. A 1982 NYT article:
Mayor Dianne Feinstein today vetoed a San Francisco city ordinance that would have extended to live-in lovers, including homosexuals, the health insurance benefits that now go to husbands and wives of city employees.
The ordinance she vetoed was introduced by Harry Britt, the only publicly homosexual member of the Board of Supervisors. Mr. Britt was traveling in the East today, but his office released a statement in which he said that ”by vetoing this law, Mayor Feinstein has shown it is our nation’s institutions that lack civility. She has done serious harm to the efforts of gay men and lesbians to gain acceptance and understanding of our life styles.”
Dana van Gorder, a member of Mr. Britt’s staff, said the Mayor ”does not believe in the spirit of this legislation whatsoever.” The spokesman said that the homosexual community ”has had a sense for some time that she has viewed us with a certain moral judgment.”
At dusk about 200 people, many identifying themselves as homosexuals, gathered at the City Hall steps in response to a call for a protest. They cheered speakers who criticized Mayor Feinstein, and they chanted ”Dump Dianne.”
She sought to collect income tax and other revenues in Deplorable states, but not to send any money back to them until they accepted Faucism (press release):
The Science of cloth masks was powerful in the summer of 2020. A quote from the above:
“Research shows that masks reduce transmission of the coronavirus. CDC Director Redfield said this surge in COVID-19 cases could end within two months if we adopt ‘universal masking.’… countries that are successfully controlling this virus require masks. So why doesn’t the United States have a national mask mandate?”
(Remember to check cumulative excess deaths to see how those “countries that [were] successfully controlling the virus” eventually fared.)
What are some example articles that communicate to readers that Dianne Feinstein was the first female senator? From the New York Post:
US Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the trailblazing California Democrat who broke gender barriers throughout her five decades in politics, died Thursday night at her Washington, DC home following a number of health scares. She was 90.
The Guardian: “Senator Dianne Feinstein, trailblazer for women in US politics, dies aged 90″.
The Hill: “Senate loses giant in Dianne Feinstein: ‘A trailblazer in every sense of that word’”
New York Times: “Dianne Feinstein, a Trailblazing Senator, Dies at 90″
A friend sent me this assignment, recently given to students at the public high school in Palo Alto, California:
Let’s focus in on a few…
This is a little confusing. Racism explains why “Black and Latino men” are incarcerated at higher rates than other residents of the U.S. But how can racism explain why men are more likely to be incarcerated than people who identify with the other 73 genders recognized by Science?
What would happen to a student who cited Elizabeth Warren as an example?
This is the one that upsets me. Our house is 3 miles from the climate change-enhanced ocean, yet we are redlined by State Farm and excluded from homeowners insurance.
As a general rule, whatever is sacred in Massachusetts is illegal in Florida and vice versa. In MA, there is no state funding for gifted programs and the typical town-run public school system has no differentiation until 8th or 9th grade. The idea that children of all abilities go through material at a single level, with some bored and some lost, is sacred. In FL, by contrast, county-run school districts are required by state law to offer gifted education beginning in 2nd grade. Parking an academically-inclined student in a grade-level classroom is actually illegal.
A friend and I were chatting about this while on a walk with his dog in Wellesley, Maskachusetts back during my August trip up and down the East Coast. A neighbor walking her own dog joined the conversation and opined that public schools shouldn’t have gifted education because it tended to result in racial segregation, with Black students left behind, for example.
Where had she attended school? Milton Academy ($64,000/year for day students) and then an Ivy League college. Had she sent her own children to the Wellesley Public Schools where they could receive the benefits of sitting in a classroom with a diversity of academic talent if not a diversity of skin color? No. They also went to Milton Academy and then on to the Ivies.
Has the lack of gifted education in Maskachusetts public schools resulted in racial harmony? Let’s check NBC:
At one point, the teen grabbed a bigger stone, threatened the victim with it and called him “boy” and the N-word, according to the police narrative. …
The victim also wrote in his statement that the other juvenile “started laughing and called me George Floyd, obviously making fun of me and showing NO remorse.”
HUME: Forty years after Reagan’s landslide reelection, the Republican Party faces critical questions: What does it mean to be a conservative?
VIVEK RAMASWAMY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We fight for the truth.
GOV. RON DESANTIS (R-FL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We are not going to worry about what the left and the media say about us.
Nobody else answered? Vivek’s answer seems crazy. Which truth is he fighting for? His truth? I can’t believe this guy is polling higher than my favorite, Nikki Haley. DeSantis’s answer is terrible in my opinion. Shouldn’t a conservative be able to exist without the “left” (whatever that might mean in America’s incoherent politics) and the media?
Should I be worried that I agree with Chris Christie?
During the Trump administration, they added $7 trillion, $7 trillion in national debt. And now, the Biden administration has put another $5 trillion on and counting. They have failed, and they’re in the spot they’re in now because none of them are willing to tell the truth; none of them are willing to take on the difficult issues. They just want to keep kicking the can down the road.
DeSantis basically says the same thing, but works in low-skill immigration, which drives up costs for everything that the working class might want to buy, e.g., housing, while feeding the elites:
DESANTIS: The people in Washington are shutting down the American dream with their reckless behavior. They borrowed, they printed, they spent and now you’re paying more for everything. They are the reason for that. They have shut down our national sovereignty by allowing our border to be wide open.
Now, I can tell you this as governor of Florida, we cut taxes; we ran surpluses; we’ve paid down over 25 percent of our state debt. And I vetoed wasteful spending when it came to my desk. And as your president, when they send me a bloating spending bill that’s going to cause your prices to go up, I’m going to take out this veto pen and I’m going to send it right back to them.
I rate this last statement “partly false” because the U.S. president doesn’t have a line-item veto as most state governors do. I guess a hypothetical President DeSantis could have vetoed coronapanic spending and massive spending programs authorized by individual bills, such as the “Inflation Reduction Act”.
More from Vivek:
Look, I have a different view on this. I think Trump was an excellent president. But the America First agenda does not belong to one man. It does not belong to Donald Trump. It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to you, the people of this country. … When we rallied behind the cry to make America great again, we did not just hunger for a single man. We hungered for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence.
He raises an interesting question: What are Republican voters voting for? “Pursuit of excellence” doesn’t seem right. Given the chance to sit on the couch and collect money from others who work, most Americans grab the deal with both hands. (My favorite recent example: police officers in a San Francisco exurb who got paid about $300,000 each while sitting at home suspended due to being investigated for criminal activity. One moved to Hawaii! (Mercury News). None of them chose to pursue any kind of productive employment or education during their suspension.)
Readers who watched this live or on video: What struck you as interesting? Does this format make sense? It didn’t seem as though any of the candidates had enough time to utter a coherent policy point of view.
Maybe the November 30 debate between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom will be more interesting:
If Biden on the union picket line is the senile version of AOC, maybe Gavin Newsom is fairly characterized as the young edition of Bernie Sanders, i.e., someone who can articulate a vision of vastly expanded government presiding over a miscellaneous collection of humans that has been vastly expanded via immigration.
This is a report on the coronapanic level in Panama observed during a February 2023 visit.
One of the first sights stepping off our Royal Caribbean ship was a mask directive in the duty free shop:
Walking outdoors in the sunshine near the canal:
Two years after coronapanic began, compliance with these indoor and outdoor directives was spotty. Note the chin diapers on the supermarket employees below, for example, and on a gal in an ice cream shop.
On April 1, 2020, the government of Panama introduced a gender-based lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This meant that women and men were only allowed to do essential shopping on alternate days. … An unintended consequence of this measure was that police and private security guards began to single out transgender people for profiling for being out “on the wrong day.” In some cases, they arrested and fined trans people, or prevented them from buying essential items like food and medication. These cases of discrimination occurred when security agents’ visually identified trans people, or after they checked the sex marker on their national identification cards.
Panama was celebrated by the United Nations for its California levels of school closure (more than one year). What were the results achieved by locking up the trans shoppers, kicking kids out of school for 1.5 years, forced masking, and coerced vaccination? Panama ended up with a slightly higher COVID-tagged death rate than no-lockdown, no-mask, no-school-closure Sweden (statista).
What if a Panamanian emerged from his/her/zir/their bunker having survived COVID? Our guide explained that Panamanians pay roughly 20 percent of income in tax. “That covers retirement and health care,” she said. “There is no property tax and you don’t have to pay anything when you go see the doctor.” A tourist from Canada asked if there were long waits to see doctors. “Oh yes,” the guide responded. “Sometimes you have to wait for two weeks.” Women retire at 57, men at 62, and police after 25 years of work (age 43 if they start at 18). Life expectancy is almost the same as in the U.S. (ranking), about 82 for women and 76 for men. Thus, women enjoy 11 additional years of retirement compared to men (5 years from the younger retirement age and 6 years from the longer life expectancy).
One mystery is how the life expectancy in Panama can be comparable to what we have here in the U.S. We are informed that abortion care for pregnant people is life-saving health care. The U.S. is the world’s abortion care capital. By contrast, “Abortion in Panama is illegal except in instances that the pregnancy is life-threatening or the health of the woman is at risk, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. … The punishment for a woman who has an illegal abortion is one to three years in prison. The punishment for a doctor or other person who provides the procedure with the woman’s consent is 3 to 6 years in prison.” (Wikipedia) If abortion care is rare in Panama, how are Panamanians able to live just as long as Americans?
Panama is an underrated tourist destination. The wildlife is as interesting as in Costa Rica. The historic old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a lot more pleasant than Cartagena. Everything is easier for the traveler because the country is so much richer than these neighbors. Let’s have a look at the old:
Some fancy church interiors:
The “latino style” shop:
(I stopped in to ask directions to the Latinx style shop.)
What pays for it all? Global commerce! Ships going through and also 500,000 containers per year being transferred to another ocean via the Panama Canal Railway.
