The American Dream: Now More Worthless Than Ever
Are you one of the Americans fortunate enough to still own a home? Sucks for you. Housing prices are at a new god damn low, right now, in the middle of the big recovery! Who, exactly, are the winners here?
Well, it's not you, if you managed to hang onto your home, only to see its official price change from what you paid for it ($900K, for a beautiful split-level in a brand new housing development carved out of the swamp/ desert) to what it's worth today (a medium-sized bag of sawdust). (But hey, at least you have a house; thinking about your underwater mortgage is a great way to cool off when the heat of the desert sun has thoroughly baked your crumbling worthless homestead on the Vegas outskirts to a state of inhospitability.) And it's not the people who lost their houses already; and it's not the people who never had a house in the first place, because hey, they still don't have a fucking house.
No, the real winners in this whole mess: the corporations of America. They're paying the lowest corporate taxes of any developed Western nation in the world. But don't think of this in an economically unsophisticated juxtaposition like, "Those fuckers are paying rock-bottom taxes while everyone else in America is foreclosed upon." Think of it in a more positive light, like, "Maybe those fuckers have actually saved enough money by not paying taxes that they can afford to buy my house, for a medium-sized bag of sawdust."
Either way, we should take heart from this silvery silver lining. At least some people are making it out of the housing crash in good shape: corporations. Corporations are people too.
[Photo: AP]