Neighborhood Recovery Act
 

GREAT DEPRESSION?    HYPER-INFLATION?

The Buck Stops With The State Legislatures

By: Stanley L. Klos

February 28, 2009

    It is a little known fact that March 1, 2009 is the 228th birthday of the Perpetual Union of the United States formed by the first 13 state ratified federal constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Eight years later, the United States of America was plagued by currency hyper-inflation, an inability to pay its foreign/domestic debts and a collapsing federal government.

    From November 1786 to January 1787 the eight-year old federal government failed to form a quorum of State Delegates necessary to convene their unicameral government.  The  1787 United States in Congress Assembled direly needed to elect a Ninth President of the United States, conduct the ailing nation's business and put down a citizen's rebellion that threatened to topple the Commonwealth  of Massachusetts' central government. Finally, on February 2, 1787 a quorum was formed and the Delegates elected George Washington's friend and former Major General, Arthur St. Clair,  to the United States Presidency under the Articles of Confederation.    President St. Clair and his Congress quickly enacted legislation, on February 21, 1787, to convene a Philadelphia Convention:

"Resolved that in the opinion of Congress it is expedient that on the second Monday in May next a Convention of delegates who shall have been appointed by the several States be held at Philadelphia for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the States render the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union.

    The convention was chaired by George Washington with Delegates representing 12 of the 13 States.  Early in their deliberations, Washington and the Delegates deemed the first federal constitution to be so flawed that  a new constitution was drafted rather than an Articles of Confederation revision.   The product of this convention, the U.S. Constitution of 1787,   governs the United States in 2009 with a tripartite system, a U.S. President (executive branch),  a bicameral Congress (legislative branch) and a Supreme Court (judicial branch).   Today, 222 years later, the United States finds itself on the brink of falling into a similar 1787  financial crisis, depression then hyper-inflation which, could once again threaten the very existence of the Perpetual Union. 

    On September 17, 2008, Black Wednesday (the 221st Birthday of the second Constitution) the Neighborhood Recovery Act. [1] was transmitted to Congress and the Bush Administration.  For Four months the plan  sat in various legislative chambers and despite its predictions ringing true, no action.  Therefore, the Act is submitted, respectfully, once again  to President Obama and the new Congress as the real estate market continues to decline despite  2008-2009 interest rate cuts and unprecedented "stimulus" spending measures. 

    This posting reintroduces the plan  addressing the February 17th, 2009 “Stimulus Bill”, the continued decline in residential home values, and President Obama's February 27th, 2009 proposed budget.  Additionally, the national debt and real estate/mortgage equities collapse are  all analyzed in this digital posting.  There is also a review of the Congressional and Presidential measures enacted in 2008-2009 to revitalize the economy. This plan's elements are not new, as many components were first proposed to the George H. W. Bush Administration  in the 1992 white paper “Uncommon Sense - An analysis of the U.S. Economy With Solutions For the Current Recession"   which,  predicted a collapse of mortgage equities:

In 1992 Klos met with Bush O.M.D. Director, Richard Darmon to discuss real estate and the 1986 Tax Act: “Klos also warns that the trend of millions of homeowners utilizing home equity credit lines to pay off short term consumer debt could thrust America into a depression. "Consumers are being enticed into saddling their homes with enormous debts to obtain an interest tax deduction for cars, credit cards, and other consumer good," he explained. "Should congress fail to correct the current tax law, the economy will continue its downward trend," he continues, "the jobless recessive trend will climax when home-owners begin to default on equity mortgages instead of credit card and car payments. Our country could be faced with millions of Americans losing their homes because of over-extending prompted by aggressive home equity and mortgage lending." [2]

    As noted above, the current financial state of the United States was predictable.  The only reason why the United States averted a second Great Depression in 2008  is  that Congress and President Bush stayed a 1930's banking collapse by filling failing bank coffers with billions of taxpayer dollars through TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program, funds.  The challenges are now more daunting as real estate values continue to plummet and mortgage backed securities values are exponentially declining.  This is requiring banks to infuse their underwater asset portfolios with huge infusions of cash OR FAIL as in the 1930's.  These second and third waves of bank capital shortages due to the collapsing real estate market will most likely result in federal  bank nationalization unless home prices are stabilized and begin to appreciate.

    Make no mistake about it, we are in a Great Depression.  To avert  bank nationalization and/or more government deficit spending we must reduce the residential housing inventory. This stabilization can be accomplished with a change to the real estate provisions of the 1986 Tax Act.  If the real estate market is not stabilized with appreciation returning, our currency can conceivably go the way of the 18th Century dollar and not be worth a "Continental."  The agonizing experience of the runaway national inflation and collapse of the Continental dollar prompted the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention to include the gold and silver clause into Article I Section 10 of the United States Constitution.  

    The tying of United States' dollar  to a commodity standard ended on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon ended the trading of gold at the fixed price of $35/ounce. This was the first time in modern history that formal links between the major world currencies and real commodities were severed.  This makes the dollar a candidate for a Continental like devaluation through hyper-inflation if the economy weakens further and the federal government continues to balloon the money supply.   

    Finally there is the challenge in the United States that is even more troublesome than the current financial crisis.  Simply put, the nation is polarized and has become closed minded. Today, if one constructively criticizes a "liberal idea" the "left" listener's mind closes and your are labeled a right wing capitalist.  Conversely, if one  constructively criticizes a "conservative idea" the "right" listener's mind closes and you are labeled a left wing socialist.  This has to change if We The People are going to work ourselves out of this financial crisis. Constructive ideas, especially on  how to stabilize the United States residential real estate market, must be analyzed and debated without Ad Hominem  attacks and complete closure of the mind.

HISTORIC DEBT CALCULATIONS:

Outstanding Public Debt as of 27 Feb 2009 at at 05:40:04 PM GMT was:

$10,843,952,189,378.14

The estimated population of the United States is 305,724,353 so each citizen's share of this debt is $35,469.70.  The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $3.55 billion per day since September 28, 2007.

Revolutionary War Debt was $75 Million in 1790 is = how much in 2007 dollars?
In 2007, $1.00 from 1790 is NOW worth:

 Civil War Debt was $2.8 Billion in 1866 is = how much in 2007 dollars?
In 2007, $1.00 from 1866 is NOW worth [3]:

 World War II Debt was $269 Billion in 1946 is = how much in 2007 dollars?
In 2007, $1.00 from 1946 is NOW worth:

The Good News is the U.S. is still under the GDP (gross domestic product) adjusted $16.71 trillion mark at $11 trillion.  The Bad News is that if President Obama's budget is passed it will increase the debt  to WW II percentage levels while primarily due the collapsing financial system,  GDP declines. Even without the President's new budget, the 2009 projected debt is now up to about $1.4 trillion. That's a massive 10 percent of the GDP the highest level since the end of World War II.  Moreover, the Economy posted a 6.2 percent loss in fourth quarter, the worst contraction in a quarter century, plunging the United States into a deeper recession. 
 

HOUSING CRISIS:

United States single family residential values fell for the eighth consecutive quarter, declining 11.6 percent during 2008 to $192,119, according to the fourth quarter Zillow Real Estate Market Reports, which encompass 161 metropolitan areas.[4] This means that U.S. homeowners lost a cumulative $3.3 trillion in home values during 2008, with 1.4 trillion of that loss coming in the fourth quarter just under what was predicted by this author in the initial, September 17, 2008, publication of the Neighborhood Recovery Act.  The 2007 year record loss of $1.3 trillion in housing values was, therefore, topped in the last fiscal quarter. Since the housing market's peak in 2006, $6.1 trillion in home values have been lost.  Add to that trailers, condos and 2 to 4 unit homes the numbers are even more staggering.

          As home values declined through 2008, more American homeowners have become upside down on their mortgages. At the end of the year, one in six (17.6 percent) of all homeowners had negative equity. This number rose from the end of the third quarter, when one in seven (14.3 percent) homeowners has a mortgage debt greater than the current market value of their home according to Zillow Real Estate Market Reports.   January 2009 fared no better with NAR reporting a median selling price decline of 17.9% while condo sales dropped 26%.  Finally, these low interest rates, which are currently causing a boom in the mortgage refinance market and aiding in improving real estate sales, can not be maintained much longer.  Once these low rates increase, lending and real estate demand will naturally decline causing a further slump in housing market value.

          It is no secret that the housing bubble collapse was the underlying component that caused the failure of over-leveraged financial institutions.  The financial system was predictably vulnerable due to a U.S. monetary policy making the cost of credit negligible therefore encouraging such high levels of leverage.  

Unfortunately, many key financial institutions leveraged portfolios were investments whose assets had been derived from bundled home mortgages. The securities began to collapse with the housing market declined in early 2007 and stocks soon followed.  The stock market lost 49.8 percent of its value between October 9, 2007, and February 23, 2009, a decline of about $11.7 trillion. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index closed down 3.5% at 743.33 – its lowest close since April of 1997. Is this the bottom?  Four months earlier, on Dec. 5 of 1996, as the S&P 500 closed at 744.38, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan uttered the now famous phrase about markets being taken over by “irrational exuberance.”  In 1996 the median trailing P/E for the S&P 500 was 19.26. Today, it is 10.17. Trailing earnings back then were about 50% of what they are now, with $36 for the S&P 500 in 1996, and $73 in 2008. But back then, earnings were rising, whereas now, they’re declining. The earnings are expected to fall to $63 for the S&P this year.   Have we escaped the era of exuberance? 

Never-the-less, these equity losses have dramatically reduced the retirement savings of older Americans.  It is estimated that approximately three trillion has been lost in retirement accounts alone.   Additionally, the U.S. Census reports the  silent generation (65 to 84) numbers range around 28 million while the baby boomer population (ages 45 to 64) exceed 75 million.  The wealth the baby boomers and the silent generation have set aside to maintain their health has been cut in half while health costs spiral. 

Enter, President Obama's Budget proposed to begin a vast expansion of the U.S. Health-care system by creating a $634 billion reserve fund over the next decade, launching a program that most experts believe will ultimately cost trillions of dollars.  It is safe to assume, therefore, that the aging financially strapped Baby Boomer and Silent Generation voting blocs (72% of registered voters) will embrace an Obama National Health Care System  that will exponentially increase the U.S. Debt.  

GOVERNMENT SPENDING V.  TAX LAW CHANGES:

There is very little that this author agrees with in the latest stimulus bill.  This type of spending didn’t work during the Great Depression or in the recession of the 1970’s.  Henry Morgenthau, Jr was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Morgenthau, testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in May 1939 said of Roosevelt’s spending plans:

“We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. We have never made good on our promises. I say after six years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot."[5]  

It was World War II that took the United States out of the Great Depression with unemployment shrinking from 19.5% in 1939 to 1.7% in 1944.  Currently, the nation’s unemployment is rising sharply despite the costs of the War in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The spending programs are not working.  The $180 billion stimulus program in the spring of 2008 failed. The $345 billion housing bailout from the summer of 2008 failed. The $700 billion Wall Street bailout from the fall of 2008 was disastrous sinking stocks and real estate values. Now the $787 billion in government spending coupled with another $400-500 billion in proposed deficit spending is more of the same failed strategy.  These measures do not properly address the root of the problem, an oversupply of residential real estate housing. 

The market has swung widely from a sublime artificial value “sellers market” to the ridiculous undervalued “buyers market” in the areas of Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, the Northeast Corridor, and numerous Southwest markets.   Now the real estate decline has begun to threaten the nation’s capital and the historically stable markets of the Mid-West. What is required is a plan that will encourage the private sector to invest in residential real estate to re-establish an economic equilibrium of price and quantity.    

This author believes President Obama is working hard to correct the financial crisis but he and his Wall Street advisors do not completely understand that it is real estate provisions in the 1986 Tax Act which are causing the wild fluctuations in the real estate markets.  Like politics, real estate markets are primarily local.  One major exception to this rule is governmental manipulation of the tax law and mortgage capital availability.   The President and others have miss identified the cure for disease that has caused this immense fluctuation in property values.  It is true that they correctly understand the decline of the real estate forest to be directly related  to the oversupply of residential homes but because the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of the Treasury draw all their experience and expertise from their Wall Street banking careers, their over examination on the decaying Wall Street tree leads them to  the conclusion that the current crisis is a lending challenge rather than a real estate market crisis.  They miss the fact that Wall Street, through Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan in 1986, successfully corralled investment real estate into equity instruments by making its tax category (passive income) separate from equities (portfolio income).  Wall Street, therefore, seized control of residential real estate with mortgage equities and investment real estate with REIT - Corporate - LLC equity instruments and "Laid An Egg" much larger than they did in 1929.

Like the common cold, real estate’s wild peaks and valleys have mutated into numerous viruses that have infected copious capitalistic components of the world economy.  Many political vaccines for the mutant viruses have been introduced by Congress and the Presidents including several on the real estate front. The President of the National Association of Realtors, amazingly, took great pride in enumerating the latest wave of “vaccines” in a letter to his membership only last week [6] while condemning the President's Budget provision seeking a reduction in the mortgage interest tax deduction against ordinary income.

Like the scientists battling the flu in the last millennium, our leaders have misidentified the common stem weakness of the viral ailment, the 1986 Tax Act.  Once Congress and the President come to the realization that the ordinary income residential and the passive investment real estate  tax laws are the common stem to the wild fluctuations in the markets a political vaccine can be crafted to transform the buyers market to a modestly appreciating balanced market.  Unlike the flu virus, where the viral stem has been identified as the flu's "Achilles Heal," we do not have three or four years to develop a vaccine that will undo most of the mutated economic viruses.

At NAR’s Convention last fall this author identified the 1986 Tax Act inadequacies that are root of the real estate and equity imbalanced markets. The REALTORS understood.  Unfortunately, we were unable to awaken a voluntary inclination in either Congress or the President to act. The government leaders have either failed to see the 1986 Tax Act flaw or if they see it, are unwilling to correct it.  In short,  the left sees the Neighborhood Recovery Act as adverse to struggling homeowners who they believe may never salvage their homes if housing demand increases.  The right sees the Neighborhood Recovery Act as adverse to Wall Street as they believe capital will pour out of  equities into the acquisition of distressed residential real estate.   

The Congressional majority and Presidents Bush and Obama ignored the Neighborhood Recovery Act.  They adopted an economic strategy to reduce the growing foreclosure numbers [7], provided real estate acquisition incentives as outlined by NAR’s President (see end notes), and passed the February 19, 2009 $787 billion Stimulus Act in the hopes of creating jobs catalyzing the U.S. GDP.  None of the political measures enacted corrected the 1986 Tax Act inadequacies  and consequently, the real estate market will continue to decline to the detriment of the U.S. economy. 

The loss of retirement funds of nearly 50% in the equity markets coupled with the home equity obliteration has been a one-two punch that has resulted in a National Financial Crisis that is clearly uncorrectable through more government spending.  The collapse of the past four months could have been contained if Congress and the Bush Administration enacted the 1986 Tax Law change last fall as this author advocated.   

More disturbingly, President Obama's budget does seek to change the 1986 Tax Code BUT in the opposite direction recommended in the Neighborhood Recovery Act, by capping mortgage interest deductions on “higher income”  households with yearly incomes over $208,850.  This budget provision is akin to throwing a drowning real estate/mortgage equity market a lead filled life jacket.  The National Association of REALTORS reacted:

" changing the mortgage interest deduction will not only negatively impact the 2 percent of families who own homes targeted by the proposal, but also will impact home prices and values across the board. The middle class would see their home values reduced even further by such action, and NAR cautioned the Obama administration that any further pressure on home prices will hamper the economic recovery, raise foreclosures and hurt banks’ abilities to lend."

The real solution to the current crisis is the empowerment of the private sector to absorb the oversupply of residential housing by providing tax benefits to BUY rather than enacting provisions with tax consequences that will encourage the private sector to sell real estate. The federal government, even under the President's most lofty economic projections, cannot correct the private capital loss in equities and real estate that now amounts to over $20 trillion with more deficit spending and higher taxes. Congress and the President must empower the wealth and work ethic of private sector by implementing the Neighborhood Recovery Act. The proposed tax  law change will inoculate real estate from the 1986 Tax Act’s ordinary and passive category cabal.  The proposed tax  law change will prevent over leveraging by capping mortgage deductions for everyone  to 70% of a home's purchase price.    Once again, this author submits his Neighborhood Recovery Act. 

Neighborhood Recovery Act – September 17, 2008:  

First: Move residential real estate gains and losses, (one to 4 family units) into both the ordinary income and portfolio income tax categories for properties that are acquired in the next 24 months by anyone including partnerships, LLCs and corporations.

Result: Investors and investment entities will start acquiring residential real estate in a soft market as artificial value (prices higher than the cost of the land plus cost to build) has already dissipated since one can’t build many houses at their current asking prices let alone recapture the value of the land.  

Second: Any residential real estate acquired in the two year period would continue to have losses deductible against ordinary income for the life of property ownership by the investor or investment entity.

Result: Investors and investment entities will hold the real estate (limited flipping) as the ability to offset ordinary income with real estate tax deductions make long term ownership very attractive. A balanced market will emerge as investors and investment entities acquire residential real estate at what I believe will be unprecedented levels (two years might be too long).  

Third: once the two year period has expired investment real estate gains and losses are to be permanently shifted into the portfolio tax category.

Result: Real Estate will be on an equal footing with stocks, bonds, commodities and other equities resulting in diverse investment portfolios managed by both Wall and Main Streets. 

Fourth: Primary and secondary residence mortgage interest should only be deductible for loans up to 70% of the original value of the initial acquisition value.

Result: This will retain the incentive for citizens to acquire homes while thwarting borrowing on home equity beyond 70% of the original acquisition price to take advantage of the interest tax deduction. 

Fifth: Tax Credits should be issued as incentives for entrepreneurial families to purchase mixed-use buildings to expand their businesses and raise their families.

Result: This measure will result in entrepreneurial families relocating out of the suburbs and into cities revitalizing urban centers while checking suburban sprawl. 

Sixth: Repeal FASB 157 mark to market accounting and relax regulations to provide time for financial institutions to liquidate assets to meet cash requirements.

Result: The repeal of mark to market accounting will provide financial institutions with an accounting system favorable to a declining real estate market will foster a stabilization of the financial markets which in turn will help in the stabilization of the real estate markets.  

The real estate market will continue to depreciate unless the tax code, the common stem to all the real estate and mortgage equities viral infections, is changed as outlined above. Congress needs to unleash the private sector, while it still has money.  The oversupply of residential houses must be liquidated NOW utilizing free enterprise by implementing these changes in the tax code to turn this depreciation into appreciation. Another 25% of equity losses (as opposed to a conservatively speaking a 25% equity recovery) by homeowners will further disintegrate the U.S. financial system sending us into a deep depression finally resulting in hyper-inflation.

 
Neighborhood Recovery Act Video

September 17, 2008

Article Continued  - Click Here

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The Founders convened the government in 11 different capitol buildings and
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