View Full Version : Build a New Party
catherine
10-28-22, 2:56pm
I don't think anyone is that happy with their parties. What if a third party emerged? If it did, and if your new party's candidate got elected President, what are the first three pieces of legislation you would want to see passed? How would your ideal party be different from what we've got? What would the name of the party be (can be an actual third Party or a completely different one)? Who would you like to see run?
iris lilies
10-28-22, 3:00pm
Andrew Yang is out there sincerely trying to build a new party with a buddy from the republican party, a refugee from the republican party.
Their first goal is to get ranked voting to be the standard in all elections across all states and locales.
I believe their thinking is it that frees candidates from the requirements of following their party line. They can pick and choose positions.
I'd establish term limits for Supreme Court justices and rotate their selection so each president gets to pick a couple. I've seen a couple of versions of how this would work. I'll have to think about the rest, but a flat tax might be up there depending on the details. As we've seen, the president doesn't always get his way when congress is stacked against him or her.
Get dark money--and financial influence in general--out of politics, and limit lobbying.
I do not think Presidents write and pass legislation.
catherine
10-28-22, 4:18pm
I do not think Presidents write and pass legislation.
They don't. The questions are just a series of probes to get y'all thinking. Let me rephrase: "If it did, and if your new party's candidate got elected President and your party had control of Congress, what are the first three pieces of legislation you would want to see passed?
OK? (You literal types drive me crazy when I'm doing qualitative research)
iris lilies
10-28-22, 4:59pm
They don't. The questions are just a series of probes to get y'all thinking. Let me rephrase: "If it did, and if your new party's candidate got elected President and your party had control of Congress, what are the first three pieces of legislation you would want to see passed?
OK? (You literal types drive me crazy when I'm doing qualitative research)
I probably wouldn’t be so inclined to pass legislation as to delete existing legislation, but I don’t know what would be. I’d have to look at big sweeping bills of recent times….oh wait, the Inflation Reduction Act would be when I’d be looking at to strike.
I also might be more interested in presidential actions and regulations, or at least as interested as in the stuff passed by Congress. Our president in the White House is acting illegally often in the regulations he is putting forth.
I still can’t believe he got away without huge outcry from Americans across the country When he declared a moratorium on kicking tenants out. How is that even remotely legal? A president taking over private property this way?. It’s really creepy.
Since this is my first election here in Maine with ranked choice voting, I had to go look up how to do it--it was not obvious, really. Of the 6 or 7 offices I voted for, only one, the governor, had the ranked choice voting. It was Mills, LePage, an an Independent. I guess you can, if you wish, just vote the old way and put down 1 for your candidate of choice. I gave Mills a 1 and the independent a 2 and no vote for LePage. I hope others can figure out you do not have to give a vote to someone awful, just because you are doing the ranked choice voting.
catherine
10-29-22, 9:59am
Our president in the White House is acting illegally often in the regulations he is putting forth.
I still can’t believe he got away without huge outcry from Americans across the country When he declared a moratorium on kicking tenants out. How is that even remotely legal? A president taking over private property this way?. It’s really creepy.
Apparently the moratorium was to help manage COVID, it was temporary (120 days) and it was only in Federally-subsidized properties. But can you point to where the moratorium hasn't expired? After a brief look, I can't find anything to indicate it was extended beyond August 2021.
Believe me, I'm for renter rights, but I'm also for landlord rights. We were burned by strict renter-rights laws when we couldn't get a squatter out of my MIL's house. It cost us a bundle in legal fees and a good selling season before we were able to get her out.
So, I'd like to see if Biden really did sign a moratorium that's not connected to COVID and hasn't expired.
iris lilies
10-29-22, 11:58am
Apparently the moratorium was to help manage COVID, it was temporary (120 days) and it was only in Federally-subsidized properties. But can you point to where the moratorium hasn't expired? After a brief look, I can't find anything to indicate it was extended beyond August 2021.
Believe me, I'm for renter rights, but I'm also for landlord rights. We were burned by strict renter-rights laws when we couldn't get a squatter out of my MIL's house. It cost us a bundle in legal fees and a good selling season before we were able to get her out.
So, I'd like to see if Biden really did sign a moratorium that's not connected to COVID and hasn't expired.
Of course it was “connected to Covid.”
The action by government(s) hurt a lot of landlords. There were local, state, and national restrictions on booting nonpaying tenants. Keep in mind that landlords, little guys, who rent to tenants paying with Housing and Urban Design department vouchers were involved in this. I suppose I could say “when you lie down with dogs you get fleas “and I do kind of think that about these landlords, but really, it is hard enough for voucher tenants to find a place to live without further screwing over landlords.
I’m delving into the whole eviction moratorium right topic now because I would like to get it straight in my head what took place during Trump’s presidency, what Biden did, what the CARES ACT passed by Congress did vs what CDC actions did.
There were many lawsuits by landlords to come out of this.
I hope to come up with a summary, but that will take me a while to research it. I also have first hand anecdotes about it.
If anyone has a source that’s a good objective summary of this national debacle associated with COVID, let me know. I’m finding lots of sources of course and many of them very detailed but they all have a point of view, the violin playing for the tenant.
pinkytoe
10-29-22, 12:04pm
I think the old way of doing politics is in disarray and will have to crumble before something new can be created or added. I don't know what that will be and can't even imagine it. The youngest voting generation is rightfully bored with current politics and disengaged; I hope they will become more involved in creating what they will have to live with.
I'm confused--the moratorium on evictions came from Trump, not Biden, correct?
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-working-stop-evictions-protect-americans-homes-covid-19-pandemic/
Why is Biden being saddled with this one?
iris lilies
10-29-22, 12:24pm
I'm confused--the moratorium on evictions came from Trump, not Biden, correct?
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-working-stop-evictions-protect-americans-homes-covid-19-pandemic/
Why is Biden being saddled with this one?
did Joe delete it? Did he extend it?
it was happening in 2021. Who was in the
white House then?
We are talking about Joe Biden because he is the current occupant of The White House. If you mean Trump is just as bad, to that I say “no kidding. “
I think Biden was dealing with a policy set up by his predecessor, and like all policies that involve human welfare, you have to figure out what to do with it, since people are depending on it. I think you have to try not to disrupt everything when you come into office, especially when the policy is set for a health crisis that is still extant.
Retrospectively, I wonder if the eviction moratorium achieved its goal, which was to keep renters who were out of work due to Covid from becoming homeless or facing some other sort of housing or financial disaster. Or the corollary, how badly the landlords were impacted. I just assume the renters were still responsible for back rent and at least some of it was recovered by the landlords.
There were a lot of decisions that were made in the low frequency/high risk square of the grid for decision making. Looking back it's easy to say some were wrong, but at the time they might have made sense since outcomes were unknown.
gimmethesimplelife
10-29-22, 4:32pm
Personally I'm all for a new party somewhere in between the extremes of both the Dems and the GOP. Rob
rosarugosa
10-30-22, 7:24am
https://youtu.be/LiQW1TlDZMU
littlebittybobby
10-30-22, 8:35pm
Okay---All you kids can think about here, is party, party, party. S'what ideologues do! Tell you what---if I took over as Dictator & Supreme Ruler(a scary thought)--ALL parties would be disbanded, and everyone expected to think logically, and row-in-the-same direction. Pro-America, Waste-not, want not. But see--the adversarial belief systems actually create a synergy that is part of the nwegative life cycle of an empire! They sure do.
See? Want to save your environment? Start recognizing that.
ToomuchStuff
10-31-22, 9:38am
Which third party?
Green, reform, Libertarian or any of the other parties we have?
iris lilies
10-31-22, 8:27pm
Which third party?
Green, reform, Libertarian or any of the other parties we have?
A new one, none of the above. These 3rd parties are all ideologically set in place with their positions.
The Bull Moose Party might prove instructional.
https://image.pbs.org/video-assets/pbs/roosevelts/142315/images/mezzanine_308.jpg?crop=1920x1080&format=jpg
Personally If we’re going to engage of flights of fantasy I’d prefer bigger changes than just a new political party. There are a lot of other problems with the way our government is structured and how people get to positions of power in it. The fact that part of that structure makes it virtually impossible for anyone not in and part of one of the two main parties to obtain any level of success is a bigger problem than the fact that their are only two parties that have any relevance.
Partyless ranked choice voting in primaries is a good first step towards fixing that but it’s not a total solution.
iris lilies
10-31-22, 8:57pm
About the COVID related eviction moratoriums:
Federal, state, and local governments acted in different ways to ban tenant evictions during 20+ months of COVID. The CDC went beyond its authority to act in this issue. It issued legally binding directives and kept renewing those directives.
Some bans were at the federal level for some properties. There was, apparently, a last ditch effort to exert control over our populace by the CDC in an action dated August 2021 to continue a ban in communities with high COVID rates.
The link below may be the best summary of the bans, but it is coming from a point of view of tenant’s rights so will not be entirely objective.
It may seem like Monday morning quarterbacking, but I say the Biden administration did not have to take this albatross and keep extending and extending and extending it, past the time COVID stopped being a threat. Many landlords suffered. Small landlords suffered. You don’t have to look very far on the Internet to find the tales of woe. We have friends caught up in the mess. Any promised monetary compensation coming from the federal government was often problematic as you can imagine any of these government programs thrown out with minimal preparation would be.
https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/Overview-of-National-Eviction-Moratorium.pdf
This was not limited to federal housing, privately owned properties were affected, even by the federal bans. I read several articles and it still isn't clear to me which bans affected them but I do know CDC policy and regulatory activity provided the core ideas, and Congressional monies whetted appetites to control private property.
TLDR: Federal government overreach…not cool.
About the COVID related eviction moratoriums:
I am just very very thankful that by pure chance I had gotten rid of almost all of my residential and commercial rental properties just 2 months before the pandemic, or I surely would have lost those properties anyways.
I will certainly not engage in that sort of economically-productive activity again, the risk is simply too high for me, at my age. I can't be exposed to a random stroke of a pen by my state's Governor or some Federal functionary causing me such losses.
Many of the places I sold sit empty now, as the new owners have had to raise rents to deal with their losses, and so many of the businesses and tenants either moved on during COVID anyways, or can't afford the new rents. It is a shame, for ~20 years I had managed those properties to provide affordable opportunities for folks, but that's simply not possible anymore.
In hindsight it probably would have been a better plan for the government to provide financial assistance to tenants to enable them to continue to pay the rent. In the same way that in hindsight we probably should have just been making the unemployment checks sufficient enough for people who were sidelined from their jobs to be able to keep eating and paying rent rather than paying business owners to keep people on payrolls since that program suffered much abuse.
In hindsight it probably would have been a better plan for the government to ...
In my experience working with government programs, they rarely follow the simple, direct, efficient path.
Some years back I ended up being the local administrator for an energy-assistance program. It was pretty simple - the client came into the office, filled out a one page form (3-4 mins), form got scored (took like 10 seconds), and we wrote a check directly to the client (1 min). Another couple mins for admin. The usual check was for ~$200 or so. All by formula, there was no effort needed by our agency.
The program was structured such that we were given a bucket of money at the beginning of the period, and when we ran out, that was it for the year.
I got dinged at the end of the first year. Apparently we *didn't take enough money from the bucket for ourselves*, to cover our admin costs. Now, at the time I was trying to get the whole agency running efficiently, and I had all sorts of metrics in place. We were paying our office staff $20/hour. It took us about 5-10 mins per application to explain the program, help fill out the form, issue the check, and do the paperwork. So, that's about $2-$3 cost to us for each client. So, we were skimming 1-2% of the average grant off the top for our costs. And I felt bad about that, these people really needed the cash, and we didn't.
The governmental agency providing the funds yelled at us because they wanted to see us skimming more like 50% off the top!!!!
My other experience was with funding for early childhood education. In this case, each agency along the chain was expected to skim money before passing off the funds to the next agency. By my calculations at the time, only about 30% of the funds ended up in my school's hands, and *we* were also expected to skim. So, by design, they expected maybe 20% to end up directly benefiting the actual recipients of the funding.
Of course, the intended recipients were *clearly* the various agencies along the food chain, and not the poor individual the program was alleged to be for....
Some reform is needed...
They only wanted you to skim 50%? Clearly a bunch of democrats. The welfare cheat Brett favre got his millions out of a program that only delivers 22% to the actual intended beneficiaries of the program. That’s how you gotta do it if you’re going to be the party of convincing people government isn’t the solution to the problem!
iris lilies
11-1-22, 11:33am
I am just very very thankful that by pure chance I had gotten rid of almost all of my residential and commercial rental properties just 2 months before the pandemic, or I surely would have lost those properties anyways.
I will certainly not engage in that sort of economically-productive activity again, the risk is simply too high for me, at my age. I can't be exposed to a random stroke of a pen by my state's Governor or some Federal functionary causing me such losses.
Many of the places I sold sit empty now, as the new owners have had to raise rents to deal with their losses, and so many of the businesses and tenants either moved on during COVID anyways, or can't afford the new rents. It is a shame, for ~20 years I had managed those properties to provide affordable opportunities for folks, but that's simply not possible anymore.
One of the fallouts of the government mandates may be higher rents now. I have seen discussions of that concept.
You couldn’t pay me enough to be a landlord. Commercial spaces are hurting.Residential tenants expect the moon.it is not just low income properties that experience tenant problems. It is getting so that people who take advantage look like the norm, not the exception. But I suppose that picture is I justified.
To Roger’s point, it would be nice to have metrics on how many people were “helped” and were landlords really made whole with that federal money pushed out of Congress for this purpose. Measures of success are largely a tool of the evil Republicans though.
iris lilies
11-1-22, 11:40am
They only wanted you to skim 50%? Clearly a bunch of democrats. The welfare cheat Brett favre got his millions out of a program that only delivers 22% to the actual intended beneficiaries of the program. That’s how you gotta do it if you’re going to be the party of convincing people government isn’t the solution to the problem!
I had to look up what scandal you were talking about since I’m not plugged in to the hotline that feeds you regular “ republicans-BAD!” bad news. But I thought our position of kindness and caring was that we did not look at the millions of taxpayer dollars that went to graft and corruption when it was just a small percentage of the government handouts. So many people are being helped! This news hardly fits in with the narrative that I thought was yours.
At least, that sentiment has been expressed many times on this forum, if not by you then by your ideological kin.
Me, I care about the graft and corruption in all gubmnt programs and by big fish and little fish. It isn’t my fault that the little fish are often easier to catch.
iris lilies
11-1-22, 11:43am
Apparently the moratorium was to help manage COVID, it was temporary (120 days) and it was only in Federally-subsidized properties. But can you point to where the moratorium hasn't expired? After a brief look, I can't find anything to indicate it was extended beyond August 2021.
Believe me, I'm for renter rights, but I'm also for landlord rights. We were burned by strict renter-rights laws when we couldn't get a squatter out of my MIL's house. It cost us a bundle in legal fees and a good selling season before we were able to get her out.
So, I'd like to see if Biden really did sign a moratorium that's not connected to COVID and hasn't expired.
Catherine, I think it’s good that you had a little bit of experience in being a landlord because you will see how easy it is for tenants to take advantage of landlords. One set of friends moved from San Francisco, one major reason being that the tenant laws were becoming so onerous for landlords to own property.
I was a naive landlord once and my experience was that tenants very often take advantage. I read that locally something like 350 people were evicted yesterday having overstayed their leases by months.
Catherine, I think it’s good that you had a little bit of experience in being a landlord because you will see how easy it is for tenants to take advantage of landlords. One set of friends moved from San Francisco, one major reason being that the tenant laws were becoming so onerous for landlords to own property.
That was terrible. She wasn't even on the lease! She changed all the locks per her social worker's advice. We weren't allowed to turn off utilities to drive her out. The cop on the scene told DH not to set foot on the property again, otherwise, he'd have to arrest him. It took a couple of months to get a writ of eviction, and she finally bounced the day before they would have dragged her out.
iris lilies
11-1-22, 2:24pm
That was terrible. She wasn't even on the lease! She changed all the locks per her social worker's advice. We weren't allowed to turn off utilities to drive her out. The cop on the scene told DH not to set foot on the property again, otherwise, he'd have to arrest him. It took a couple of months to get a writ of eviction, and she finally bounced the day before they would have dragged her out.
yes, I remember that saga. The tenant laws protected her regardless of whether she was on the lease or not. That’s why that story and others like it caused me to consider carefully the temporary tenant I have staying in my condo who is not paying rent, who has no lease. Also, when we bought our Herman house a few years ago the sellers wanted to stay in it for a week after closing, and I insisted on a formal lease because I wanted a mechanism to kick them out if needed.
I want you to remember the saga when we all start in about the rich people who need to be taxed more heavily. A lot of those people have income and assets due to being residential landlords.
DH had a Section 8 property when we got married and I wanted him to get rid of that as soon as possible, even though the tenant at the time was decent.
Years ago I knew someone in the Kansas City area who was a professional landlord. He was a handyman who bought up low end properties and kept them fixed up, renting to tenants in the federal Section 8/vouvher program. I thought about him often because he was so upbeat in the way he presented his tenants as being just like other folks, no worse no better than other tenants.
Three years ago I heard that he got out of the landlording business entirely because his federally funded tenants took a toll on his mental health and on his property.He was DONE.
I want you to remember the saga when we all start in about the rich people who need to be taxed more heavily. A lot of those people have income and assets due to being residential landlords.
My mother purchased about 20 years ago a nice little house here on the island with her IRA. And with the thought that, with the insanely-increasing prices of real estate here, having it might prove handy someday if my sister ever moved here.
She rented it out. She charged below-market rent, and made it available to valued members of our community. (It's very hard for people like nurses and teachers to live here.)
She rented it out to a very nice couple, both of whom were employed in Needful Professions here. Great references. Everything was fine for about a year. Then the wife of the couple became a meth-addict, the husband moved out, the house got turned into a meth party palace. The decline took about a year. Rents were late at first, and we received complaints from the neighbors about the activity.
I went in to perform an inspection. I found two unattended children sitting in filth on the floor. The house was a disaster.
It took some months to accomplish the eviction.
Mom lost about 6 months of rent or so. And then there was the cost of repairing and decontaminating the home, which was *huge*. I don't remember the precise number now, but it was 10s of thousands of dollars.
Mom's income is entirely her social security, and the rent from this small house. At the time of the incident, she was charging $800 for a 3BR 2BA home, nice yard, water view. Market rent then would have been about $1800, it'd be about $3k today. She charges the current tenant, a scientist who works at a marine conservation/research organization, $1200/month.
I'll never be involved in residential rentals again.
Housing sucks, basically.
iris lilies
11-1-22, 3:15pm
Index funds. They don’t call you in the middle of the night because their toilet is stopped up.
iris lilies
11-1-22, 3:21pm
I was a naive landlord once and my experience was that tenants very often take advantage. I read that locally something like 350 people were evicted yesterday having overstayed their leases by months.
As I careened around the web looking into tenant evictions recently, I ran into videos of tenants in low income properties that are probably federally funded.
One woman was whining because she had been evicted twice and had a third eviction pending, and she was shaking her head in sadness about the unfairness of it all that tenants with records of evictions found it very hard to find a new place to rent. So unfair!
Another young mom with perfect fake nails and salon styled hair and blue pumpkins* on her table was lamenting the fact that she couldn’t pay her rent because her job in healthcare wasn’t stable or some such thing.
* The blue pumpkin is this year’s de rigour fall decor item so I know she bought it recently. Point being, if she’s got money for blue pumpkins As well as salon visits, some of that would make up substantial parts of her rent.
Our nanny government is creating dependent children out of adults.
ToomuchStuff
11-1-22, 4:39pm
A friends mom recently passed and left him the apartment complex behind us and the streets of duplexes behind that. They had three that didn't pay rent, during the pandemic. One paid after that was lifted, but I don't know about the other two.
My late coworker rented one side of a duplex, after the original tenant passed. It needed a complete update (not touched since 1979). Most of those were needing to be updated, so his company became the management company, and sold off all the duplexes.
At my old street, we had what was an extended family home to me, that years ago became a section 8 house. Next door neighbors baby monitor, picked up the drug deals from the section 8's wireless phone. Under 7 year old kids, tried breaking into peoples houses for food, stole and burned mail, were seen with shaved heads after their father picked them up by their hair, and when people saw them eating, they had hot dogs while the parents ate steaks.
We had enough issues in the neighborhood, that I started and every single neighbor on the block, signed a petition threatening to take the landlord to small claims court for nuisance property. He was a local police officer who claimed ignorance, but decided it wasn't worth it, while people showed up to repo the renters car, postal inspectors showed up, codes got involved, etc. The story continued from there for a bit.
And a few people have tried to get me to rent them my old house, under market, I don't think so.
I had actually forgotten that I was a landlord once, when I bought an estate house that had a guy living with his family in there for free.
I charged him rent, and at the end of the year, he was gone, and we moved in for the summer. Then we went back to Illinois, and he broke in and stole our chainsaw. Then, the next summer, he broke in and kidnapped his parents and took them hostage there, in my house.
I had forgotten about that whole experience.
Index funds. They don’t call you in the middle of the night because their toilet is stopped up.
^ This is The Way.
Index funds. They don’t call you in the middle of the night because their toilet is stopped up.
^ This is The Way.
Absolutely. They don’t have thousands and thousands of dollars of expenses year after year either.
Teacher Terry
11-1-22, 10:56pm
I have been a landlord a few times and while things didn’t always go smoothly luckily no horrible stories. Why a social worker would advise a client to squat illegally makes my head hurt.
iris lilies
11-2-22, 11:56am
I have been a landlord a few times and while things didn’t always go smoothly luckily no horrible stories. Why a social worker would advise a client to squat illegally makes my head hurt.
The social worker was being objective, I would think, in advising a client of her legal rights. As stupid as the situation is, I would have to say the social worker was doing her job. Also, we don’t know what real conversations the social worker had with the squatting tenant and the social worker was probably urging her to go find a legal place to live.
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