It's the anti-regulation anything goes, unethical practices invented and adopted in the commercial investment banking sector allowed to spill over into the deposit banking sector that brought on earlier busts and the current securities and real estate bubble.

It's the commercial banking sector flim flam artists who generate fraudulent practices at the national, state and local level. Do people really believe that some political hack from the local school district knows how to create and exploit a bond market? No he needs to be politically sponsored and trained by the lobbyists and lawyers for commercial bankers. They captured state and local governments the same way they captured Congress and the regulatory agencies. Now the rich want to have ownership of real estate tax free. This is a complete abandonment of the reciprocal obligations attached to the ownership of land. The commons is gone, therefore real assets must have taxes levied upon them to provide for the public interest, such as schools, emergency services, courts, etc. But the rich don't want to pay.

I couldn't sit through the whole of the first video, perhaps he does get into Glass-Steagall after a while.

The bias of the second presentation is clear, with a flat property tax, super rich people can't escape being the target. So they are targeting the local governments and the appraisal process rather than the financially corrupt investment banking system itself. In this sense they are captured by their own greed because taxes on real estate are essentially flat and they themselves promoted the real estate speculation which forced increased tax burdens upon them.

There aren't any exemptions, credits, or caps for rich people like there are in income taxation, which gave rise to the enormous inequities in our society. If you own a huge palatial estate, how to escape real estate taxes? Replace it with a sales tax? The proportion of sales taxes relative to income paid by lower income and middle class persons is way higher than that of the rich. Like tariffs, a sales tax is notoriously regressive. In effect, it will cripple commerce and further impoverish most people.

I'm not an economist; I studied the US tax code in some depth years ago. My economic knowledge about this subject, subject to debate of course, came mostly from watching and listening to Professor William Black's videos for a few years. The federal deficit problem began when Reagan gutted the tax code for the benefit of the wealthiest corporate rich. The revenues Reagan and his supporters gave up from income and estate tax cuts accrued to the benefit of the wealthiest in the US. The democrats never reversed this trend which abandoned equity in the tax system; Dems only tried to mitigate the changes in the progressive tax code at the margins for political appearances. The progressive nature of the tax code was fundamentally weakened.

Who got rid of Glass Steagall? Bubba the dem. This put the FDIC banking system on the hook for investment bankers ill gotten gains. In other words the government debt market. Black is an expert in what he calls "control fraud," that is legalized fraud allowed by federal deregulation of the financial "industry." The financial deregulation had to occur to allow the deficits and huge debt markets to accumulate under a cloak of financial gimmicks and fraudulent practices.

When you deregulate entire industries, the foxes are loose in the hen house, there are going to be disastrous results. What a surprise. The sacrosanct "genius of the free markets" is bs. Bill Black predicted this outcome years ago. The "expert" in the second video says "Taxes must be uniform and must be equal," according to federal law? That's simply not true. The bigger your estate and the higher one's income the more taxes should be paid, and the tax rate should be progressively higher above certain levels.

It's the bond investors who lose why should the Fed fix it? Because FDIC Banks with insured accounts have been roped into it with deregulated banking practices? The real remedy is to keep FDIC banks from investing in this s..t and not bailing out the people who invested in it. So this looks like another commercial/investment banking bailout in the offing...

When W left office the national debt was over ten trillion not one trillion. This completely blows this guys credibility.

(Source: Haechi, viki.com/ Kocowa )

rejected that last school bond proposal. One of the school board members is a lifelong friend, told me it was something he fought hard against, and wanted me to know personally that his proposal was 30% of what the bond proposal to do the school upgrades were on the ballot, so my property taxes will not go up this time.
A client told me her $200k home increased in value by the appraisal district because she added a 2-car garage. She may have to sell because her property taxes are above her pay grade.

Every time I look in I hope you're doing ok. My wife says it's a journey not a race, milestone by milestone.

More and more I think it's the game of Monopoly, and we are just the victims of the game players. I keep wondering when there is one entertainment company, one healthcare company, one drug company, when all the consolidation is over what happens? The direction is always to offer the least value for the most profit. When all that's offered is shit, will anyone buy it? or will they abandon it and learn to rely on each other again?