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Monday, 23 September 2024

It Is Not The Same Anymore

 



If you are a millennial like me you have sat through more than a few conversations in your days with some wealthy boomer, who never finished school, had some kind of trade (builder, cabinet maker, carpenter, etc, etc.), or even no trade, who is laying out how easy it is for the average man with a low income not only to succeed in life, but do really, really well. I can remember some of these conversations really well, and they are both interesting because they give you insight in what our culture and society once was, but they are also disturbing because they show how disconnected from reality so many people can be today. Things are not the same anymore:

Saul Eslake says decades of ‘bad policies’ have inflated demand as report finds about 20% of households effectively ‘locked out’ of the market

Housing affordability has deteriorated over the past year to reach its worst level since records began in 1995. First home buyers now rely on wealthy families or high-income jobs to enter the market, according to the latest housing affordability report from PropTrack.

Driven by high mortgage rates and increasing home prices, affordability further deteriorated this financial year to the point where a median-income household earning about $112,000 could afford just 14% of homes sold – the smallest share since records began. This share has declined from 43% in just three years…

…The report showed how hard the situation had become for first home buyers, with a median-income renting household being able to afford just 11% of homes sold over the past year. In comparison, a median household with an existing mortgage could afford 34% of homes sold over the same period.

Paul Ryan, a senior economist at PropTrack, said in the short-term, high interest rates and prices had created an accute affordability issue. First home buyers trying to get into the market were now in an almost impossible position, he said.

“The unspoken message here is that wealth matters an enormous deal in the Australian housing market at the moment, in a way that it didn’t just one generation ago.”[1]

20% of households are locked out of the market and most houses are out of reach of the average income home. And this has worsened in just the last 3 years. A household where the man was a maths teacher, or woolworths manager, or middle manager, and his wife a stay at home mum, could afford to buy far more homes in 2021 than he can now, and this is true for many similar families.

The idea of a high school dropout with a trade or no trade being able to build the kind of wealth that boomers and older Gen x were able to create is simply a pipe dream today, unless your family already has significant wealth and resources from which to draw. The property treadmill is throwing off more and more Aussie families.

I like how the article notes towards the end that,

“If you were really wanting to do something about that, the first thing you would do is stop doing dumb things,” he said. “Stop needlessly inflating demand by scrapping all the programs that needlessly inflate demand, and stop constraining supply by stop doing the things that constrain supply.”[2]

This article comes from the Guardian which is a far left of centre news organization, but the two major causes of inflation the last three years are government stimulus and mass immigration, things the Guardian will avoid mentioning like the plague. At this point every Australian who cannot afford to buy a home needs to recognize that the government is stealing from your security to benefit foreigners, and that is a simple fact. But they are also willing to pretend to be helping by dumping more and more money on the economy to help the needy…which in many cases includes those foreigners who just got here.

This has been happening for so long now there is no way this is unintentional either. The liberal government worked out in the late 90’s the by increasing immigration they could artificially grow the economy, and grow housing wealth at the same time, and every government since then has only increased this. This is not some random policy, it has been tried and tested for some time now. I think it is far past time that we should be admitting that the elites of our society have almost no regard for Australians, and are quite content to give our inheritance to any and sundry if they can find some benefit for themselves in it.

As the article notes “stop doing dumb things…” There is no doubt that these policies are dumb and counterproductive. Growing tent communities filled with unfortunate Australians is proof of that. But just because they are dumb, does not mean they are not also malicious.

I can’t help but think of this verse in relation to what is happening, Deuteronomy 28:43, “The sojourner who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. 44 He shall lend to you, and you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head, and you shall be the tail.” It is very obvious that God is judging this nation, in fact the West in general. When he wanted to judge the Rephaim he sent in the Amorites into Canaan and when he wanted to judge the Canaanite he sent in the Israelites, and many other examples could be given.

But getting back to where we started the old boomer advice is no longer relevant. Really, what they did was recognize that the housing market was an untapped resource for wealth building in our country, and like all other limited resources, this means of building wealth has been consolidated by the few, and shut off from the majority, and they have simply created a situation where others, even foreigners, can profit lavishly off their children. That same generation has the wealth and the political power to change all of this, as well, by transferring the wealth to their children and grandchildren, and changing the laws to stop the kinds of things which led to this situation from happening again. But do they have that in them?

List of References

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