ASKED:
MURATORE: If elected, what are the top 3 issues you want to address?
I'd also like to get the sales tax down to 5%. There are things that we can do that can help people in Massachusetts and make us more competitive.
The immigration crisis, housing issues, and affordability are all connected. These issues are intertwined and one impacts the other.
For instance, we proposed changing the right to shelter laws in the House on three different occasions in the past year. Instead of changing it, they said anyone can be in a shelter for nine months and then can go into housing. They are taking housing away from people that live here. It causes affordability issues for Massachusetts residents. People are leaving Massachusetts because of these issues. It's affecting everybody. I have six daughters — two were able to get houses early on, and I have a couple others in their 20s and they can't afford to move out on their own, and they stay with us.
ROBERT REICH OFFERED THIS:
3. Rent is skyrocketing and homebuying is out of reach for millions partly because of Wall Street. Hedge funds and private equity firms have been buying up hundreds of thousands of homes that would otherwise be purchased by people.
Wall Street’s appetite for housing ramped up after the 2008 financial crisis. When the Street’s excessive greed created a housing bubble that burst, millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure.
The Street got bailed out and then began picking off the scraps of the housing market it had just destroyed, gobbling up foreclosed homes at fire-sale prices — which it then sold or rented for big profits.
Investor purchases hit their peak in 2022, accounting for around 28 percent of all home sales in America. If the present trend continues, by 2030, Wall Street investors may control 40 percent of U.S. single-family rental homes.
The lack of supply is the biggest reason home prices and rents have soared. Wall Street is worsening the supply problem.
Harris should announce her support of a bill now in both houses of Congress to ban hedge funds and private equity firms from buying or owning single-family homes. If it comes to her desk, she’ll sign it.
More generally, Harris should take on corporate concentration. Corporate profits are a bigger share of the economy than they’ve been in 75 years, while wages comprise the lowest share, due to the increase in corporate concentration. Workers and consumers have fewer options and have to accept the wages and prices these giant corporations offer.
Giant firms also provide significant campaign contributions and employ platoons of lobbyists and lawyers. The financial returns on their political investments are huge: They get tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, and loan guarantees.
The sky-high profits at America’s biggest banks are due to their being too big to fail, along with their political power to keep regulators at bay.
High profits at the four remaining airlines come from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions.
High profits of Big Tech come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and market power that’s discouraging innovation.
And so on.
The shift in bargaining power from workers to corporations and their shareholders has siphoned off a larger portion of national income into profits and left a lower portion in wages than at any time since World War II. Most of these profits are going into higher share prices — fueled by share buybacks — and higher executive pay rather than new investment.
Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come out of the pockets of American workers.*
America’s shift from farm to factory was accompanied by decades of bloody labor conflict. The shift from factory to office and other sedentary jobs created other social upheaval.
The more recent power shift from workers to large corporations and their shareholders — and consequentially, the dramatic widening of inequalities of income, wealth, and political power — has happened more quietly but has had an even more devastating consequence for the system: an angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have an opportunity to restructure the American economy to benefit workers rather than big corporations, their executives, and major shareholders. I hope they take it.
"R" VOTERS AND THEIR CANDIDATES CHOOSE TO REMAIN UNINFORMED WHINERS EVEN WHEN INFORMATION IS WIDELY AVAILABLE!
THE HOUSING ISSUE PRE-EXISTED THE PRESENCE OF IMMIGRANTS....TYPICAL UNINFORMED "R" CANDIDATE MAKING FALSE COMMENTS!
DO NOT EXPECT ANY ACTION TO BE TAKEN IN CONGRESS WITH THE MAGA GOP MORONS WHO DO NOTHING BUT OBSTRUCT!
THERE ARE SOLUTIONS, BUT MAGA GOP ARE BOUGHT & PAID FOR BY CORPORATE INTERESTS....
MATTHEW MURATORE STOOD WITH CRYPTO CARPETBAGGER JOHN DEATON & BLAMED SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN FOR THE FAILURE TO REPLACE THE CAPE COD BRIDGES....WHEN IN FACT TRUMP SLASHED FUNDING FROM THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS, THEN INSTRUCTED THE MAGA GOP MORONS TO DEFEAT THE BIPARTISAN INFRASTRUCTURE BILL - MOST GENUFLECTED TO THE ORANGE TURD!
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