Trumpland

We just live there.

If this blogpost is correct, after only ten years, we're back to the excesses of the Housing Bubble. Good luck with that:

Now these perfunctory valuations abound, underpinning tens of billions of dollars of home deals. Sometimes the process is outsourced to India, where companies charge real-estate agents a few dollars to come up with U.S. home values by consulting Google Earth and real-estate websites. BPOs have been used to value collateral in the more than $20 billion of bonds sold by institutional landlords, such as Blackstone’s Invitation Homes Inc., and in the fast-growing business of lending to individual house flippers.

...It’s remarkable how fast we’ve decided to ignore the lessons of the great housing bubble and the subsequent crash. Republicans, of course, never wanted to learn any lessons from the very start, but Wall Street stayed cautious for at least a few years. Now even that’s receding into the rear view mirror, a mere decade after the second-worst recession of the past century.

I'm not nearly as worried as most on the Left about Democratic eagerness to reopen the government. That was Part 1 of a two part drama. The Republicans had seized two hostages, the CHIP kids and the DACA Dreamers. The Democrats got at least the CHIP kids released. In February, the real battle will be joined:

But “someday” isn’t here, and as of 23 January 2018, Schumer’s Democratic Senate looks cowardly and inept to the people most invested in the party’s future. Schumer chose to end the government shutdown without a deal to protect undocumented immigrants. He chose to trust McConnell because the Kentucky Republican promised an immigration vote in the coming weeks.

...There are no serious political consequences for shutting down a government. Republicans did it in 2013, won the Senate in 2014 and the presidency two years later. Arsonists win.

Obstructionism for a moral purpose is noble. Obstructionism for the sake of obstruction – the Republican way under much of Barack Obama’s presidency – is nihilistic.

The progressive wing of the Democratic party and the senators who chose to stand for the Dreamers understand this truth. They know trusting Donald Trump’s Republican party is absurd. They know what they are dealing with.

Baiting Donald Trump's government shutdown trap:

That’s easy: Schumer has figured out that if there’s another government shutdown, it needs to be seen as the Republicans’ fault. So he’s going to negotiate a deal that gives Republicans most of what they want in return for DACA—except for the wall. If they refuse to pass another continuing resolution—or Trump threatens to veto it—because it doesn’t contain funding for the wall, then it’s their fault. Democrats were the voice of sweet reason, but Trump was so obsessed with his stupid wall that he shut down the government over it.

In other words, it’s a trap. It’s also a fairly obvious trap, so the question is how Republicans are going to react to it. We’ll have to wait and see.