6 pc

This post is the last of my "6-6-6" series. 6% was the percentage of employees at my employer who own their homes with no mortgage.

I read yesterday that the entire city of Orlando, Florida -- the entire city -- is underwater. That is, the total outstanding balance of mortgages is greater than the total housal unit value for the entire city. I believe that the city of Las Vegas falls into this category, too.

That's impressive! And, it's exactly what keeps Wall Streeters earning twenty two million dollar bonuses, too. Without all those Orlandans fuckering away their next nine years of collective gross annual product on mortgages that will take that long just to break even, bankers would have to find other ways to garner such profits.

But no. Individually, we love to carry staggering amounts of debt so that we have a nice 3,200 sq ft starter mansion each with his-n-hers BMWs in the driveway and new iPads charging in the docking stations. Locally, our cities and counties are borrowing twenty cents for every dollar they spend, while our states are borrowing nine cents for every dollar they spend and the federal government is borrowing thirty cents on every buck. Government is simply mirroring what we do ourselves.

The housal unit, the pair of BMWs and the iPads all do nothing to add to the value of the Orlando family in this hypothetical example (hypothetical, but real; there must be over 450,000 of them!) -- or more correctly, they are all unproductive assets. They are not employed in any productive fashion, to earn the family income. They do not yield current income, nor will they yield future income -- they are trapped, dead assets. Yet the two wage earners owe $228,356 on the mortgage, $25,790 on the two Beemers and $2,430 on the credit card used to pay for the iPads. That is -- they are working today to service their debts...not their assets. They can most perfectly be described as debt-slaves.

None of the things, not a single fucking one of them, that people in Orlando buy are productive assets. None of them. A BMW is not productive, not in the least...not even when you consider it carries you to work. That $235 iPad with another $97 in accessories is only ever used as a toy, to socialize, to view YouTube videos, to play Angry Birds. And least of all is that housal unit, it is not productive in the least. Indeed, you will lose 6% to a realtor of it if you wanted to liquidate it.

I regard the purchase of tools, even if bought on credit, as an example of a fine way to increase one's productive capital. A hoe can be used to provide vegetables, or a hand plane can build furniture for your own or others' use, or a 15-mm socket can be used to save you $35 on an oil-change. But most Orlandan housal units owners wouldn't even know how to spell hoe, let alone know how to use one. Check that -- hoes as bitches, well, they probably know all about them hoes.

Socking away monies in the 401(k) like we're all taught to do is also a form of sunk, stranded, trapped capital -- we have no access to it to produce anything today, and certainly not to pay off any of those soul-crushing debts Orlando housal unit owners owe.

Orlando citizens consumers will be spending the next decade paying on underwater mortgages to bankers in Manhattan, just to break even on their "assets" and their debts. If this isn't the definition of debt-serfdom, I don't know what would be.