In many of the areas I am talking about teachers, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, policemen, other government workers, etc can affordably buy a house in those areas.
Much of the US housing stock includes homes built before 1990 (30 years ago). If most of the median home price increase was due to build quality there would be a bimodal distribution of housing appreciation with newer homes having appreciated more than older homes.
Most of the appreciation in housing is due to higher household incomes due to two income households.
I would change your last sentence to: is due to higher household incomes due to two income households without a similar increase in the supply of housing near where jobs are.
Why bimodal? Houses are being built every year. So maybe houses built in 2023 have appreciated 1% more than in 2022, and those have appreciated 1% more than 2021, and so on, leading to a smooth distribution.
Thanks for this! I didn’t know the guidelines were published. This is like FINCEN’s 2013 and 2019 guidances for cryptocurrencies.
“The limit on not-for-profit losses… does not apply to corporations except S Corporations”.
It doesn’t seem to mention LLCs. These are “disregarded entities” at the IRS level, so what does that mean? For tax purposes they are treated as sole proprietorships?
It seems to me there is some “minimum” level of bona-fide for-profit business that might be helpful to reach if you are a prolific traveler or movie goer or eat out in restaurants a lot. That’s my main point. A little bit of effort and you can write off thousands of dollars a year in business expenses while you also stand a chance of making money on top of it.
Business expenses must be ordinary and necessary to be deductible. A roofer would have a hard time justifying deducting a boat under the rule but a commercial fisherman wouldn’t have trouble.
Entertainment expenses are no longer deductible with recent tax law changes with few exceptions. It would be difficult today to get a CPA to sign-off off on a lot of what may have passed previously. A decent write-up can be found here - https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2023/nov/navigating-aro...
* However, a taxpayer’s trade or business must be considered. For example, a theatrical performance, which would normally be considered an entertainment expense, would not be an entertainment expense for a professional theater critic attending the performance in a professional capacity (Regs. Secs. 1.274-11(b)(1)(iii), 1.274-12(a)(1), and 1.274-12(b)(3)).*
I had a small "hobbyist" software business once upon a time. I made a point of only deducting expenses that seemed reasonable and not red flags for a software business, and only deducted up to just below my revenue (about $7K/year in the 90s). That seemed safe if maybe somewhat conservative.
Doesn't work for a lot of things (including reputable restaurant reviews) but bloggers also have the opportunity to get free stuff if they get noteworthy enough. Yes, it's a source of bias but so long as everything isn't how this thing they were given for free is fantastic, I don't have a problem with it. I've reviewed books (and a few other things) sent to me and I've given some pretty negative reviews as well as positive ones.
Monsanto engineered several crops to create their own insecticides with genes from bacillus thuringiensis (BT). BT corn was approved by regulators for corn not intended for human consumption.
In practice it became impossible to keep BT corn out of the food supply. With corn as a staple crop and the international trade in corn everyone on the planet became a test case.
There was controversy on the impact of corn pollen on non-target species, including monarchs and lady-birds/lady bugs and bees. Follow-up studies didn’t show significant impact in quantities likely to be encountered in the field.
All GMs have risk of pollen drift and the risk of gene spread. Farmers growing non-BT corn for export may have their crops rejected in some markets if contaminated. Corn cross pollinates with a genetic ancestor of corn in South America which is considered a weed because it can cause domestic corn kernels to not develop properly. There is some risk of gene transfer and creating a “super” weed.
The Federal Reserve is paying 5% interest on $7 trillion of reserves held by banks. Since this is in excess of what the Federal Reserve is earning on the assets on its balance sheet they are booking the difference as “deffered assets”. Little of this needs to trickle down to retail depositors given the Federal Reserves “ample reserves” policy so this is effectively a bank subsidy.
For all the talk of the Fed “printing money” this is literally printing money because there is no offsetting asset on the Feds balance sheet. Eventually the hole in the balance sheet is supposed to be closed by interest earned that would normally be paid to the US Treasury.
In other words the Federal Reserve has figured out how to directly bail out banks without the consent of Congress to the tune of $10B+ per month. The higher they raise interest rates, the bigger the subsidy. That should leave a lot of banks well capitalized to pick up assets of small regional banks and REITs that will eventually fail. Roughly $10B in bank subsidies can translate into $100B in loans with required 8% capital ratios.
The Federal Reserve considers their “ample reserve” policy a “public good” as in it is good for the public to see savings eaten away by inflation and higher public debt burden of interest payments to subsidize banks.
> Federal Reserve is paying 5% interest on $7 trillion of reserves held by banks
This was sanctioned by the Congress in 2008. And the banks could earn more in the interbank market. That’s why the Fed pays that interest: to keep those excess reserves out of the market.
This author is essentially arguing that the security of his garden shed is equivalent to the security of most banks because statistically banks get robbed more often.
Spammers and scammers have a fixed cost to initiate an attack and the potential return on investment is proportional to the user base. A platform below a certain size simply isn’t profitable to attack. It isn’t that small shops are going to be better at mitigating spammers and scammers as the article states, small shops just aren’t being attacked.
If the arguments were true that there are diseconomies of scale there wouldn’t have ever been consolidation in email hosting. Email providers all use the same protocols so the incremental cost of attacking a small provider is zero. A small company hosting their own email will quickly see their customers flee for the big providers as they drown in spam. Scaling spam management was the primary driver that drove consolidation in email providers in the early 2000’s.
This also drove consolidation in areas with similar economics such as e-commerce. The low cost of attacking a new player in the e-commerce space and the cost of scaling risk management drove a lot of the growth of PayPal and spawned the growth and consolidation of outsourced e-commerce fraud risk management.
The economics are going to be true of any n-squared business model where the value is in the size of the network. I go to LinkedIn because it has the lowest scam rates but because most of the people I work with are there.
While a wildly diverse ecosystem would be more resilient against fraud this is the internet, the biggest n-squared system of them all. It’s unlikely that the internet is going to devolve into small, diverse fiefdoms so the problem is here to stay.
A lot of those regular folks could have kept their money in US Government bond funds or in FDIC backed bank accounts as well. They invested in commercial real-estate paper because they wanted higher returns than those bonds funds would provide. Usually higher returns means accepting higher risk.
Maybe to level the playing field the government should publish a list of investments with high returns and implicit government guarantees so that we’d all know where to put or retirement money. It really screws with my retirement planning to only find out after the fact.
Most of these ranches will be running cow-calf operations. A cow-calf operation is a herd that produces calves which can be sold to a feedlot or backgrounding operators.
In factory farming it’s the calf that is the factory that turn grain into beef. It takes 3 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef so it’s cheaper to move the calf to the grain than the grain to the calf.
At the same time a cow can only produce one calf per year so it is cheaper to keep the herd of cows that produce the calf on marginal grasslands rather than on the richer farmland near the feedlots.
While these ranches aren’t directly shipping steaks to customers they are more than a vanity project for the wealthy.
Economic incentives aren’t aligned between cow-calf operations and feedlots. There may be a significant difference in feed efficiency between calves. Some may turn grain to meat at a 2:1 ratio and others at a 4:1 ratio but ranchers are paid the same for each calf. A way to cheaply identify calves that are more feed efficient or align incentives would be worth some money.
Sometimes people want to be firefighters to protect the people they serve but others love how being in a crisis makes them feel alive. The later are why arson investigators first look at firefighters when doing an arson investigation. Some of them need the fires and will start them just to fight them.
There are a lot of these types that gravitate to crisis management roles like DevOps.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-price-income-ratio-re...