Death Pledge or Green Pledge

Green Pledge Not Death Pledge

Why mortgages and interest kill the planet.


I will start with what may seem an absurd proposition at first but which will become clear if you are capable of breaking out of the pain and suffering of being stuck in the morass of conventional current financial cultural insanity.

Housing is cheap, dirt cheap, absolutely ridiculously cheap. All the materials that go into building a house are cheap, and the cost of the labor to produce all the materials and build the house is very low. At first this seems a total and complete idiocy to even state such a thing as we are told every day that housing is unaffordable and that the cost is high and that one must be prepared to make great sacrifice to get approved by the system and set up with a mortgage, a loan from a bank, and insurance to cover the possible loss of such an expensive and hard to come by asset such as a modern house. But we have been deceived and we have bought the deception in whole or part and are either in the game so deep that it would threaten all that we believe in to think otherwise, or we are out of the game and cannot get in but are stuck paying a heavy price to some one or some entity that is heavily in to the system of the deception to the point of playing the game with large numbers of housing units. Or you may be one of those completely out of the deception and cut out of economics all the way and be homeless money less, asset less and of course in this deception a person of zero value to the system.

But simply think of the real cost of your housing just in terms of the game of economics called capitalism and the purchase price is actually rather small. If you had the purchase price for an average house where I live it equates to about five years of an average households income which is in terms of 40-50 years of possible productive lifetime output not a whole lot. The main issue is that in this system no one is ever allowed to have access to the productive output of ones lifetime when it is needed and the majority of ones productive output is taken away in the form of taxes and interest and fees and charges and all the hidden costs of all the taxes in all the things anyone buys anywhere for anything. So very basically the house is cheap, for example a $200,000 house is cheap, the mortgage interest is usurious, in fact debilitating and destructive and a burden to both you and your local community, with a 6% loan on that house you end up paying an extra $150,000, and that is $150, 000 straight out of your community, and out of productive use and into the void of international finance. Next you will be required by the bank to insure the house, and if you do not have a large enough down payment, required to insure the mortgage itself! How absurd that if you do not have enough money as evaluated by a bank that you must then pay more, but still can have the loan at a higher rate, plus then pay an insurance penalty and a very large one to some other economic absurdity, so now you pay an additional fee for nothing, lets say $750 a year, which adds up to 22,500 over 30 years. Next you will get hit with a property tax, and where I live that would likely be about $2000 a year, so another $60,000 goes to property taxes.

In Summary:

House for $200,000

Mortgage Payments $350,000
Insurance 22,500
Property Tax 60,000

Now we are talking $432,500 for a $200,000 house. Great deal huh?

But you say I’ll never own one house for 30 years so I will never pay all that, and if I did the house would go up in value so much that 30 years from now it would be worth $675.000 due to inflation etc. This may be true, however if you inflate the insurance and property tax over the period and if you actually maintain the house you will end up having spent near to the inflated value of the house or more plus all costs for taxes and insurance and will have run head on in to a not mentioned economic reality that real estate prices escalate to equal what the real estate does in fact cost over time. So owning the house takes productive labor value out of you, for at least 30 years and gives it to the banks, the insurance companies and the government, you end up better off than if you lived under a bridge but you pay a heavy price. The price is that you do all the work and maintain the house and the finance and taxation folks get three times what you got. And when you sell that house in 30 years to move in to the old folks home , or pay off medical bills in old age, and move to a trailer park because they got such a large chunk of your money over your lifetime, the system will again extract a very large chunk of change out of your sale, for the real estate agent commissions, for the appraiser, and the closer and the excise tax, though at least for now you get a capital gains tax break on your own home sale.


I hope anyone gets the point here that the house is cheap, the system that disallows you from getting a few years of your productive labor converted to tradable exchange is very expensive.

A simple solution within bean counting shortage economics would be that the government could give all citizens a zero percent or 1% mortgage on any home up to the median price in each county or metropolitan area. This anyone in their right mind would prefer to our system giving money to banks at a very low rate who then loan it to you at a ruinous rate. It is simple to see that if everyone had this zero percent mortgage then all the money now sent to banks as interest would be freed up and circulate in the real productive economy and there would ensue a huge growth and flowering of all nonfinancial sectors. And happily for us, Banks and insurance companies would go down in size by a very large amount.

But we don’t want to just go there. We want to go much farther.

To carry the logic further, one should consider that every product that goes in to building your house is produced by businesses and companies and corporations and contractors all of whom themselves are constricted and over paying the banks and insurance companies and taxes to the government. One could easily conclude then that every thing in the house is over priced by at least 50% by the fact that all the producers have had to pay all the taxes and insurances and bank interest on loans, and many of the products in the building of a home have a multi path creation chain, for instance the lumber was cut down by one company which had to overcharge 50% to cover all the usurious excess, then it was processed in a mill that had to overcharge by 50 % and then it was transported and sold to the company that sold it to you which again had to cover all its usury and tax costs. I believe this has been called the rule of 10%, and if not yet then I am now, calling it that, the rule of 10%. Everything you purchase in this free market capitalist culture costs by bean counter standards 10% or less than what you pay for it. A pure capitalist actually profits best if it can acquire commodities for free and even better if not for free, then in addition get a subsidy to pay for the bean counters accrual of the fictionalized cost.

SO to add insult to injury you pay the price on paper of $200,000 for a house that cost $20,000 to build in reality and you will pay $675,000 to live in it. Now that is one sweet deal for you is it not?

But we don’t want to just to stop here we want to go much much farther.

And if you are a bean counter get out your beans and you can certainly prove that here in this document the numbers are not perfectly accurate, but if you do a thorough bean counting and really go down in to the details they are mechanically and systemically correct. Remember that taxes and interest and all this good stuff have reverse multipliers just like beans counted as income and spent around has positive multipliers called the velocity of money. For example you spend a dollar at the bakery, the baker spends it hiring a contractor, the contractor gives it to an electrician, who pays for stuff at the light store, who buys groceries with it, who takes the dollar back to the bakery who deposits in the local bank, which loans it to your neighbor to remodel her kitchen, who pays the contractor who then pays off his mortgage and poof that dollar goes to Wall street now. But when your dollar goes straight to the banker or the tax jurisdiction especially the Federal tax the negative velocity of your dollar now goes out of your community taking away all that activity mentioned , especially severe as noted when the money goes straight to wall street, and especially adding insult to injury then gets invested not back positively for you in the USA but is invested in the worst possible highest profit locations away from you, like to get low wage folks in foreign lands to manufacture stuff in factories built with subsidies, also out of your tax dollar, in some foreign economic zone.

But we can go further sadly :

Let us consider that all these cheap inputs are ravaging the environment and killing the planet. And they are. Because instead of all the resources being produced sustainably and each step of production getting proper compensation, all the primary and secondary producers and up the line are running around ripping off the planet and producing frantically not to produce good quality and leave the production site for the seventh generation or better than it was to start with, but to serve the banks and the taxation system which have no accounting for the real world in their operational function. Over generations the real costs of the production of your house is going to be more than the current value or any bean counting to determine such values today or tomorrow. So we can deduce and state certainly that we are really getting a negative acceleration on our home value. You yourself may be appearing to get some benefit but the planet and society as a whole are getting ripped off. Further the cheap inputs necessitated by the majority of the cost going not to production but to finance and taxes also means your home is not engineered and designed to be energy efficient and not designed to last for a as long as it could so you get an additional burden from the system that needs to extract your productive labor once again but now in the form of high utility bills and constant maintenance and replacement of consumer consumption grade building systems, channeling again huge percentages of all income upward and back to the financial centers for ever more of the same turning the death and destruction of the planet into money.

Your house is in effect really cheap in terms of the current market inputs that are counted, and creates huge wealth for those on top of the system while extracting huge sums from you and your local economy. This process is destroying the environment and diverting and then destroying your wealth making your community poorer and poorer. At the same time cheap housing is destroying the environment by not pricing in the effects of extracting all the resources in an unsustainable and exploitative manner. In effect the system is robbing us all and the planet and destroying our infinite life support base in order to produce illusionary monetary and paper wealth in Wall Street, London, Abu Dubai and Tokyo.



Think about an alternative. An alternative world where the products were produced in an environmentally sound way by persons receiving a living wage in all cases and your home was built with green products and all the contractors and contractors employees got a liveable wage and in the end you paid $200,000 for a $200,000 house because all the labor exchange value in the house was paid directly by you and all the products were produced without burden of taxes and usury and insurance and markups at every stage of the process.

Wow imagine that! That would be INSANE. Imagine you spent an hour doing whatever it is you do and you traded that value to someone else for one hour of what they do! Crazy.

Imagine that you did not trade 10 hours of what you do to get one hour of what others do. Imagine that the huge number of persons who don’t do anything at all productive but seem to need 100’s or 1000’s or Millions of times more beans than you need, no longer got those beans.

Imagine that we all spent most of our productive income in our local area and everyone else did, creating a huge renaissance of small local businesses and services and farming and art and culture instead of most of everyones income and productivity getting channeled ever upward and into more and more arcane and bizarre investment schemes where fewer and fewer people work or do anything and more and more people do weird meaningless tasks related to the manipulation of imaginary things and to satisfy ever deeper layers of bureaucratic rules and regulations designed to insure that nothing ever gets done at all without approval of some legislative rule written somewhere by someone interested in getting some profit out of nothing.


Depressed Yet?? Pissed? Well there is still more. Or hell yeah, screw this crap, lets go flip some houses and get rich before the shit hits the fan!

If you live in an apartment in a city with good development and you can get around on foot or public transportation hooray for you. Most of our houses in slumburbia however have been built in a car centric crazed planning and development paradigm and your house very probably is not being served very well by public transportation, and it is probably not surrounded by nice bike and walk ways to the local stores and health services, probably you have to have a car to survive as all the places you need to go to have been zoned exclusively to areas far and scattered from your house. So if and when Oil either runs out or gets really expensive your suburban dream home may become a real economic trap as the cost of driving to and from it escalates to an unsustainable portion of your income (in fact why many folks got foreclosed on in this recent cycle, the cost of driving to and from work can reach 10-30% of a persons income if they drive a lot). And we can thank ourselves for this last one as much as the auto industry and the planning department and the banks and developers who got all these nice big neighborhoods approved and built.