http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/10/i-had-not-realized-nobel-laureate-paul.html
Excerpt: ==QUOTE== [T]hink about Las Vegas. Sin City had the biggest boom of the decade and now the biggest bust with, by far, the highest foreclosure rates. Why? Because it's next to California. The median homeowner in California saw his home equity rising by, say, $60,000 per year in the middle of the decade. A lot of those Californians took out home equity loans, gassed up their new cars, and headed to Vegas to spend some of that $60,000 in additional wealth. (My barber used to go five or ten times per year to Vegas.) So, businesses built more gigantic casinos in Las Vegas, which employed lots of construction workers and then service workers to work inside the casinos. In turn, they built tons of homes outside Vegas for, depending on the price range, all the new construction and service workers, or all the people trying to get away from living next to the new construction and service workers. Meanwhile, the price of existing homes was going through the roof in Las Vegas, so the local homeowners were all spending money like they were Californians, too. And, in turn, they built tons of retail and other stuff, like, say, water parks, to service all those new residents and their kids. All of sudden, people in California wake up to the fact that they aren't as rich as they thought they were. In fact, they are much poorer because they've already spent much of the pseudo-wealth they thought they had garnered in the middle of the decade. They can't cash out on their houses, so they are suddenly looking at 28 years of writing big monthly checks to pay for all those trips to Las Vegas. What's the first thing you can cut out of the household budget? Well, the single most obvious luxury to eliminate is those goddam trips to Las Vegas. ==UNQUOTE== -- Mark Spahn (Las Senecas, NY) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
