What has happened in Arkansas is that someone in California can sell their two bedroom house for a million dollars, move to Arkansas, and pay for a house in full with money left over. Where as a guy in Arkansas can sell his house and move to Mississippi and he may profit enough to take the family out to dinner at Taco Bell. So for native residents of Arkansas, with native wages, we not only experienced standard inflation but west coast invasion inflation also. Now what was once a $60,000 house ten years ago, is now a $160,000 house.

If you can’t build a shed, addition, home on your own property with out government approval

You truly don’t own it

We have property taxes, we just rent our paid for land. lol

Ya, same here,,

X 2

And if you don’t pay your property taxes, at least here in Pennsylvania, they will forcibly remove you from your home and sell it to the highest bidder.

Not Californians, but NYC people. Same thing though, they create the demand and the price goes through the roof....people buying a "cheap" house for the lot, then tear down the house....open lots that are left going as high as a million bucks, then the builder puts a 2 million plus house on it....This place has changed big time, and not for the better...

The evolution of the American house can be seen in every small town in America. The average square footage has more than doubled Lots are bigger and complexity of the structures and landscaping is absurd. The best part is families are smaller. People are not buying shelter, they are buying an investment. The winner is the guy who collects property taxes and sells the homeowners insurance .

Long term home ownership is a poor investment

Nah...

As I said, the list goes on...and yes I do. Young folks have terrible financial habits from what Ive seen. Ive known so many young couple that get married and immediately want everything that their parents have, too ignorant to understand it took their parents a lifetime to get where they are at. Savell gave perfect example of young kid going into debt for a toy...promise you that isnt the last toy he'll likely go in debt for. Do stupid things with your money and then whine about how tough it is to buy a house....decisions have consequences.

Maybe if your strictly a numbers person with little emotion... my farm has been a terrible investment from a numbers standpoint, Great lifestyle though and good for raising kids that end up "normal". There's a peace that comes with owning a home, what's the price of peace?

Governments run on emotion Their numbers are not so good either.

A person needs a home. The memories made from raising a family in a home is priceless.

Homes are expensive to own, when people sell them they talk about the money they made. Most most forget about taxes, insurance and up keep.

There’s much to be said both for and against this article. Against might consider the “too much government” that DOGE was created to get us out of. In the end, we laid off tax collectors. Then hired them back, to collect the government’s share of business taxes and loans.

Where do you come up with this stuff? CNN?

The IRS workforce was reduced by only about 5k people, which amounts to about 2% of the total reduction in government employees since Trump took office.

Overall, since his inauguration, the federal civilian workforce has shrank by about 10%. Now, that's nowhere near as much as it needs to be shrunk, but not bad for a year and a half!

If you're interested in more solid numbers (which I doubt you are since they won't fit your agenda), there were roughly 2.7 million government civil employees when Trump took office. Since then, 278,282 employees have either been let go, resigned, or took early retirement. Source.

So which government departments saw the biggest losses? The one with the biggest decline was the Department of Education (which may be why you're so disgruntled that you're posting misinformation??), followed by USAID, and then the USDA. That's per capita, by the way, not total number of jobs gone. Most all agencies have decreased in size somewhat, though.

Now as anyone who's paid attention to my posts can attest to, when Trump does something I disagree with (such as the topic of this post) I will call him out on it all day. But, I'll also give credit where it is due, and shrinking fed government bloat by 10% IMO is commendable for sure.

I'll also call out people who post blatantly false "facts" without a single source to support their outlandish claims.

Looks like the AI is working out well

yotetrapper30 has a valid point, less government intrusion.
Yet our government controls every facit of our lives.
I'm not saying government should control anything but it's self.
Insider trading along with backing donors to their campaign , has to stop.
Along with they vote themselves raises , and control way too much.
I was referring to deregulation.
It used to be that companies could only work in certain areas that they held rights to.
Much like a mining claim.
Regan started deregulation , and Carter finished it.
I was making over $12.00 an hour in the mid 1970's, deregulation meant companies could no longer own/operate in certain areas.
In other words your mining claim was no longer valid.
Trucking companies were everywhere, many serving the same cities and states.
Then all of a sudden , they couldn't , jobs were lost companies closed, same with the steel mills.
There has to be some control, but it's totally out of hand anymore.
The idea was service industries were the future.
LOL So yotetrapper30 is right , too much government control.
I know we can't be political, but have to point out, we could be finally going in the right direction.
It's going to hurt, same as anything new in our lives, but we can survive and take back our control of the government.
The way it was meant to be in the first place.
When our country was born, it relied on tariffs alone, no taxes on property, just taxes on whisky that was sold over seas.
I could be wrong about that, it's all I remember without looking it up.
And anymore you can't get an answer you can trust.
But it was 1913 when our country stopped tariffs , and went to taxes on income.
Then it was taxes on anything we bought, then it was taxes on anything we owned, and on and on.
I just hope I see it turn around and taxes are no longer.
Funny how roads were built and bridges were built before taxes, isn't it?
People wanted them, and donated to get them built!
That's a strong country, not one that's taxed to death.
JMHO

Corruption is the number one problem today with government. Its the same number one problem government has had since it was invented. No matter the government from tribal to monarchies to dictators to totalitarian to whatever form of government you can name. Some forms of government, like democratic republic make corruption harder to get away with. Since governments are run by us humans corruption will never disappear. No matter the religion or lack there of the individual ascribes to, some humans are more prone to corruption than others.