▪️They’re resurrecting this false meme from last year, when the “10 year challenge” meme was popular. I’ll post the original bust below, but I’ll note the current Redfin estimate is $383K, which has gone up since last year, but still way below $550k (also the meme cites 2022).
▪️This meme currently has over 340K likes on Twitter & has been widely shared elsewhere. It presents this house like it was sold for these prices in 2012 & 2022, but is actually complete fiction, like someone just picked a random picture of a house and fabricated a price.
▪️This particular house was hard to find, reverse image searches brought up just a few sites, where this house was used as a generic example of modern American ranch-style architecture. Like here:
https://architecturestyles.org/post-war-modern/
▪️I nearly gave up, but in a caption one site mentioned it was in Des Peres, near St. Louis, MO. If you look closely at the original photo, you can see “eleven hundred and nine” written above the garage.
▪️It was a long shot without the street, but I tried a search for “Des Peres 1109 ranch style home” and bam, it came up on Trulia!
https://www.trulia.com/p/mo/saint-louis/1109-cameo-ct-saint-louis-mo-63131--2060091681
▪️It’s 3 bd 2 ba, 1478 sq ft. It was last sold in Aug 2008 for $220K. According to Redfin it’s estimated at $322K, Trulia & Zillow put it at $337K ($290-385K range) and it was assessed for property taxes at $296,400 in 2020.
https://www.redfin.com/MO/Des-Peres/1109-Cameo-Ct-63131/home/93514369
▪️I don’t know what is was worth in 2012, as it wasn’t for sale then, but in 14 years it went from ~$220K-330K. If it went up exactly with price inflation it would be $280K, so it certainly exceeded that, but not the more than 3X in 10 years that this meme suggests.
▪️Meanwhile, average hourly earnings were $21.70/hr in Aug 2008, $23.24/hr in 2012 and $31.31/hr today. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out no one earns the Federal min wage. Just 0.8% of full-time workers earn at or below it, and most of those are in leisure & hospitality that get tips in addition. It makes no sense to use it as a metric for any price, especially home prices.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
▪️To pre-empt the objections that this meme still makes a valid point housing has gone up, ok. But these numbers are pure fiction, they don’t accurately represent the change in this house, the median US price, median St. Louis price, nothing. Why not find an actual 10 yr home price instead of making it up? I guess the answer is because you can get 340K likes, so who cares?
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
