While we’re on the topic of being permitted to death, let me introduce a portion of the Cap and Trade legislation which you may not be familiar with. The bill would require any property which is being sold, operated by a different person/party, or under a new lien, to be inspected for conformity to energy efficiencies. And yes, residential properties do apply to this.
So imagine this. You want to sell your home, but it is now subject to an energy inspection. The inspector finds that your WWII era home doesn’t quite meet current legislative benchmarks. It may be perfectly inhabitable, but you will now need to meet certain energy specifications. So now, you have a willing buyer, but the government won’t let you sell your home until you fix say 3,000$ worth of “inefficiencies”. What a pain. And a major violation or your perceived private property rights.
Lucky for you Uncle Sam is willing to let you deduct say 50% of those improvement costs. So at the end of the day your improvements will only cost you 1500$, and hopefully your willing buyer hasn’t moved on.
You know all those green jobs the bill is supposed to be creating. You’ll be paying their salaries.
July 16th, 2009 at
I know more regulations are almost always bad, but the truth is I can see some good that could come from this. For example, when we bought this house without a real estate agent, I would have liked it if a government inspector came out and showed me some of the problems with the property I, in my naivete, would have liked to know about. Furthermore, energy use regulation is actually investing in the future, in a way, because less energy used in the future should mean more available for other uses, (no, I’m not going to say lower cost, though that should be a result, we’re dealing with semi-monopolies here).
In the 80’s back in California they were considering an air quality management plan. My young husband worked in a local paper mill and together we wrote a paper that stated that the proposed plan to regulate air quality would destroy life as we knew it in LA. Imagine my embarrassment when the plan was enacted and the city kept humming along as it always did, waiting, instead, for unchecked government spending (of today) to get into the national news for economic trouble.
July 25th, 2009 at
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