Dumb Americans!

6% Real Estate commissions, Dumb Americans!

Why are we still paying 6% commission to a real estate agent when we sell our homes? Twenty years ago, here in southern California, a 2000 square foot house sold for around $125,000. So a 6%commission was about $7,500, not bad for its time. Today the same 2000 square house house sell for $800,000. So today that 6% commission will cost you $48,000. More then  a lot of people make in a year. We go along, with this exorbitant commission, because we have the money at the moment and most likely you are making a tone of money selling your home. Plus everyone is doing it. But we are just rationalization our dumb American behavior.

I know that the commission is split between the selling and listing agent and then again between the broker and the agent. But that is still roughly $12,000 each. But the $48,000 is still allot of money to sell your home.

If you cut a deal with your agent you might be able to reduce the commission to 4% if your listing broker and selling broker are one in the same. But I see a problem, why should a selling agent sell your house for 3% when he/she has more then they can sell at 6%. So your house just sits....

Nothing will change until the entire Real Estate industry changes. There needs to be an across the board reduction in the commission structure period. There need to be an end to the absurd amount of money we pay to sell our homes.

Burning our food, Dumb Americans!

How dumb are we? We have the American government and corporate America promoting and encouraging  us to burn our food supply to power our cars. The thing is we are buying the that line of thinking as it makes us feel good because we are using a renewable green product too fuel our cars.

Look at this government site www.fueleconomy.gov or look at GM site pushing Flex-fuel cars www.gm.com. All push the idea of burning our food (bio fuel) for fueling our cars.

We start using grain to make ethanol gasoline also know as bio fuel for automobiles because it is renewal. Then look at what is happening to the price of our food. As we burn more grain the cost of feed for live stock starts going up. The price increase in grain will work its way to your table as higher prices for milk, meat and grain based products (breads and breakfast cereals). The basics food needs for all us.  Do not forget that the farmer needs grain for his live stock. That live stock is used to make milk, cheese and other dairy based products. So if we keep burning grain to fuel our cars, that puts a higher demand on grain and prices go up. And food prices will continue to go up as we migrate from petroleum fuels to grain based fuels.

Ok, so let use other crop products for fuel. Like switchgrass, it grows fast, can grow in a wide area in North America,  has a better yield per acre then corn and it is not a food crop.  Great idea so then we will not cars. Everyone wins!  But now the farmers will stop growing food crops and use their land to grow cash rich fuel crops.  So now there is less acreage being farmed with food crops and more land dedicated to fuel crops and what happens to food prices, they go up.

 We need to stop burning our food to power our cars! Before you know it we will be all starving to death as we drive our cars powered by our renewable, green fuel. As we will not be able to buy food due to the ever increasing price, or there will no be any food to buy.