Michael Bates: December 2016 Archives
Trump's envoy to Israel is ready to slay some sacred cows - Jeff Jacoby
One of Trump's more heartening appointments: "David Friedman avidly supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, unequivocally rejects a 'two-state solution' to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and strongly believes the US embassy in Israel should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Those positions put Friedman - Donald Trump's bankruptcy lawyer and close friend - sharply at odds with the US foreign-policy establishment and entrenched conventional wisdom. So when the president-elect announced on Thursday that Friedman was his choice to be the next ambassador to Israel, alarm bells started clanging....
"Friedman's view is that US policy should be sharply reoriented - away from pressuring Israel to keep taking more 'risks for peace,' and toward pressuring the Palestinians to abandon their oft-stated ambition of eliminating the Jewish state. The incoming Trump administration, Friedman explained recently, 'doesn't see much opportunity for progress until the Palestinians renounce violence and accept Israel as a Jewish state. That's really a prerequisite.'"
Blight Inc. -- Indianapolis Star
The sale of abandoned homes for just enough to pay the outstanding tax bill has created a perverse incentive for investors who buy these homes to walk away from them, abandoning them once again, and further blighting the neighborhood, according to a detailed investigative report.
"Frank Alexander, a professor at Emory Law School who has studied tax sales across the country, was not surprised to hear that investors like Mt. Helix were leaving houses empty.
"'Indiana has a broken system,' he said. 'It actually creates incentives for passive investors.'
"He said government tax sales don't function like normal markets. They're designed only to collect taxes, not necessarily to seek a fair market price for the property. As long as the taxes come in, the government doesn't mind giving up the homes for less than they are worth.
"People often can pay $2,000 to buy a property that's worth $10,000, said Alexander, co-founder of the Center for Community Progress, a blight advisory group. 'Well, all I have to do is sell it for $6,000,' he said. 'Then I get a 300 percent rate of return.'"
