A new "Iron Lady" -- in Spain
Back in 2020, the “Iron Lady of Madrid” refused to lock down her city and impose excessive COVID-19 mandates, stemming the tide of government overreach that had overtaken other European countries. At first, Díaz Ayuso took action against the coronavirus, closing shops and non-essential businesses to stop the spread of the first viral wave. But, as the second and third waves came, she resisted the urge to impose unnecessary stay-at-home orders.
By the end of 2020, Madrid was buzzing. Bars, cafes, and restaurants filled up, while offices and schools opened. The regional economy hummed, and it remains healthy today. In August 2022, the Community of Madrid reported a more than 25 percent decline in unemployment since 2021—the largest year-over-year drop in history. Over the last 12 months, joblessness has dropped across all age brackets and productive sectors.
And that’s not all. As of September 2022, the Community of Madrid has recovered nearly 99 percent of the economic output lost during the pandemic—well above the national average. Last year, Madrid’s gross domestic output rebounded by 6.5 percent, outperforming the 5.1 percent for Spain writ large. The recovery continues now, with annual economic growth still exceeding 5 percent heading into 2023.
In Madrid, entrepreneurship and private-sector innovation are alive. Businesses are opening and staying open, while consumers are contributing to the market economy. It’s a model not only for the rest of Spain, but also for cities around the world. Before enacting new taxes and regulations, policymakers in the likes of New York or San Francisco can learn a thing or two from the pro-market policies of Díaz Ayuso and Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, her Cabinet Minister of Finance and Civil Service. Despite pushback from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government, Díaz Ayuso’s leadership has shown that freedom and liberty are the safest and surest bets for sustained economic prosperity.
So, when Díaz Ayuso speaks out against government mandates today, people need to listen. As she recently put it, “Madrid is recognition of a job well done and respect for work and encouragement. It is a matter of political will, respect for the efforts of the taxpayer and effective management of public resources. Collecting is not governing. To govern is to manage.”
That is the role of government—to oversee, not to exploit. The proper place for political leadership is in enabling the free market to work its wonders, fostering an environment where employers and employees can truly thrive. Political leaders should incentivize entrepreneurs to innovate, rather than erect barriers in their way via mandates.
One example is high taxation, which Díaz Ayuso has consistently rolled back since coming to power in 2019. Under her leadership, Madrid citizens have saved an average of nearly $6,500 in taxes per person. That money can now be spent, saved, or invested. Judging by Madrid’s growth rate, the money is already going to work and strengthening the private sector.
From lower taxes to other policies, Díaz Ayuso is leading by empowering her fellow citizens, trusting the people of Madrid to bounce back from COVID-19 and fuel an economic recovery that lasts long after the pandemic.
Looking across the pond, Americans can only hope that U.S. policymakers take a page or two from the Iron Lady’s playbook. The power of freedom and liberty is universal—from the Plaza Mayor to New York, San Francisco, and beyond.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/madrids-iron-lady-shows-american-leaders-true-leadership_4757747.html
************************************************The U.S. Is Running Short of Land for Housing
In the Sunbelt, the hottest commodity isn’t oil, copper or gold. It is land. And rancher Robert Thomas has plenty of it.
Mr. Thomas’s family owns about 11,000 acres of ranchland northeast of Tampa, Fla. His grandfather, who owned newspapers and ran a minerals-exploration business, bought much of it for 10 cents an acre in 1932. Since then, the population of the Tampa metropolitan area has exploded to more than 3 million. The Thomas family’s ranch is now surrounded by communities of single-family homes.
Home builders, hungry for land, have offered to buy Mr. Thomas’s land. The family sold part of its holdings last year to a developer for about $70 million, or about $20,000 per acre, according to property records. Developers are now offering more than twice as much for some of his remaining land, Mr. Thomas said.
Tampa-area land prices are “booming right now like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And I’ve been in charge here for 44 years.”
The United States, a country of wide open spaces, is short on land.
Or at least land where people can live. Land-use restrictions and a lack of public investment in roads, rail and other infrastructure have made it harder than ever for developers to find sites near big population centers to build homes. As people keep moving to cities such as Austin, Phoenix and Tampa, they are pushing up the price of dirt and making the housing shortages in these fast-growing areas even worse.
In the Sunbelt, the average price of vacant land per acre more than doubled in the past two years through the second quarter, according to Land.com, a land-listing website owned by real-estate firm CoStar Group.
The Federal Reserve’s efforts to fight inflation might bring prices down. Higher interest rates and construction costs are already weighing on the land market, brokers say, and other parts of the real-estate market are starting to slow. While land prices haven’t fallen, there are fewer bidders on deals. Some landowners worry about a downturn similar to the 2008 financial crisis, when home and land values plummeted after years of debt-fueled excess.
Still, the lack of supply and the strong demand mean land prices will likely continue to rise in the long term, economists and investors say.
Even in cities such as New York and San Francisco, where populations shrank during the pandemic, land is far more expensive today than it was decades ago. U.S. residential land alone is now estimated to be worth more than $20 trillion, according to Morris Davis, a professor of finance at Rutgers Business School who studies land values.
This historic land boom has provided a windfall for homeowners. Land now accounts for 47% of U.S. home values, estimates Mr. Davis. That is up from 38% in 2012 and less than 20% in the early 1960s. The rising value of land is responsible for almost all of the surge in home values in recent decades, he said.
Few places have seen land values rise more sharply than Tampa’s exurbs. When Mr. Thomas’s grandfather bought the family ranch during the Great Depression, he was the only bidder. “It didn’t have a tree big enough for a bird to build a nest in,” Mr. Thomas, 66, said. “It was just a chunk of sand in a godforsaken wilderness in Florida.”
According to family lore, the bank that oversaw the ranch on behalf of an estate was so desperate to get rid of it that a banker urged Mr. Thomas’s reluctant grandfather to make an offer. “He said 10 cents an acre, and the banker slammed his fist on his desk and said ‘sold! You could have had it for a nickel,’ ” Mr. Thomas said.
Even after factoring in another $5 an acre in back taxes owed on the land, it was still a bargain, Mr. Thomas said.
Over the years, the family bought additional land around the ranch. Today, much of the property is densely forested. Cows laze in the shade of moss-covered oak trees while white-tailed deer pass through the bushes.
Increasingly, it is a green oasis surrounded by construction sites. As Mr. Thomas drove down a road near his ranch in his pickup truck on a recent Thursday, he could see dozens of two-story homes rising in neat rows. “You can reach out your window and tap on your neighbor’s window,” he said.
Asking prices for homes in these new communities go as high as $900,000, in part because the land underneath is so valuable. That has a lot to do with land-use regulations.
Tampa’s zoning rules prevent developers from building anything larger than a single-family home in much of the city. When officials for Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, adopted zoning regulations in 1950, they said the measures were necessary to prevent overcrowding and traffic jams and would preserve the neighborhood character, all “with a view to conserving the value of buildings,” according to the regulations.
Not only did these restrictions help maintain home values, they boosted the price of developable land. Because developers can’t stack homes on top of each other, they need more land for each housing unit. That is driving demand for land, pushing up prices.
It is also forcing builders to look for lots farther away from the city, where they run into new restrictions. Hillsborough County in late 2019 put a moratorium on the rezoning of land for housing in some areas in a bid to rein in new development. The move followed antidevelopment protests from residents who said local infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the region’s growth.
Pasco County, to the city’s north, in 2021 also put a moratorium on rezoning to multifamily use in some areas.
Between early 2021 and early 2022, home prices in the Tampa metropolitan area rose by 35%, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index, the fastest increase of any of the 20 metro areas tracked.
Because much of the Thomas land, which is only a half-hour drive from downtown Tampa, is already zoned for housing, it is in high demand. Builders are competing for a piece of it. “I get letters, I get emails, I get calls,” Mr. Thomas said. “Somehow people got my cellphone number.”
Since 1932, the value of the Thomas family’s land, adjusted for inflation, has increased almost 200-fold, based on the price of last year’s sale. That is about 10 times the inflation-adjusted growth of the S&P 500 stock market index, which increased about 20-fold during that period.
Inadequate infrastructure is also boosting land inflation. In Nashville, for example, commutes have been getting longer as the population grows and traffic jams worsen, U.S. census data shows. A lack of public transit means commuters often have little choice but to inch down clogged roads. In 2018, voters rejected a proposal to build a light-rail system and expand bus service. That is putting a premium on scarce land close to the city center.
Lisa Maki, a principal at commercial real-estate brokerage Avison Young in Nashville, said her team last year arranged the sale of two lots in the city’s booming Gulch neighborhood to a real-estate investment firm for $7.1 million. The seller, a family from California, had bought the properties for $1.1 million in 2011.
The number of vacant lots zoned for residential use in Nashville fell by 43.5% between 2016 and 2021, according to an analysis of public property records by real-estate data, technology and services firm Altus Group for The Wall Street Journal.
A shortage of development sites and surging land prices, plus high construction costs, mean developers haven’t been able to build enough housing to keep up with demand. Apartment asking rents in Nashville rose 31% in the year ending in June, according to real-estate brokerage Redfin. The same phenomenon is playing out across the Sunbelt.
Five years ago, building apartments in the hottest Sunbelt markets was pretty easy, said Ryan Williams, executive chairman of real-estate investment firm Cadre.
“Now, almost across the board, you’re fighting for land,” he said. Bidding wars for vacant sites in cities such as Atlanta and Austin are common. Cadre recently looked at a lot in Tampa but didn’t have time to get a bid in because another investor snapped it up without even visiting it, he said.
Increasingly, the company competes not just against other developers, but also against investors looking to buy lots and flip them for a profit or keep them unused, he said. “It’s a literal land grab,” Mr. Williams said.
Wealthy investors, including billionaire distiller Tito Beveridge and golfer Phil Mickelson, have started buying up land in the Sunbelt in recent years. Some investors keep land vacant for years, betting values will keep rising and taking advantage of favorable tax treatment for undeveloped land.
Land wasn’t always so expensive. Until the second half of the 20th century, America’s population was far more spread out, living where land was cheap. But as more people moved to a small number of cities with abundant office jobs, and municipalities passed stricter zoning codes that made it tougher to build housing, land prices and housing costs surged.
Land values in Manhattan barely increased between the 1880s and 1970s after adjusting for inflation, according to calculations by Jason Barr, an economist at Rutgers University-Newark. But between 1977 and 2019, they grew at an average annual rate of about 13%.
Most economists say municipalities need to relax zoning rules and other restrictions to bring down land inflation and build more housing. But these changes are often unpopular with homeowners, who benefit from rising land values and make up around 65% of U.S. households. Adding more housing also often requires costly investments in roads and other infrastructure.
People are still moving to Sunbelt cities, and zoning restrictions are unlikely to disappear soon. Remote work has given Americans more choice, but economists say most young professionals continue to flock to a small number of cities. Some think the Sunbelt could see the same kind of stubborn land inflation that has haunted New York and San Francisco for decades and made them among the country’s least-affordable cities.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-u-s-is-running-short-of-land-for-housing-11664125841
************************************************Judge Orders Unvaccinated New York City Police Officers Reinstated
TrialSite News has been covering the mandates imposed on New York City’s municipal workers since former mayor Bill de Blasio first put the rules in place in November of 2021. The former mayor’s vaccination requirement for NYC workers was widely criticized by unions representing the municipal employees who run the city on a day-to-day basis. Lawsuits soon followed. Now one of those legal actions has had the effect the municipal workers were seeking.
Judge Orders Fired NY Cops Reinstated
In a late ruling this past Friday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank ruled New York City’s vaccine mandate on the NY Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA) was invalid “to the extent it has been used to impose a new condition of employment” on the union.” The judge ruled the police officers who were fired for not being vaccinated were to be reinstated. “The mandate was also invalid because it issued enforcement beyond ‘monetary sanctions’ prescribed in the law,” Frank wrote. The judge added, “To be unequivocally clear, this Court does not deny that at the time it was issued, the vaccine mandate was appropriate and lawful. But the city hadn’t “established a legal basis or lawful authority for the DOH (Department of Health) to exclude employees from the workplace and impose any other adverse employment action as an appropriate enforcement mechanism of the vaccine mandate.”
In a statement, the president of the PBA, Pat Lynch, said, “This decision confirms what we have said from the start: the vaccine mandate was an improper infringement on our members’ right to make personal medical decisions in consultation with their own health care professionals.” New York City’s law department immediately appealed the ruling, which will keep the mandate frozen in place during the appeal.
Fire Fighters Demand Reinstatement
“It was only a matter of time before a common sense Judge concluded that the Covid-19 vaccination mandate was never a condition of employment,” said FDNY (Fire Department of New York) Uniformed Firefighters Association President Andrew Ansbro and FDNY Uniformed Fire Officers Association President Lt. James McCarthy. In a statement, the two fire fighter’s unions said, “The Uniformed Firefighters Association and Uniformed Fire Officers Association will send a letter to the Fire Commissioner demanding the reinstatement and remuneration of all FDNY members terminated or placed on leave without pay due to the vaccine mandate.” As TrialSite has reported, the New York City mandates have been opposed by firefighters and municipal workers from the inception of the ruling. Since taking over from Bill de Blasio, Mayor Eric Adams has been inconsistent with the city’s mandate policy. Adams lifted mandates for professional athletes and performers and then rolled back the vaccine mandate for private sector workers and student-athletes. But Adams never lifted the mandate for NYC’s employees. Perhaps the new ruling in favor of the New York City Police Department will give the mayor of New York City some clarity.
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Conservative Australian senator calls out a Muslim whiner
Pauline Hanson has been labelled a 'scumbag' in the Senate for refusing to withdraw a tweet telling Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to 'p*** off back to Pakistan'.
Ms Hanson doubled down on her attack on Tuesday, offering to take Ms Faruqi 'to the airport' after she tweeted saying she could not mourn the Queen's death.
The One Nation leader's offer shocked politicians with Greens senator Jordon Steele-John shouting 'you scumbag' across the chamber.
Ms Faruqi moved a motion to censure Ms Hanson, saying 'I have the right to talk about this issue (the Queen and the empire) without being racially vilified'.
Ms Faruqi had originally moved that the Senate (a) condemns all racism and discrimination against migrants and people of colour;
(b) assures all migrants to Australia that they are valued, welcome members of our society;
(c) affirms that, if Parliament is to be a safe place for all who work and visit here, there can be no tolerance for racism or discrimination in the course of parliamentarians’ public debate;
and (d) censures Senator Hanson for her divisive, anti migrant and racist statement telling Senator Faruqi to 'piss off back to Pakistan', which does not reflect the opinions of the Australian Senate or the Australian people.
Labor later amended the motion, changing the first and last parts to condemn all racism and discrimination 'in all its forms'.
The government also removed the censure of Ms Hanson in particular to broaden it to 'calls on all senators to engage in debates and commentary respectfully, and to refrain from inflammatory and divisive comments, both inside and outside the chamber at all times'.
During a heated debate on Tuesday, Ms Hanson would not retract her comment, which followed a tweet from Ms Faruqi calling the Queen 'a leader of a racist empire' on the day of her death.
'Condolences to those who knew the Queen. I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples,' Ms Faruqi posted.
'We are reminded of the urgency of Treaty with First Nations, justice & reparations for British colonies & becoming a republic.'
Speaking in the Senate, Ms Hanson said: 'As I have explained myself, I will not, NOT retract what I've told Senator Faruqi or any other Australian that's come here for a new way of life, to disrespect what is Australian to me.
She then referenced her previous comment telling Ms Faruqi to go back to Pakistan if she did not support the Queen. 'And she can do and go where I've said,' she added on Tuesday. 'I make the offer, also, to take her to the airport'.
Mr Steele-John then roared 'you scumbag' at Ms Hanson.
Ms Faruqi had previously slammed the British empire for 'enslaving millions of black and brown people around the world'.
Ms Hanson, who once moved a motion in the Senate that it was 'OK to be white', fired back at the Greens politician by suggesting she get out of Australia and that she had taken advantage of everything the country had given her.
'Your attitude appalls and disgusts me. When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country,' Ms Hanson said.
'You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in a parliament. It's clear you're not happy, so pack your bags and p*** off back to Pakistan.'
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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