Originally Posted by Rochard

No, I don't think they are living in a bubble. My town was hit huge by this recession - we were in a massive growth spurt being just on the edge of the suburbs. Half of the houses here were seven years old, meaning half the houses had bad loans. At one point, exactly half of the houses on my street were vacant. We bitch about "how bad it is" yet we all have central air and flat screen TVs.

The idea of the rich helping to float the economy.... Is something I came up with off the top of my head. It's just common sense. If you have forty-thousand people in California state that suddenly decide they can't afford homes, that's forty thousand homes that have suddenly flooded the market. That's the tip of the iceberg though. Forty thousand homes flooding the market impacts the landscapers, who have forty thousand less customers. It also impacts the contractors and builders - no reason to build houses when there's forty thousand houses on the market cheaper than what they can build them for. So now the landscapers, builders, and contractors are out of work, spending less money, and so forth.