Lenny,

If you were the primary banker that had lent money to home buyers on margin accounts requiring only 5 percent of the sale price of the property would your confidence rise to the level that you would advocate that the legislature adopt an anti-deficiency judgment law?

What if you were the state treasurer and thus were effectively that banker and raced to issue bonds like they were candy to make such loans?

Unless Oregon can print money in like manner to the federal reserve, at the risk of inducing inflation in the classic sense where money is used only as a means of exchange rather than to measure accumulated personal debt, then the property values are a fiction. There is no inherent value in the property. Rather, the income level (wage income) of residents is a better measure of the equitable performance of the economic strategy of the PDC and Portland.

Don't forget, I am the guy who likes the study of economics from the perspective of lesser industrialized countries . . . and not from the perspective of lawyers here who need only argue ad hoc in court that a politician had a single plausible public purpose so as to vindicate their glorious deeds against all possible objections. I am mindful too of the tax court judge's total absent minded disregard for any public objection to the lunacy of any issuance of revenue bonds that any set of elected officials might design . . . seeming to the point of using ALL sources of revenue to justify bonding them into the future and spending it all today in a drunken binge.

What performance measures do you find appropriate? Is it leverage? Leverage induces asset inflation. Such asset inflation to me is just another way of saying wage deflation, notwithstanding and irrespective of a static and cooked up CPI. As we know, asset inflation that results in capital gains, seeming by design, are not recaptured via the tax code in an equitable manner to that for wages. The flat wages over the last several years, coupled with asset inflation, makes for a rather ugly picture for the working class. Blame it on Keynes, and a focus on the CPI. I would rather see the money distributed more evenly and result, horror of horrors, in inflation that is a mere side effect of wage inflation.

Again, would you have the confidence, if you were the state treasurer (our banker in the public interest), to advocate passage of an anti-deficiency judgment law?

I would not be advocating that a selected set of folks jump on the asset inflation train. Is that the limit of your view?