Aug082016
Is the benefit of homeownership to society worth the subsidy cost?
Homeownership is considered a universal good by politicians. However, the benefits of ownership are not worth the costs of the subsidies politicians put in place.
For over 100 years, every presidential administration embraced homeownership as a panacea, quelling civil unrest, creating citizens with a strong sense of community. The goal of bureaucrats and lawmakers is to create a mythical society with 100% homeownership. The powers-that-be consistently promote homeownership, sometimes with costly subsidies with little or no real benefit.
Every homeowner wants to see the resale value of their home go up as rapidly as possible, and since most local governments obtain revenue from real estate taxes, government officials like high home prices too. Since more than half the country owns a house, political pressure mounts to prop up home prices and cause them to appreciate. Politicians are happy to go along. The result is a plethora of subsidies that make houses more expensive. Unfortunately, house prices can’t appreciate faster than the wages go up to support them. Any time prices are artificially pushed higher, they inevitably crash back down with horrendous consequences.
What’s worse is that all this volatility can be avoided. If people accepted that house prices can only rise so fast, then perhaps they wouldn’t get carried away with kool aid intoxication and overborrow to buy real estate as an investment. If governments accepted that some people are better off renting, we wouldn’t get policies designed to make everyone a homeowner whether they can sustain it or not. If homebuilders, realtors, and bankers accepted that some people shouldn’t be given onerous debt loads to buy houses (and generate sales commissions), perhaps we wouldn’t have such powerful lobbying for policies that are the root of the volatility in our housing markets.
Our obsession with homeownership carries a cost that’s much larger than the actual dollars and cents of the costly subsidies.
A Persistent Housing Crisis Stifles the American Dream and Economy
Elyse Cherry, Updated August 2, 2016, 9:29 AM
Plummeting homeownership rates are a worrisome sign that the American Dream remains a fantasy for millions. But they are also worrisome for another reason: they show that the housing crisis continues to afflict millions of families facing foreclosure or saddled with unaffordable, bubble-sized mortgages.
Those bubble-sized mortgages were embraced by politicians who saw homeownership rates rising along with those bubblicious house prices.
That’s a problem, because for generations of Americans, homeownership has been a gateway to the middle class and a primary source of wealth creation. What’s more, it is not just families who benefit when they own their homes: their neighborhoods and the entire economy do, too.
The housing market has broadly recovered from the 2008 crisis, but many Americans remain left behind. As of June, one million homeowners were facing foreclosure. Almost 7 million more were underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. For them, there has been no housing recovery. These working- and middle-class homeowners have seen their incomes stagnate — along with the value of many of their homes. What’s worse, they’re still on the hook for mortgages that are based on bubble-era valuations.
That’s the nature of cloud inventory. Those homeowners loanowners will not participate in the housing market until they are no longer underwater. Even then, many more won’t participate until they have enough equity for a 20% down payment on their next house.
When these beleaguered homeowners see no path to financial well-being, they have no incentive to maintain their homes — meaning they lose even more value. And the exorbitant monthly payments they face mean that they can’t sell their house if they get sick or lose their job. They are stuck with the burdens of homeownership and none of the benefits.
Lenders and borrowers perverted the American Dream during the housing bubble as Americans began to define themselves by the size of their house. Wealth became confused with debt; appreciation became confused with income; credit became confused with savings. Rather than viewing the road to prosperity as one that required hard work and delayed gratification, Americans came to believe they could achieve success by simply purchasing the right house and living off the increase in its value. The new American dream required no work, no sacrifice, no experience, no expertise, and no risk, yet yielded unlimited rewards.
These perverted views of what it means to be American are so ingrained in the collective consciousness of Californians, that few remember the real American Dream.
Work hard, save money, pay off a mortgage, and live in your debt-free house on the investment income from your savings in your golden years.
In a sad way, I understand why people bought the fantasy. If offered to chose between working hard and sacrificing to obtain a goal or doing nothing and instantly gratifying all desires, most people will chose the latter. Unfortunately, reality has a way of exposing myths that are too good to be true, and the housing bust destroyed the illusions and perversions of the American Dream created by the housing bubble; unfortunately, no new mythos has yet emerged to take its place.
There’s Little Public Benefit in Homeownership
And the American Dream can be realized in a rented urban apartment just as easily as behind a suburban white picket fence.
Edward Glaeser, Updated August 2, 2016, 3:21 AM
It is a terrible mistake to artificially boost the homeownership rate by subsidizing borrowing. Before 2007, America chased the chimera of an “ownership society” and ended up creating a “foreclosure society” instead.
Homeownership is a good option for people who want to live in a single-family house for the next seven years or more. Homeowners can customize their property. They are hedged against rising costs of housing. Ownership creates incentives to maintain a home. Understandably, 84.4 percent of occupied single family detached dwellings are owner-occupied.
For Americans who don’t plan on settling in any one neighborhood, or who like dense apartment buildings, renting is more attractive. Renting saves the fixed costs of realtor’s fees, and limits exposure to housing price swing. In apartment buildings, renting avoids condominium fees and coop boards. Consequently, 87 percent of occupied units in multifamily buildings are rented.
There is little public benefit in pushing people to own rather than rent homes, just as there is little public benefit is squelching the market for leased cars. Homeowners are somewhat better citizens, but we shouldn’t screw up the $28 trillion housing market in the hopes of mildly increasing engagement in local politics.
Home ownership has been linked to greater community involvement and other positive societal goals. This link may or may not be true, but many in the government accept it as so, and this has long been used as a justification for a plethora of policies and misguided government subsidies encouraging home ownership.
However, Housing subsidies are detrimental to America. They do not raise the rate of home ownership, they cause house price inflation and volatility that inflicts financial pain and distress on the population, and these subsidies cost the government an enormous amount of money. Homeownership doesn’t need to be encouraged with government subsidies.
Moreover, when homeowners get involved in politics, they often try to stop new development which makes housing less affordable for everyone else.
(See: Everyone in California wants to be the last new resident in their neighborhood)
Homeowners who pay off their mortgages or who are lucky enough to experience rising housing prices do become wealthier.
The American Dream is not dead. The idea of owning a home will rise from the ashes, and the American Dream will once again include owning the roof over your head and the floor beneath your feet. Personally, I would like to see a return to the traditional view of the American Dream: truly owning a home free of any debt. That’s where peace-of-mind reunites with the American Dream.
But making it easier to borrow reduces the need to save for a down-payment, and owners can also be hit by falling prices.
Subsidizing homeownership has bad side effects. Owners are less mobile, which makes it harder for them to move from high unemployment places to high wage places.
Since big apartment buildings are overwhelmingly rented, inducing homeownership pushes people away from urban centers. The American Dream can be realized in a rented urban apartment just as easily as behind a suburban white picket fence. There is no reason to stack the deck against America’s cities, which are more economically productive and require less household energy use.
We shouldn’t worry about less homeownership, but we should worry about high housing costs in America’s most productive places. But the right response to high housing costs is to permit more building, not to subsidize homeownership. Homeownership subsidies just push prices up further. America should never again use public policy to prod people to over borrow in the vain pursuit of high homeownership rates.
I am a supporter of home ownership — not loan ownership as it’s become perverted into — but real home ownership free of encumbrances like a hefty mortgage. Most people who achieve home ownership go through a period of indebtedness because few can save enough (or get gifts from relatives) to buy a house for cash. Those that achieve home ownership do so through disciplined repayment of mortgage debt without adding to it to supplement consumer spending via the home ATM.
Anyone who plans to stay in one location for five years or more should consider home ownership. It is advantageous to fix one’s housing costs with an amortizing fixed-rate mortgage, and over time, between house prices inflation and amortizing mortgages, equity builds up into a significant nest-egg useful in retirement. These are great reasons to become a homeowner.
While citizens consider many good reasons for homeownership, politicians find ways of ruining the benefits, often through misguided attempts to subsidize the costs.
The impact housing subsidies
Not long ago I received a letter from the City of Santa Ana detailing a program where they provide $40,000 of down payment assistance to buyers who meet their qualification standards. Think for a moment about what this does.
First, the number of applications who want this subsidy would obviously out-pace the supply because they are giving out free money. Second, the selected applicants are essentially lottery winners who gain a house on luck rather than merit. Third, and this is the most important point, the selected applicant will outbid the current, hard-working, wage-earning buyer and deny them their family home.
Where is the justice in that?
[listing mls=”PW16172396″]
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac would need another bailout in severe economic crisis
Despite the fact that both of the government-sponsored enterprises turned in profitable second quarters, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would both need bailouts if the worldwide economy crumbled, a new report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency shows.
Last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disclosed profitable second quarter earnings, and will therefore send $3.833 billion to the Department of the Treasury later this year under the terms of the Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements that went into effect when the government took the GSEs into conservatorship.
Under the PSPAs, Fannie and Freddie send dividends to the Department of the Treasury each quarter that they are profitable.
But under the PSPAs, the GSEs are prohibited from rebuilding capital and each of the GSEs capital base is required to be reduced, with their capital reserves scheduled to be drawn down to $0 in 2018.
Combine that dwindling capital base with a “severely adverse” economic scenario, and the GSEs could need as much as $125.8 billion in additional funds from the Treasury to stay afloat, the FHFA reported Monday.
The need for a bailout is not a forecast; rather it is the result of a stress test on the GSEs conducted as required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Under the stipulations of the stress test, a global economic crisis, in this case called a “severely adverse scenario,” would require Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to draw between $49.2 billion and $125.8 billion from the Treasury.
According to the FHFA report, the “severely adverse scenario” is based on a “severe global recession which is accompanied by a period of elevated corporate financial stress and negative yields on short-term U.S. Treasury securities.”
Return of The Bidding War, But Only For Certain States
The phenomenon is very uneven geographically, but CoreLogic says that one factor behind the sustained pace of home price appreciation is the return of bidding wars.
The company’s analysis is limited in that it was done on the city level in markets where there were a hundred or more closed home sale transactions in the second quarter – criteria that is in itself a bit self-defining. They also included properties where the sale price was bid up by $5,000 or more above the list. The cities that emerged on top for bidding wars were no surprise; they were mostly in the West and primarily in California, but some of CoreLogic’s findings were still interesting.
http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/jann.0000201608/2016_2D00_8_2D00_8-core.jpg
Seventeen of the top 30 cities where multiple offers are most frequently pushing home sale prices above list are in California.
Housing in a Low-Growth Economy
Eight years ago, if you read columns about economics or housing, you’d come across this one-word sentence pretty often.
Jobs.
All that was wrong with housing–the fraud, the fantasy money, the false promises lying beneath misplaced dreams, the failure of every fail-safe system, and the flood of human consequence–could only begin to heal if, first, the tides of lost jobs began to turn.
So, here we are, about 12 million private and public sector payroll head count increases later. The tides turned. The latest employment report released by the Labor Department Friday punctuates the fact that jobs resilience–in both payroll growth and wages–is a going concern in our economy.
Still, even though we got all we could have wished for and more as we peered into the future eight years ago, we’re not seeing the pick-up we thought we’d see in housing.
So, the question now is whether structural constraints now bind our economy–domestically and globally. We’re left with one of economics’ more humbling quandaries, not knowing whether it’s supply that’s off the rails, or demand.
New York Times economics correspondent Neil Irwin writes in “We’re in a Low-Growth World. How Did We Get Here?”:
Weak productivity and fewer workers are hits to the “supply” side of the economy. But there is evidence that a shortage of demand is a major part of the problem, too.
Think of the economy as a car; if you try to accelerate far beyond the speed it’s capable of, a car won’t go any faster but the engine will overheat. Similarly, if the voluntarily exit of people from the labor force and lower-than-expected gains from technological advances were the entire story behind the growth slowdown, there should be evidence the economy is overheating, resulting in inflation.
Which is not happening, Irwin notes.
So, if 12 million new jobs in the past 8 years didn’t get us the adrenaline surge needed for housing, what will?
It may be the same one-word sentence. Jobs.
Only, what those jobs are, and what pay comes with them, and where they’re located, and what they produce may be vastly different than we could have imagined 8 years ago, and we’re only beginning to imagine now.
Infrastructure spending, with all of the skilled and unskilled labor that those projects require, is looked at now as the catalyst the economy has been missing, and no doubt these projects are sorely needed.
Fact is, though, new jobs, new productivity, new models for both supply and demand, new processes, and process management probably lie outside the scope of current predictive algorithms, because those projections aren’t very good at understanding people at either the household nor the firm level.
What a low-growth economy means for housing today–with today’s models–is that not everybody wins, even if the trajectory improves. Adverse conditions continue to stress test every business and every business model, and it’s those who revel in the challenge, spite the bitter taste of failing, and find new better ways to give people a timeless value who’ll be here eight years from now and eight years later than that.
The models broke. When the pie’s not expanding, it doesn’t mean your slice shouldn’t be bigger.
The next big fight over housing could happen, literally, in your back yard
LOS ANGELES — In the new home Julia Coffee designed for herself, handpicking the tiles and the flooring and the red front door, the microwave doesn’t work. Neither does the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, the washing machine, nor — including on 100-degree days — the central air.
Everything else runs on braided extension cords that snake into the bedrooms, through the living room, across the kitchen floor, out the window, through the yard and into her daughter’s house. Charles, Coffee’s 82-year-old husband who relies on a walker, tends to accidentally unplug things.
“We have a nice little place here,” said Julia Coffee, 74. “But we really would like to get our power turned on.”
The Coffees built their two-bedroom home, the smallest they’ve lived in since they were married 44 years ago, in their daughter’s back yard. They were just finishing the place when a lawsuit earlier this year against the city of Los Angeles brought permits for homes like theirs — second units on single-family lots — to a halt. As a result, city officials who gave them permission to build now haven’t given them a certificate of occupancy, and the utility won’t connect them to the power grid.
Second homes, often called “granny flats,” have become a new front in the conflict that pits the need for more housing in the country’s most expensive cities against the wishes of neighbors who want to preserve their communities. The same battles flare over large developments that might loom over single-family neighborhoods. But even this modest idea for new housing — let homeowners build it in their own back yards — has run into not-in-my-back-yard resistance.
And the difficulty of implementing even such a small-scale solution shows why it will be hard to make room in crowded cities for the middle- and working-class households who increasingly struggle to afford to live there.
Homes like the Coffees’, proponents argue, could help ease housing shortages that have made $2,000-a-month one-bedrooms look like a bargain in cities such as Los Angeles. They could yield new affordable housing at no cost to the public. They could add rentals and economic diversity to more neighborhoods. And they could expand housing options for a population in which baby boomers are aging and millennials are stuck at home.
Many neighbors, though, protest that a glut of back yard building would spoil the character of neighborhoods designed around the American ideal of one family on one lot surrounded by verdant lawn. They fear that more residents will mean less parking. And they question whether small homes, particularly in wealthier neighborhoods with the most room to build them, would really constitute affordable housing.
And so across the country, homes like the Coffees’ remain extremely difficult — if not outright illegal — to build.
“We are determined to add needed units to communities without changing the look and feel of our neighborhoods,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who wants to remove more barriers to second units. He adds that such housing would make the city more affordable not just for renters but also for homeowners. “The extra rental income could make the difference for a potential homeowner between affording a mortgage or not,” he said.
O.C. skyline: 7 things to know
Orange County doesn’t have much of a skyline, but it’s a growing collection of classy, high-rise office towers.
Analysts at JLL, the commercial real estate brokerage, take an annual look at the office skylines of major U.S. cities. These are the premium spots for corporate offices.
Here are seven things you need to know about Orange County’s 14 skyline office buildings, which house 20,000 workers in 5 million square feet of rentable space, according to JLL. A 15th tower, 400 Spectrum Center, is under construction in Irvine.
• Two big owners: The Irvine Co. and CJ Segerstrom & Sons own a combined 89 percent of the skyline space. That does not include 400 Spectrum Center, which will be completed in 2017.
Irvine Co. projects will have boosted skyline space by nearly one-third in three years.
• These are pricey digs: Orange County’s skyline rents run $45 a square foot – that’s 4 percent higher than the national average and roughly 50 percent more than basic Orange County office rents. Now, we’re not New York City where skyline rents run $86 per square foot!
• It’s filling up: Orange County skyline landlords leased 379,129 square feet of offices – that’s space roughly equal to the size of one tower – in the year. Only two markets – New York (1.2 million square feet) and Chicago (664,771) – rented out more.
• It’s filling up fast: Orange County filled the nation’s largest share of empty space in the past year – “net absorption of inventory,” in industry lingo – with new tenants leasing 7.6 percent of available skyline space vs. a national average of 0.6 percent.
• It’s still pretty empty: Need trophy offices? Well, 22 percent of the space in these towers is empty due to the Irvine Co.’s speculative development.
That’s roughly 1 million square feet – or what would fill three buildings.
Only six U.S. markets have a higher skyline vacancy rate.
• It’s a tiny skyline: Orange County has the 38th “biggest” skyline nationwide in terms of tower space. New York has 21 times more skyline office space; Chicago, 12 times more; San Francisco, five times more; and Los Angeles, four times more.
• How rare are offices in O.C. towers? Don’t bet on your next meeting being in a local high-rise. Even with recent construction, Orange County’s office towers hold only 13 percent of all office space countywide. The typical U.S. market has 29 percent of its office space in high-rise towers.
With the “big one” coming, I am fine not having that many skylines around. I work in DTLA on the 10th floor of a historic building (also old), I do my best to get out in the field!
I just got back from Chicago and it is so beautiful there in the summer, that’s a city where I wouldn’t mind working on the 50th floor.
I’ve been to Chicago a few times, and it seems like a great city. It’s supposed to be brutal in the winter though, and it has serious crime issues. Oh, and the public employees own the state, like here in CA.
Yeah, I believe it has the worst crime in the USA at the moment. A co-worker is from there and loves it in the summer but the winters are rough as you’ve stated. Real Estate is so much cheaper compared to California though, if I had an opportunity I would give it a try even for a year or two.
CA is the 8th largest economy, so at least it has that going for them. Their pension issues are crazy, I believe their property taxes have increased about 65% in the last 2 years to make up for the unfunded liabilities.
As a visitor, I thought it was so much better than what LA has to offer but then again, we mostly stayed in the safe part of town with no care in the world.
Chicago is a beautiful city. I’ve been there many times. As Perspective noted, it is cold, and if you work downtown, you will find out just how cold a wind off Lake Michigan can be.
I actually experience 5.0 earth quake in Chicago.
The buildings aren’t built for it.
That plus tornados and awful thunderstorms
I was born in Chicago and lived there for 30+ years before moving to SoCal. It’s nice in the summer, but that only entails about 3 months (plus the mosquitoes can be quite an issue). It’s a real tax heavy place (worse than CA) and the upkeep required to your home is alot more (+ large gas bills).
CA living is much easier and has been waaayyy better for my career. Chicago always seemed like you couldn’t make as much money or you had to be wired in to some government job.
Is there an income property bubble in California?
After a solid recovery boom, confidence about future growth in the national commercial real estate market is dwindling. Forecasters now predict income property prices and developments to stagnate nationwide over the next few years.
For the California commercial real estate market, the UCLA Anderson Forecast echoes similar expectations with some optimistic variance: while office and retail construction is expected to run at a slower pace over the next three years, confidence remains high for industrial and multifamily housing developments.
These commercial real estate forecasts follow a period of strong, continued growth in commercial real estate — both nationwide and in California. Present lower vacancy rates and elevated prices now buoying the market will encourage cities to permit more development and, with some time to forget, accelerate lender funding of projects.
MORE…
“…the selected applicant will outbid the current, hard-working, wage-earning buyer and deny them their family home. Where is the justice in that?”
Was this a real program in Santa Ana? Can you share the letter and/or details? It seems so preposterous. I’d love to see any council meeting transcripts discussing the cost/benefit/fairness analysis.
This was a real program. In fact, I got it from Shevy who said it was circulating around realtor offices. They viewed it as a good idea because it would generate more business. The idea that there are merely displacing someone else eludes them.
The political discussion was probably little more than the city council caving in to demands of the political left to provide more affordable housing. Nobody actually analyzes proposals like that.
Ban predatory rent gouging in San Francisco
Dumb ideas like this sometimes find support
Another day, another rent-hike horror story making headlines in The City.
A Bernal Heights tenant was forced out in May after her rent went from $2,145 to $8,900. A North Beach tenant was hit last month with a 344 percent rent increase, and his eviction is now imminent. And earlier this month, an Alamo Square resident’s rent doubled after his partner, the master tenant, took his own life.
Enough. It’s time to end evictions by rent increase. The City must put a stop to predatory rent gouging.
On the state level, we’ve already banned what’s known as price gouging, making it a crime in times of crisis to raise the price of basic necessities over 10 percent. If hotel owners, for example, jack up the cost of their rooms after an earthquake, or if store owners double the price of water during a drought, they face stiff fines and even jail time.
With our housing affordability crisis raging, and landlords exploiting loopholes in rent-control protections, San Francisco needs to follow suit when it comes to runaway rent increases.
How would it work?
The City sets a maximum allowable increase for rents — a level that targets only the most outrageous hikes and leaves alone reasonable landlords who aren’t gouging their tenants.
If an increase exceeds the ceiling, landlords face what we’re calling the Runaway Rent Tax, a stiff tax paid by the landlord. All revenue generated goes to creating more affordable housing.
It’s a win-win for renters, and fair-minded landlords face no adverse effect. Most importantly, it’s an immediate game-changer, providing San Francisco tenants with a much-needed protection to stay in their homes.
No more tinkering around the edges, no more excuses from City Hall and no more rent-hike horror stories. Now is the time for our city to end predatory rent gouging.
Such a complex issue. Focusing blame on evil landlords is misdirected. If you can’t afford to live in an expensive city, then you can’t afford to live in an expensive city. It’s pretty simple. These outrageously expensive areas of the US represent a tiny fraction of the livable space.
“…providing San Francisco tenants with a much-needed protection to stay in their homes.”
There’s a false presumption in this statement, that these are the “tenant’s homes.”
And why would you want to live in SF anyway? The Giants suck!
What they argue for is to favor one group of poor over another group who is a little less poor. The really poor family can’t afford to live there, so we want to subsidize them and squeeze out a somewhat less poor family who could still afford market rent. That doesn’t seem like a particularly worthwhile thing to do.
Irvine Renter’s political forecasting license just might be revoked, as Nate Silver has Clinton at an 87.5% probability today:
Who will win the presidency?
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Don’t know if it’s Trump’s intent, but he’s lighting this party on fire:
Down Ticket #1: How Trump could cost the GOP its biggest House majority since WWII
https://www.yahoo.com/news/down-ticket-1-trump-could-000000722.html
Expect this list to continue growing:
GOP senator Susan Collins: Why I cannot support Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gop-senator-why-i-cannot-support-trump/2016/08/08/821095be-5d7e-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html
I think Trump will pick up steam quickly but how long before he blows up again is anyone’s guess.
At the end of the day these GOP representatives are really democrats if you review their voting record.
Trump has 20 plus million blue collar American’s behind him, I think it will be a close race.
Unfortunately for Trump, math and statistics cannot be denied. There isn’t a sufficient number of white male non-college educated voters to propel him to the Presidency.
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20160809-the-gop-is-dying-let-s-pull-the-plug.ece
I wouldn’t place too much stock in Nate Silver’s statistics. I believe he will underestimate Trump’s performance in nearly every state.
You seem to be falling into the, “I dismiss science and facts because I have a feeling” camp. 😉
Nate Silver’s model fluctuates heavily based on recent polls taken. Just after the RNC he was forecasting Trump with a 55% chance of winning.
When does Pence jump ship? Do you defend Trump daily for the next three months if the polls stay the same, much less worsen? He’s a big Christian values guy, which is nearly absent in Trump’s campaign. Pence could withdraw in September if it looks as bleak as it does today, and easily defend the decision based on his Christian values – similar to Susan Collins taking so long to jump, but easily able to defend the decision.
Is Something Wrong With Hillary: Bizarre Behavior, Seizure Allegations Raise Doubts About Her Health
As the presidential campaign enters its final stages, probing questions have emerged about the health condition of Hillary Clinton.
Hillary’ bizarre, erratic behavior on the campaign trail (culminating with last week’s perplexing “short-circuit” comment) has left many wondering whether she is seriously ill. Hillary has at multiple times had convulsions that appear to be seizures on camera, including a series of seemingly inexplicable coughing fits.
A frequently referenced video, shown below, alleging that Hillary may have seizure-like conditions emerged several weeks ago and has so far failed to lead to a conclusive explanation whether Hillary may have ongoing health problems and potential residual aftereffects from a blood clot in her brain sustained three years ago.
Recall in January 2013, CNN reported that then Secretary of State Clinton was treated with blood thinners at a New York hospital to help dissolve a blood clot in her head. Back then doctors were confident she would make a full recovery. Clinton was admitted to New York Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday due to the clot that was discovered during a follow-up exam related to a concussion she suffered this month, her spokesman, Philippe Reines, said. The clot was located in the vein between the brain and and the skull behind Clinton’s right ear and did not result in any stroke or neurological damage, her doctors said in a statement.
Going further back, in 2005 then Senator Hillary fainted during a speech in Buffalo, NY, where she received medical attention on site. “About five minutes into the speech, she said she was queasy,” said Erie County Democratic Chairman Len Lenihan, who was at the Women’s TAP fund-raiser at the private club. “Clinton left the podium and continued her talk sitting in a chair but eventually left the room, saying she needed a break, Lenihan said. She returned to the podium a short time later but fainted before resuming her speech. “It became clear she was faint. She was sort of brought down gracefully,” he said.
The room was cleared, and Clinton immediately received medical attention from, among others, a doctor who attended the event.
And so, questions about Hillary’s health remain, especially after photos emerged over the weekend showing Hillary demonstrating unease while climbing stairs.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-08/something-wrong-hillary-bizarre-behavior-seizure-allegations-raise-doubts-about-her-
(Click through to see photos and videos referenced above.)
Can you imagine Trump winning due to a Clinton withdrawal?
It would be awesome to see the poor liberals crying their eyes out!