YOU ARE ALL RICH SO STOP COMPLAINING: The economy grew at a 3.5% pace last quarter, with cash-for-clunkers helping boost durable good spending 22.3% and a federal tax credit for homebuyers increasing housing spending 23.4%. Now that members of the upper-middle class all have new cars and homes, the dough should be trickling down to the rest of us any day. [NYT]

Sad news! While sales of peasant dwellings have begun to creep upward due to the first-time home buyer tax credit, low mortgage rates, expanded FHA loans, and of course FIRE SALE PRICING on foreclosed homes, homes costing more than $750,000 have been difficult to move in this market. Wealthy home owners (or “the middle class,” as they’re known in pricey markets like New York, DC, and the Bay Area) are finding it difficult to sell their million-dollar shacks. However, at least some of them are able to rent out their sad dwellings for, oh, $7500 a month, so don’t feel too bad about this problem yet. MORE »

Well, here is some depressing news! The hot new housing sector in the US isn’t houses at all: it’s shacks. That’s because the kind of people who used to be your next-door neighbor if you lived in a sort of marginal neighborhood in a largeish city are now squatters living under bridges in Fresno. Hell, maybe you’re one of them. MORE »

Beware. John McCain’s BRUTAL NO-HOLDS-BARRED RESPONSE AD OF DEATH about TONY REZKO is out, and you better be SCARED. Ha ha just kidding, it sucks. The ad distills Obama’s naive but benign relationship with Rezko into a more familiar, corrupt politician’s narrative: (1) Rezko bought Obama a house, so (2) Obama returned the favor by giving him $14 million in taxpayer money! Since this is a horrible lie, the narrator doesn’t actually say this, just chooses words that sound like he’s saying this. Too bad no one will ever care about this. [YouTube]

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With all this talk about Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad getting SWEETHEART MORTGAGE DEALS giving them literally fractions of a percentage point off their mortgage interest and fees, it’s instructive to find out how many of America’s senators even have mortgages. A shocking number do not, which means they are either living in cardboard boxes like 99% of their bankrupted constituents, or they paid off their houses in 1957, back when John McCain was running for his first term. Find out what Politico’s intrepid researchers dug up, after the jump. MORE »

That 0.6% bit of economic growth in the first quarter of 2008 was just the pathetic result of $3.50-a-gallon gasoline, but there is one sector of the U.S. economy that’s truly booming: Desperate Americans are selling off their last possessions on Craigslist and other online flea-market sites, just so they can buy a little food and gas. MORE »

Here are some cheery housing numbers, as the bankrupt truckers impotently beep their horns at Congress and the food is rationed and “consumer expectations” hit lows not seen since the early 1970s: More than 6 million homes will go into foreclosure before this housing collapse is finished, and the number of houses now sitting empty in America has reached a staggering 18.6 million — including 2.3 million currently on the market. MORE »

Congratulations to Dominic Turano, incoming president of the Washington Area Realtors Board: MORE »

Looking for a reasonably-priced bedroom on Capitol Hill? This one doesn’t sound bad:
Pretty good price, good location, and the best part is, you’d get to live with Congresswoman Ginny Browne-Waite! Yes, that’s her ad, as an operative found out after expressing interest in the room. Trawling for roommates on craigslist — can there be any lingering doubt that House members are basically college students with slightly better wardrobes? MORE »

Remember when President Bush promised to have 200,000 or so evacuated families housed in readymade trailers New Orleans lickety-split, like in mid-October? It seems like, oh, only last Thursday. But as Spencer Hsiu and Ceci Connelly report in today’s WaPo, there’s no project too big for a crony-infested agency like FEMA to mung up royally: MORE »