Word: affordability
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...many urban middle-class Chinese, dreams of owning property that came into focus in the past decade have faded. Chen, 28, makes about $22,000 a year. By combining that with his wife's $13,000 salary as an office administrator, the couple estimated that they could afford a $260,000 apartment. But after more than a year of searching, and touring some 50 potential homes, they're still renting. In the heated market, sellers kept raising the price thousands of dollars just as Chen and his wife were on the verge of closing a deal, he says. Or worse...
...have made an effort to insure everybody. But we passed our plan without cutting Medicare. We didn't raise taxes. It was all self-sufficient. It was done through a free-market system where people could go in and [comparison shop] for a plan, and if they couldn't afford it, they would get a form of government subsidy...
...substance of the bill; it's the process as much as anything else. No. The primary [concern] for the average voter - and I've met hundreds of thousands of people since I've been [campaigning] - the biggest problem that I have heard is that No. 1, we can't afford it, and No. 2, they don't like how it's been done behind closed doors. They don't like the political maneuvering...
Problem is, a lawyer earning less than $200,000 a year can't afford all that unless he's, say, running a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. And that's exactly the crime that Rothstein, 47, has told a judge he'll plead guilty to later this month. Federal prosecutors have charged Rothstein with swindling investors out of $1.2 billion over the past decade, a scam in which he got them to plow money into lucrative, securitized lawsuit settlements that usually turned out to be nonexistent. The alleged crime wasn't as massive as New York City financier Bernard Madoff...
...Much of the money raised by those investments was funneled in the mortgage market. That gave lenders the ability to make more loans, allowing more people to buy houses and push up real estate prices. Many of those loans, it turns out, were made to people who couldn't afford to pay. What happened next - real estate bust, foreclosures and Wall Street mayhem - is well known...