Man...sorry about your stolen catalytic converters Larry and Jeff!
My brother-in-law just had his stolen off his van in the Boulder Colorado area too. He put some kind of cage around his new one too. his van stays in storage a lot too. It's crazy. it's like a franchise business or something. The people stealing them are probably selling the cages for them too.
My son is a prosecutor for Snohomish county. Right now there's a three year backlog for non-violent cases. He has well over 100 cases to manage (just his share) and they want him to go to trial on something every week or so. So, getting to theft stuff can take forever and I think the people doing the stealing and the buying know that. The police know it too, so why even bother going out to catch a bad guy?
I agree with a lot of what you said Roger...especially the part about one thing leads to another, depression, etc...and down the spiral goes. It's a bad situation.
Overall I'm a fan of capitalism. I've always been fascinated with the "machine" inputs and outputs and complexity of it all and the opportunity it brings and how it can motivate people to greatness, but it definitely has it's downsides and has to be managed or it can be problematic.
Check this out: https://www.census.gov/library/visua...tate-data.html
According to the latest census, the population in Washington state went up 14.1% over the last 10 years, but the number of available housing units only went up 11%. That's a huge supply and demand gap! Based on that data, we need more people to build housing units and to be landlords. There's just not enough supply- so the price goes up.
Meanwhile, there are help wanted signs everywhere you go. We raised WH worker pay about $4/hour just this year and still have a hard time getting people to show up. It's cheaper to live further out too and people can move- and they can move a lot easier if they have transit...
Anyway, we do all agree it's a mess. Hopefully we can keep it from getting worse.