his? How about you tell me if CNN or MSNBC will have a mortgage loan broker on and then you ask the question, hey, how many more loans do you think you'll make if people get $25,000 for their first home buy? Let's see what they say. At best they'll say something generic like, well, you know, more money is better. I don't know. But if you ask them how many extra loans they'd make, it'd probably be close to zero.

All right, part of that plan apparently is to exert some federal zoning control over the local areas. In other words, there's some part of what they want to do with low-cost housing. This is different from the $25,000 thing, so separate but related. They want to make it easier to build homes basically. And one of the things that they would do is exert some kind of federal zoning control over the local places. I saw a video from some probably Republican, a woman who was in the business, and she wanted you to know that it's a terrible idea for the federal government to tell states or localities what to do with their zoning because the federal government would not know what they needed more specifically locally. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Do you buy that the right place for zoning is locally?

You shouldn't, because what happens is they all do different jobs and they're all rogue. So if you have different zoning requirements in every town like we do — like if I'm walking distance, literally walking distance from different zoning requirements. Walking distance. I mean literally if I just walk in that direction I'll be in the town of Livermore in 20 minutes or something. And the rules are different. Now you try to hire a contractor and they have to learn the new rules for your town even if they've already built 100 homes. And our town has some of the strictest, dumbest ones.

Let me just give you one example. Here's one example from my town. When I built my house I had to put a wastewater treatment vault on my property. You've never even heard of that, have you? How many have you ever heard of that? Putting a wastewater treatment vault on my property. What did it cost? About $35,000. And what it was was a hole in the ground where all the wastewater — so we'd engineer the gutters and stuff so all the rainwater would come off the roof and go into little tunnels and it would all end up in this big hole in the ground at the end of my property. And then there would be a tree, a certain kind of tree that had to be planted so that the roots of the tree would be naturally filtering the wastewater before it got into the town's wastewater facilities. $35,000 and maintenance every year.

Now a few years later when I had to do maintenance on it as required by the approvals for my house, I went to look for somebody who was like an approver who could look at it and there was nobody there. There was nobody in the world who was in the business of approving it or examining it. And yet that was a requirement of building my house. So I contacted the town and I said there's nobody in the business of doing the thing you required me to do. And they said, oh don't worry about it, we don't have that requirement anymore. And I said what? They said yeah, yeah, we dropped that requirement. That's no longer in the code. And I said I just spent $35,000 to do this. How many other people spent $35,000 to do it? And they said I think it was just you.

So do you think that I like federal building control? Yes I do. Yes I do. Because I think the feds are far, far more likely to come up with a stable set of rules. Now of course they might have to modify it for your climate and your specific situation. But I could easily imagine the feds having let's say half a dozen different models that you could pick from for your building thing in your state that would just be easy to understand and wouldn't have in it — like I mean it was just monstrously difficult to get approval for my house from the town.