Speaking Of ...

Houses falling, perhaps not the actual edifices themselves, but their "value" may be circling the drain. (As it will be a cold day in hell — current temp in the bunker, w/ heat on: 76°F — before we wade through all the stats & graphs in the item, realize that we're going by the headline alone.)

Was buying that house for a mortgage deduction worth it, suckers? Megan McArdle weighs in, preëmpting anticipated, "But Megan, how does this affect YOU?" questions from her Megan-obsessed commentariat.

Given that we just bought a house a few months ago, I'm sure this post will inspire a couple of readers to ask whether we regret that decision. The answer is that no, we don't, for several reasons:

1. We always viewed buying a house as a consumption decision, not an investment decision: we wanted to own a house a little bit for the forced savings, but mostly so that we could get the house exactly the way we liked it. We knew that process would be expensive, and would come with a bunch of hassles, an expectation that has already been borne out by our experience trying to get the chimney guy to call us back so that we can give him thousands of dollars to rebuild our chimney and flue. But that decision has been more than vindicated by our ability to fix up the kitchen the way we want it.

As opposed to fixing the kitchen down?