Congressman from New York says President has shown "remarkable compromise"...

[Walk away]

11. Everything is more expensive here. I live in tiny a two bedroom cottage.

My house is less than 700 square feet on a small piece of property. My yearly taxes are currently over $9,000 a year and (even in this market) my tiny 80 yr old, one bathroom, hardly updated house in a blue collar neighborhood is going for about $350,000 to $400,000. A normal 3 bedroom house in Northern Bergen Cty is going to run at least $500,000 and taxes can be $20,000 or 30,000 a year. Even my health care costs more. My premiums for the same company and the same policy is almost a thousand dollars more than it would be if I were a county away. That is because it is more expensive to do anything here.

If you live in the NYC suburbs and make $30,000 a year and single...you cannot afford to live alone in a safe neighborhood. You are barely scraping by. If you have four kids and making that kind of money you are in trouble and most likely on food stamps.

I have a friend who just bought a house in the suburbs of Dallas. It is in mint condition, three times the size of my house and cost less than a third of mine.

I always think about my friend Dan who sold his 2 bedroom condo in Basking Ridge and moved to Cincinnati for his job (where he was paid the same salary as here). He sent me a photo of his huge house with a built in pool with the caption "Living like a Rock star!".