Fixing America

[shemp]

Over the next four years, as millions of people are deported, or die of starvation or preventable diseases, there'll be plenty of housing available.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Over the next four years, as millions of people are deported, or die of starvation or preventable diseases, there'll be plenty of housing available.

I expect a lot of them will be bought up by the wealthy, and then rented out to the masses. That way they can extract the money from them without giving up the assets themselves. The larger corporations might think to do that, and bring back company housing. Some of the oligarchs might enjoy being medieval liege lords and allow peasants to exchange labor for housing. It'll be very interesting.

 

[Thermal]

I'm saying it shouldn't be. Ideally we'd all have reasonably-priced homes, and our actual investments would be, well, actual investments. You don't think it would be better if a good house cost $150K and you had $500K in your retirement account, versus having to borrow money to buy that same house for $650K?

You're losing me, here. A house's worth is a reflection of the market value. You think it should be artificially deflated... but that wouldn't apply to other investments?

A house costs X. The actual lot value is the larger variable. Are you saying contractors like myself should be working for minimum wage to knock the price down? Not sure I'm on board with that.

Or are you saying property itself should be devalued? What if someone else thinks it's more valuable than dirt cheap? That's kind of how we got here.

 

[TragicMonkey]

You're losing me, here. A house's worth is a reflection of the market value. You think it should be artificially deflated... but that wouldn't apply to other investments?

A house costs X. The actual lot value is the larger variable. Are you saying contractors like myself should be working for minimum wage to knock the price down? Not sure I'm on board with that.

Or are you saying property itself should be devalued? What if someone else thinks it's more valuable than dirt cheap? That's kind of how we got here.

Calm down. I'm saying exactly and only this: homes should not be as expensive as they are. They are, though, despite my wishes, so we have to act accordingly. We're trapped.

But ideally they would not be, and more people could afford them. My grandfather, a high-school-educated blue collar worker, afforded a house, a stay-at-home wife, and three kids on a salary that even adjusting for inflation is less than a third of what I make now. There is no way his modern equivalent could own a home like that, or likely any home at all except perhaps the most dilapidated shack in a rural area which would not be where he could work his job from. The gap between average income and average house price is way, way larger than it was then.

And no, I don't have any idea on how to fix it. That doesn't stop me from recognizing something as a problem, though.

 

[Olmstead]

Keep taxing land owners until everyone has a home. Does everyone have a home yet? No? Okay, take some more money from land owners then.

 

[Norman Alexander]

? No, the point is that you don't want to have poverty concentrated in one area because it becomes a slum. If you require a certain percentage (say 10-20%) of housing everywhere be set aside for lower-income residents then you create opportunities for the poor to live in better areas, and their kids to attend better schools. The way this is typically done in the USA is with multifamily dwellings. Local communities can issue bonds to reduce the interest cost on the complex, which gives the developer a financial incentive to include the affordable component.

As it happens I worked in affordable housing for years and did the necessary supporting financial calculations to convert something like 1500 units in Florida from market rate to a mixture of market rate and affordable units (typically we were required to set aside either 20% of the units for families with incomes less than 90% of the poverty line or 10% of the units at less than 80% of the poverty line).

Trump's response to this would be to take over all your properties, toss out all the tenants, and rent them out again at exorbitant rates provided the new tenants were not black, brown, Jewish or multilingual. Those properties he could not rent would go to being tax-breaks. The whole schmeer would be one giant tax-break. Then he would claim he was "helping the poor".

 

[Norman Alexander]

Over the next four years, as millions of people are deported, or die of starvation or preventable diseases, there'll be plenty of housing available.

All covered in water due to rising water levels due to climate change. So the poor get to live IN the swamps, not NEXT TO the swamps.

 

[acbytesla]

Houses are overpriced because supply doesn't meet demand. Basic free market economics. And it doesn't meet demand because when the homes were built they became zoned for single family residences. Restricting supply. The essence of the government interfering in the market. That caused the shortage. That made the homes a good investment. But it totally screwed future generations.

The ONLY ways to deal with the problem is start building or start killing off a chunk of the population and therefore reducing demand. We absolutely NEED to start building.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

The ONLY ways to deal with the problem is start building or start killing off a chunk of the population and therefore reducing demand. We absolutely NEED to start building.

I mean, the former administration did kill off a million Americans. They took office just in time for the bird flu to become a pandemic, plus they'll be deporting as many illegals brown people and other undesirables as they can. Then factor in all the moderates and liberals and I-didn't-think-the-leopards-I-voted-for-would-eat-my-face people who will flee for Canada, Mexico, and Europe!

Housing prices will plummet as cities become ghost towns! Make America Abandoned Again!

 

[acbytesla]

I mean, the former administration did kill off a million Americans. They took office just in time for the bird flu to become a pandemic, plus they'll be deporting as many illegals brown people and other undesirables as they can. Then factor in all the moderates and liberals and I-didn't-think-the-leopards-I-voted-for-would-eat-my-face people who will flee for Canada, Mexico, and Europe!

Housing prices will plummet as cities become ghost towns! Make America Abandoned Again!

I reluctantly gave you a thumbs up. But I'm afraid you're not that far off. Especially if Trump starts a war. Kill off a generation of our youth combined with old people who will starve to death and can't afford medical care.

I assume, maybe wrongly that at some point America will wake up and start addressing our systemic problems. And housing is one of them. Medical care is another. We are never going to solve problems like manufacturing and world competition if we don't.

 

[Solitaire]

True. But it is an investment. For a lot of people, they buy the house thinking they can raise a family in it and then when the kids grow up, they can downsize, move to a smaller place or move to a place with lower property values and pocket the difference.

That said, it makes things much harder for the next generation.

Yeah. I didn't hear anything about Trump changing the laws on that.

An outdated IRS tax law that’s unchanged since the Clinton era is making the U.S. housing crisis worse.

 

[acbytesla]

Yeah. I didn't hear anything about Trump changing the laws on that.

An outdated IRS tax law that’s unchanged since the Clinton era is making the U.S. housing crisis worse.

Me either. Trump says he was going to end the Ukraine Russia war within 48 hours. He didn't. Or has ever suggested how he might do this. Guess he's not God eh? You cant exactly make an incantations and voila solve others intractable positions. Trump said he would solve inflation. Now doesn't give a crap. Trump said he was going to lower gas prices to $2.00. It has only been going up.

Is Trump doing anything that will solve any real problem that the average American faces? Do you think making it harder to sign up for the Affordable Care Act helps us? How about freezing Medicaid? Which he did and rescinded once he saw the backlash on that.

Instead Trump is bad mouthing every American ally and has started a trade war with Mexico and Canada. Threatened Denmark to hand over Greenland. Threatened Panama. None of these actions will help the average American. Tarriffs will not resolve inflation. The last time the US attempted to deal with American economic problems with tarrifs was during the great depression and it worsened it. Almost unanimously, economists are condemning Trump's tarriffs.

From my perspective, that tax exemption shouldn't exist. That is what turned homes into investments, instead of places to live. Increasing the exemption maintains the idea that a home is an investment. It turns the middle class into speculators. Buy a house, flip it in a couple of years and do it again. All tax free. Increasing the tax exemption makes it more attractive to sell. Which is great for them. But is does nothing about housing supply. I'm really not interested in heating up the housing market. I'm interested in solving the housing crisis and creating affordable living.

If you think I'm wrong about the tax exemption, please tell me what you think I'm missing.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

Calm down. I'm saying exactly and only this: homes should not be as expensive as they are. They are, though, despite my wishes, so we have to act accordingly. We're trapped.

But ideally they would not be, and more people could afford them. My grandfather, a high-school-educated blue collar worker, afforded a house, a stay-at-home wife, and three kids on a salary that even adjusting for inflation is less than a third of what I make now. There is no way his modern equivalent could own a home like that, or likely any home at all except perhaps the most dilapidated shack in a rural area which would not be where he could work his job from. The gap between average income and average house price is way, way larger than it was then.

And no, I don't have any idea on how to fix it. That doesn't stop me from recognizing something as a problem, though.

The biggest thing that sentence says is that official figures are way off the pace when it comes to inflation. But that is not at all surprising when you realise that most staple goods have been taken out of inflation calculations.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

Yeah. I didn't hear anything about Trump changing the laws on that.

An outdated IRS tax law that’s unchanged since the Clinton era is making the U.S. housing crisis worse.

And if you believe that Traitor in Chief Trampy is going to fix that, there's some magic beans I want to sell you.

 

[The Don]

The biggest thing that sentence says is that official figures are way off the pace when it comes to inflation. But that is not at all surprising when you realise that most staple goods have been taken out of inflation calculations.

Utter garbage. Staple goods are in there but they're weighted less than they were a long time ago because people spend so much less on so-called staples.

In 1960 close to 20% of disposable income was spent on food, now it's under 10% with food at home dropping from 14% to less than 6%.

The basket of goods and services used to calculate inflation is constantly changing because what we spend money on is constantly changing. Back in the 1970s you couldn't spend money on mobile phone plans, streaming service subscriptions or broadband contracts because they simply did not exist. I suppose you could ignore these and solely focus on the price of bread, milk and buggy whips so as to provide a direct comparison with 1890 prices but that doesn't make sense to me.

 

[The Don]

Calm down. I'm saying exactly and only this: homes should not be as expensive as they are. They are, though, despite my wishes, so we have to act accordingly. We're trapped.

But ideally they would not be, and more people could afford them. My grandfather, a high-school-educated blue collar worker, afforded a house, a stay-at-home wife, and three kids on a salary that even adjusting for inflation is less than a third of what I make now. There is no way his modern equivalent could own a home like that, or likely any home at all except perhaps the most dilapidated shack in a rural area which would not be where he could work his job from. The gap between average income and average house price is way, way larger than it was then.

And no, I don't have any idea on how to fix it. That doesn't stop me from recognizing something as a problem, though.

The UK faces a similar issue and at one level it's a matter of supply and demand, where there is ample employment demand for housing far outstrips supply, but the perception that your primary residence is a source of wealth also helps to skew the market (especially when politicians recognise this and apply incentives to support the market and to continue to inflate that bubble).

It's a complicated, possibly unsolvable problem. One way to start to address it is to foster demand elsewhere by creating jobs but there' no guarantee that will work.

 

[Ethan Thane Athen]

The UK faces a similar issue and at one level it's a matter of supply and demand, where there is ample employment demand for housing far outstrips supply, but the perception that your primary residence is a source of wealth also helps to skew the market (especially when politicians recognise this and apply incentives to support the market and to continue to inflate that bubble).

It's a complicated, possibly unsolvable problem. One way to start to address it is to foster demand elsewhere by creating jobs but there' no guarantee that will work.

Indeed. And in Europe, aren't we outliers with the majority of Europeans not owning houses but renting being more the norm?

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

P

Utter garbage. Staple goods are in there but they're weighted less than they were a long time ago because people spend so much less on so-called staples.
In 1960 close to 20% of disposable income was spent on food, now it's under 10% with food at home dropping from 14% to less than 6%.
The basket of goods and services used to calculate inflation is constantly changing because what we spend money on is constantly changing. Back in the 1970s you couldn't spend money on mobile phone plans, streaming service subscriptions or broadband contracts because they simply did not exist. I suppose you could ignore these and solely focus on the price of bread, milk and buggy whips so as to provide a direct comparison with 1890 prices but that doesn't make sense to me.

Only if you're a 1%er. Everybody else's disposable income is geing are up by essentials

 

[The Don]

P

Only if you're a 1%er. Everybody else's disposable income is geing are up by essentials

That simply isn't true.

The weighted basket of goods and services reflects expenditure for a typical household not just the 1%.

That's not to say that a lot of people haven't been hit by a cost of living crisis but the inflation figures reflected that.

 

[Planigale]

One problem is when the US attacks its own successful businesses. Opiate addicts used to be able to rely on US produced opiates (oxycodone) and the profits from the sale of the opiates was kept in the US. The drugs were produced to a high and consistent quality. The profit was taxed. Attacking US based manufacture hasn't stopped people being addicted they have just moved to using imported fentanyl, often of variable quality. The profits are off shored, and the US has lost the tax. The US needs substitution therapy, replace Chinese fentanyl with US oxycodone. Use a hypothecated opiuate tax to fund drug addiction services.

Opioid Use Disorder

In 2017, more than 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, including illicit drugs and prescription opioids, a 2-fold increase in a decade.

www.psychiatry.org

(This post is intended to be satirical)