The Soviets would have understood this. I don't

RichardR said:
To a minimal level, yes. No laws force property owners to improve their buildings, though.

I'll take your word on that regarding California. That's not the case in some states, or at least municipalities, if the improvements relate to fire, electrical, heating, or plumbing safety.

Note, I'm not talking about replacing unsafe or malfunctioning systems, either, I'm talking about installing new stuff based on the fears of tenants.

Rent control laws, however, may cause some property owners from putting off some essential repairs. That's wrong, of course, but it is a possible consequence or rent control.
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In some places where control has become onerous, owners simply walk away from buildings at some point, leaving them to decay as they will.

Parts of NYC were having that problem for quite a while. I'm not sure how it's resolved lately, having moved 2996 miles west of there.
 
gnome said:


Sufficient... well one can argue about the ideal teacher-to-student ratio... what would you propose is best, for example?

Regarding textbooks--sufficient = the student actually has the textbook for each class.

Regarding classrooms--sufficient = they have a place to seat all the students during the day without adding on "temporary" portable rooms that become permanent.
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California has that, the problems is not money spent it's how it is used. LAUSD(Los Angeles Unified School District) is an awful bureaucracy machine that wastes money. Even with that the schools are not that bad. Aside from all the federal and state funding for schools California has 6 Billion dollars for construction, fixing and remodeling of schools. That pretty much means all the money can go to books, teachers and administration. And as Tmy said on another thread education is used as a scapegoat and once can always point to a child and says they are not learning as much as they should.
 
Grammatron said:


It will be the day when someone can finally tell me what the heck fully funded means in dollars.
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I would assume that it will vary from area to area what the actual cost is, but when you have schools being condemned as unsafe structues, there is a problem. The lack of computers and other modern marvels is another problem, as are textbooks in some schools. Not to mention the whole safety issue.

In my state the issue is that education is based upon local property taxes , so you can a school distcrict with 20,000 per pupil per year next to a school district with 5,000 per pupil per year. It doesn't help that we have a stste government that argues over what "education as the top priority of the state ' actualy means.
 
Art Vandelay said:
In an equilibrium, rent control doesn't actually decrease the amount of rent paid. Basic economics tells us that the market rate is the one that maximizes social gain. Any other rate is non-optimal. With rent control, landowners will anticipate loss, and they will increase initial rents to compensate. The result is that renters end up paying the same amount, but with a large portion shifted to the beginning of the lease, and with short term renters subsidising long term renters.

"It will be a fine day when education is fully funded and the army has to have a bake sale... "
Defense is funded by the federal government, while education funds come mostly from local sources. Interesting comment on grass-roots democracy, isn't it? Schools have bake sales because people like them better than taxes. If we got rid of what people like, how would that make it a fine day?
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It's a little more complex than that.

Rent control is a price control, and history has shown, and shown again, that price controls do not keep prices down, except for short periods. In fact, price controls usually have the opposite effect of what was intended, raising prices in the long term above reasonable market levels by creating shortages in supply.

I can think of two ways in which this shortage is created:

1) When people are living in a rent-controlled place, they tend to stay there, that is, to hoard their apartments, effectively removing these units from the market. There are, therefore, a smaller number of homes actually available.

2) Fewer individuals will wish to buy property or construct new property for rental if they feel their rents will be held down.
 
Grammatron said:
It will be the day when someone can finally tell me what the heck fully funded means in dollars.
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It means that you can always complain of underfunding, no matter how many funds are actually allocated. ;)
 
RichardR said:
Nowhere is perfect.
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Didn't you mean erewhon? :D

As to price controls, I believe that they only serve a point when they expose serious gouging.

In general, they just cause a shortage, and restrict investment, and turn out to be disasters in the long run. They prevent money from circulating, basically, instead of encouraging it.
 
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