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Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

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Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#311

Post by miltondts »

hervature wrote: post #179
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #151

Covid has got me thinking about the government’s role in social welfare. Providing social welfare through money allows for people to misallocate the money or skim off the top of the money. For the vast majority of people their covid stimulation money did not go into their pockets, it went to their landlord or their mortgage holder resulting in a massive wealth transfer from public funds to banks and those who own lan…

How much food and what quality? Do I get to ask for tomahawk steaks every meal and an extra one to bring home to my dog? Is everyone entitled to an avocado or just those that live close to an avocado farm? There is no easy answer to this and you bet a government mandated system would be heavily lobbied to include/exclude certain things. For housing, do you get to decide where you live? Or does the government set up a…

This type of discourse seem to be more focused on affirming how this can't possibly work than on genuine interest in discussing the issue.

Imagine I propose that everyone should get access to free universal healthcare or education. You can make all these kinds of questions to defend how these things can't possible work and yet they do. Are these "perfect" in all instances? Of course not, but they are a net positive and much better than nothing.

The same can be implemented for the basic necessities. The best way to figure out what the really important questions are, is to implement a system and iterate on it.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#312

Post by Sharlin »

miltondts wrote: post #310
Sharlin wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to classify all zillions of goods offered by a modern market economy into “basic” vs “non-basic” necessities? Is triple-ply toilet paper basic? What about bananas? Beef? Coffee? A cellphone? A smartphone? After all, modern life is increasingly difficult without a Web terminal of some sort. Some luxuries become necessities over the years. It’s just utterly impossible to draw a line.

At least in Portugal, this is done in the form of lower taxes. Essential goods are at 6% VAT and the rest is 23%. Yes it's not perfect, but unlike how you paint this issue, it's far from difficult to implement.

Hmm. In Finland all foodstuffs (apart from alcohol) have the same reduced VAT rate, which is somewhat easy to arrange but of course doesn’t exactly match the essential/luxury division very well. Everything from noodles to caviar has the same reduced VAT rate.

Anyway, whether something costs 1.06x or 1.23x is not a vast difference, so VAT brackets can be a useful tool, crude as they are. It’s quite a different story when it’s about something being literally free or not. You also have the problem of deciding how to ration all of those free goods, given that market forces aren’t there to control demand.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#314

Post by daddylongstroke »

zapita wrote: post #297
jessaustin wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was version 2. Version 1 was the "great recession", when several investment banks found themselves insolvent after cluelessly underwriting an overvaluation of American homes. It had been their custom to play a sort of musical chairs with overvalued assets, unloading them on clients and other victims, but eventually they forgot how that game typically ends. After a small amount of public discussion, it was decide…

> “Representative government" seems fine until one looks more closely at who is actually represented. Why ruin an otherwise reasonable argument with an out-of-nowhere jab at representative democracy? If anything, without legitimate elected officials in charge, the problem would have been more acute.

Ahhh yes. The old "the-ones-who-caused-the-problems-will-fix-them-honest" routine. Never gets old, and it's been playing out for thousands of years!!! What a sale job.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#315

Post by [deleted] »

trentnix wrote: post #226
andrepd wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>government is doing the steering That under capitalism those who accumulate massive amounts of wealth can use that wealth to “buy” the state institutions to do their bidding, is precisely (one of the) problems in capitalism.

One way to address that problem is to prevent "state institutions" from being so powerful as being able to do anyone's bidding .

[deleted]

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#317

Post by daddylongstroke »

missedthecue wrote: post #194
birken wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the employees would much rather have been laid off to stick it to the asset holders.

I have come to realize that many people are haunted by the constant fear that someone somewhere might be making a profit. I think it's a great thing and a credit to our institutions that millions of citizens of my country weren't evicted last March and April. Who cares if landlords got paid for rent or if a bank received a mortgage payment?

>...Who cares if landlords got paid for rent...

Hmmm...unfortunately, most landlords are people who own a single rental, often the one they lived in previously that they cannot sell. By not bailing out landlords (not speaking of institutional investors here that buy up distressed mortgages in cash by the hundreds), you've hurt average-earning middle income citizens. So yes, with the moratoriums, you've transferred wealth from a chunk of the middle class to a different chunk of the middle and lower class.

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#318

Post by DangitBobby »

nradov wrote: post #296
bredren wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invitation Homes raises rents as much as possible. It seems unlikely a typical landlord would need to raise rent at the same rate because they maintain their own operations and have no duty to shareholders. An offer to buy from IH would need to beat IH’s own model for returns in such a substantial way that it would be overpriced and affect comparable home pricing in the area. Thus, it is not similar to making an unso…

Most landlords raise rent as much as possible. Invitation Homes can't charge more than the market rate; their costs are irrelevant.

I hear people say this, but it's definitely not been my personal experience. I've rented at places where the rates were incredibly reasonable and did not increase. One guy let me rent month-to-month for over a year without ever increasing rent. Is there evidence to suggest that private landlords are mustache twirling villains?

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#319

Post by daddylongstroke »

nly wrote: post #309
tracer4201 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we saying a rent payment is a “transfer of wealth”? I’m not invested in real estate, but I imagine many people in real estate were just as impacted. Don’t you likely need to pay towards a mortgage and put some aside for capital and day to day maintenance? Your comment is written as if a rent payment is a transfer from one person to directly to someone else’s savings account. I’m not convinced this is true.

It's the power of capital vs the power of income. If you have a high salary and no ability to save for a deposit then property can be unaffordable and you're stuck paying someone else's mortgage. If you have a 5% deposit saved and a high salary, you still can't afford a home because lots of people are in your position and have driven up house prices and rates and leverage available sucks. If you have 20-25% down and…

> If you have a 5% deposit saved and a high salary, you still can't afford a home because lots of people are in your position and have driven up house prices and rates and leverage available sucks.

I keep hearing this trope and reading about it. Not positive why it gets repeated. It doesn't take long to do a realtor.com or trulia search to find a shit-ton of affordable homes. It seems to me that, there's a certain class of people, many of which I gather hang out on HN, that don't have either a long enough lifetime behind them to possess an acute perspective or just outright completely have false expectations. My home value in the midwest hasn't risen in 15 years. My value actually decreased by 10K two years ago. Within 6 blocks of my house in SE WI, I can find about 80, 3bdr, single family houses for sale, many if not most under 120K. I'm looking at a 3bdr, 1bath now for 60K that I would love to fix up and turn into a rental. If you feel like 120-130K is not 'affordable' to someone with a 5% deposit saved and a "high salary", let me blow your mind. Nobody, and I mean, not a single person on my block makes more than 48K/year. Me and my wife bought our house for 124K, while making 28K/year jointly!

Re: Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid

#320

Post by daddylongstroke »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #65
ralph84 wrote: post #3

Directly via bailouts and indirectly via inflation, COVID was the biggest wealth transfer to the rich in history.

Most of the 99% are proud of being vaccinated, so they don't seem to have a problem with the situation.

Fajne imię! I agree, most of the 99% don't seem to be too disturbed by the hyperinflation. Actually, we've spent a record on durable goods last year with the handouts! Keep the machine printing! Brrrrr....
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