The middle class continues to get raped and fleeced by corporations while our governments do nothing. This is how America dies.
If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#132If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often wit…
I agree that we need to stop treating houses as investments, because they're a basic fundamental need everyone has. IMO, the problem could be fixed by having stricter laws prohibiting people who aren't residents from owning homes in another country. The requirement to become a resident is only to live in a country for over 6 months out of the year. Before that, you can just rent. We could also do things like limit th…
Something like this would effectively bar any person born in India who tried to immigrate to the U.S. in the last ~5 years from ever buying a house, unless they got married to a citizen. Broad strokes, I agree that residency requirements might help with reducing speculative investment, but maybe phrased in terms of how long you're in the country, not literally permanent residency as a legal threshold.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#133If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often wit…
Do not miss the bigger thing.
A generation ago : trade policy => offshoring of shippable jobs
This generation : monetary policy => institutional ownership of the common home
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#134Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#135Probably worth pointing out this twitter account is promoting the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. To me that casts suspicion on their other assertions.
I follow this account and others like it because it allows one to be exposed to things like the idea that COVID leaked from a lab a year ago. Skepticism is warranted in all cases, of course, but I think it's extremely healthy to keep in tune with a variety of subcommunities who are in and of themselves skeptics of many mainstream narratives.
I don't understand how you can manage, honestly. The absolute swarm of conspiracies around COVID and the election overwhelmed me and i wasn't even trying to stay informed on them. Furthermore, even if i was trying to stay informed on them it seems like a full time job trying to discern the "maybe not entirely moronic" conspiracies to the completely batshit ones. Most are batshit, it seems.
Sounds exhausting.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#136If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often wit…
I already pay a Land Value Tax to my town.
Only partially true. You pay a *property* tax, which does sometimes have a land component to it, but mostly is a tax on the purchase price of your home.
A Georgist-style land tax proposes a tax on solely the land, so a 2000sq-ft lot is the same regardless of a $10mil home or not.
This would require an appraiser that regularly re-evaluates the value of the land-- but we already do that! But with homes.
Furthermore, a property tax still leaves open lots of tax-shenanigans. "Look, my home is actually worth half the appraised price, thus I should be taxed half." It's harder to do so with land, since you can't easily "hide"/play tricks with its value from a regulator.
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#137If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often wit…
I agree that we need to stop treating houses as investments, because they're a basic fundamental need everyone has. IMO, the problem could be fixed by having stricter laws prohibiting people who aren't residents from owning homes in another country. The requirement to become a resident is only to live in a country for over 6 months out of the year. Before that, you can just rent. We could also do things like limit th…
So, also make holiday homes also illegal?
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#138If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often wit…
I already pay a Land Value Tax to my town.
There's a distinction in [1]:
> Common property taxes include land value, which usually has a separate assessment. Thus, land value taxation already exists in many jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions have attempted to rely more heavily on it. In Pennsylvania certain cities raised the tax on land value while reducing the tax on improvement/building/structure values.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#United_States
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#139This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…
Not arguing with you, but are you suggesting that raising mortgage rates and/or stopping the printing of money will get rid of the Blackrocks and make housing affordable to the working class?
The argument might be that in that event, housing becomes less attractive as an investment to the Blackrocks of the world, and they have alternative lower risk sources of return in a higher interest rate environment?
Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
#140Probably worth pointing out this twitter account is promoting the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. To me that casts suspicion on their other assertions.
They also push the idea of "The Great Reset" in that thread, which is another conspiracy theory that is tied up with FEMA putting people in camps in abandoned Walmarts, Bill Gates chipping us through the Covid-19 vaccine, and Q-anon.
As soon as they brought up "The Great Reset" I found the whole thread lost credibility.