101–110 of 433 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Direct cash still has this effect. $1500 to subsidize rent that is $1500 to property owners.
Pay the landlord, and landlord gets the money and tenant gets evicted. Pay the tenant and the rent gets paid and no one gets evicted. We saw this with the 2009 mortgate crisis - banks got bailed out and evicted homeowners. Had we paid the homeowners, I suspect most would have just brought their mortage current.
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So, in your opinion, the "And then where did the money go?" question is entirely distinct from the "Did those investments have the desired impact for the desired audience, per the predefined criteria for success?" question? Who were we doing capital investment for, in hopes of them raising additional separately-accounted-for monies? https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-25893860 re: https://www.usaspending.gov/
Oh, are you talking about tracking the money after it's been loaned out? Like for a given dollar we can see that it was loaned to Company X, then paid to an employee, then spent on rent, then spent at a restaurant, etc. If that's what you mean then I agree it would be useful for studying the impacts of stimulus policies, although I think there are a lot of other privacy impacts we'd need to consider.
Like with banning encryption, the privacy impacts would be felt by the little people, and the big bad actors would be largely unaffected.
Anything other than direct cash transfers to individual humans is likely to have this effect. Institutions are simply always going to be able to navigate and take advantage of complex government programs better than real human beings. UBI or stfu. Time to try some trickle up economics. Also, for the love of god, let's stop prioritizing saving "jobs" that may or may not be necessary for civilization and start prioriti…
Utterly and laughably wrong. Anything other than basic education and viable community-level institutions is going to have this effect. Play stupid wealth transfer games and win zero dreamy wealth transfer prizes.
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Land lords still exist in a competitive market and can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion. One way to alleviate this problem is to have a harsher tax on vacant properties to punish using housing as a store of value and creating artificial scarcity in the market, e.g. like how the DeBeers corporation made diamonds artificially scarce and scammed the world for the past century selling a shiny rock.
The thought-out version of this is called Georgism. It proposes a (close to) 100% tax on the unimproved value of land. Economists agree the tax can't be passed on to renters, for reasons I can't articulate. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
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When I was a landlord I found it very difficult to even cover the mortgage, let alone cover association dues and maintenance. I would try to raise the rent a little in between tenants, and it would greatly reduce interest in the listing.
It sounds like the bank was doing to you what people are complaining about landlords doing to tenants.
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Please enlighten us what proud plan that is brazenly American would you have enacted to keep the country from collapsing when everything was closing?
Well, the best option at the time would have been to not lock down at all and just carry on as usual: lockdowns appear to have had almost no effect on Covid deaths ( https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... )
In that sense, it makes sense that much of the recompense goes to the people who were asked to shutter their businesses, put up signage and buy new equipment and reduce capacity, make their employees check vax cards at the door, etc.
"Relief" could be a misnomer for a fair payment in return for cooperation with a government lockdown program.
And no one was worried about "socialism" when the tax payers gave tons of cash to the rich. Certain people only seem to worry about "socialism" when it helps regular people.
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The thought-out version of this is called Georgism. It proposes a (close to) 100% tax on the unimproved value of land. Economists agree the tax can't be passed on to renters, for reasons I can't articulate. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
How do you define and evaluate unimproved value?
The bigger issue is with vacant properties being used as cash stores.
I think the right graph would compare rescue plan funds received by each income quantile against the actual income distribution. The better question it illustrates is roughly, was the inequality in the rescue plan funds distribution greater or less than the general income inequality?
In particular, if ordinarily roughly >50% of the income goes to the top 20% (I think that's true), and the graph in the article shows that maybe a bit less than 30% of the rescue plan funds went to the top 20% (>600B / 2.2T), then yes we should regard the rescue plan as benefitting the rich, but to a lesser degree than like, the whole rest of the economy.
If you want to complain about ways that we needlessly hand money to the rich, shouldn't we start with the ways which are most unequal? How about the fact that we distinguish capital gains from earned income? How about the mortgage interest deduction?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-househo...
https://www.brookings.edu/?simplechart=top-quintile-receives...
See fig 5 https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/substantial-income...