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Just Be Rich

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Re: Just Be Rich

#641

Post by sbacic »

bouncycastle wrote: post #559
sbacic wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 70s and 80s even 90s someone on a teacher's salary could own their own home in a major world city - say London. You can still have that. All you need is a real estate tax. But nobody wants that. People don't want cheaper homes, they want to become part of the home-owner elite and get their own appreciating asset.

No, tax won't help. The reason is because the population grew and the amount of land available stayed the same. (Google London population growth charts).

How much of the increased housing costs is due to growth and how much due to lack of real-estate taxes?

Real estate prices are going up everywhere - including places with negative demographic trends.

Re: Just Be Rich

#642

Post by wing-_-nuts »

wayanon wrote: post #557
johndevor wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Why is there no car shortage? Because politicians can't limit car production.

But politicians can (and should in my opinion) make car ownership less attractive.

Only by making public transit more available and reliable.

Re: Just Be Rich

#643

Post by opportune »

rocqua wrote: post #252
kjcharles wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem is the supply of housing hasn't kept up with that demand due to artificial limits placed on the market. Single-family zoning has made it illegal to build more of the dense housing that's needed in cities today. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...

Note, that kind of zoning is US specific issue. The situation zoning wise is quite different in Europe. At the same time Europe also has a housing crisis.

Don’t most European cities have pretty strict building height restrictions? Of course that’s not as bad as banning multi family housing complexes completely but it does seem like basically the same core issue

Re: Just Be Rich

#644

Post by McScroogy »

sanedigital wrote: post #538
McScroogy wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rich outbidding poor people is not what is causing a housing shortage. There are only so many houses a rich person can occupy. Even if you assume that every rich person keeps a number of spare houses, there are not enough rich people to cause a housing shortage.

It’s not just “rich people,” it’s “wealth.” Speculation in there housing market is a widely accepted contributor to rising housing prices: https://www.princeton.edu/~wxiong/papers/Speculation.pdf

[flagged]

Re: Just Be Rich

#645

Post by gre »

TheTrotters wrote: post #123
ac29 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World population crossed 4B in the 1970s and 5B in the 1980s, now we are about to cross 8B in the next few years. I agree with your point about real estate becoming more heavily securitized, as well as being used as a method to escape capital controls. But, you cant ignore the fact that there are a lot more people both rich and working class competing for those major world city houses than there were 40 or 50 years a…

The obvious solution is to build more housing. We know how to do that! The obstacle is politics, not technology or economics.

The obvious solution is to make renting out properties illegal.

Re: Just Be Rich

#646

Post by pjc50 »

MikeUt wrote: post #618
nindalf wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you inherited a home in the US valued at $2 million. You would pay 2% of that ($40,000) as property taxes, every year . If you can't afford to pay the tax, you would sell the house and pocket the $2 million. Is this so terrible? Doesn't seem to have stopped people investing in property.

That's buying a new house every 50 years. That's re-building all of the wealth your family spent generations accumulating, every 50 years. That's a direct disincentive to saving money and frugality - the more you save, the bigger your tax gets, while your income stays the same .

> re-building all of the wealth your family spent generations accumulating, every 50 years.

Correct, that's the point.

> the more you save, the bigger your tax gets, while your income stays the same.

Only if you're a completely useless investor. Most people's income increases as their wealth increases. That's part of the problem. Especially the "r > g" question: are you growing the pie or simply sitting on a larger share?

On the other hand, this can and should be irrelevant to the average family. Start the wealth tax at $1m, say.

Re: Just Be Rich

#647

Post by greyhound »

feoren wrote: post #120
Barrin92 wrote: post #49

I'm just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself >" People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources,…

It's so weird that you seem to be kinda agreeing with the article while at the same time quoting some Ayn-Randian, hyper-libertarian, "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help" scare-tactic nonsense. Can we kill this idea that the spooky government helping a poor person is some sort of tyrannical insult to them? The government helps rich people all day long -- even the most bootstrapped businessman still uses gov…

Such a privilege to have no idea how the Government can execute millions of its citizens having no doubt that they are paving the way to a Better Tomorrow.

Re: Just Be Rich

#648

Post by [deleted] »

mdorazio wrote: post #606
timwaagh wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands we already have wealth tax (capital gains tax, but doesn't care whether you gained or not). It's nothing particularly disruptive. We still have the most wealth inequality in all the world. It might be a bit pointless to tax wealth in addition to capital gains though. You could just raise the former instead.

I think you need to revisit your assumption about wealth inequality in The Netherlands. It’s on par with that of most of Europe, significantly lower than in the US [1]. [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rank...

[deleted]

Re: Just Be Rich

#649

Post by ameister14 »

laurent92 wrote: post #605
adriancr wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. Corruption is an incredible poverty multiplier, combined with debauched and half-useless is just insane. Living in a society led by such people isn't fair by any means. Arrogant new wealth is 100x better then old corrupt wealth that only seeks to entrench itself and friends. New wealth in…

Entrenched money stabilizes the world. Imagine putting 10% of the billionaires of the world on a boat, those who pull the strings of their empires to keep their nations into status-quo, and imagine the boat sinks. A year later, all those entrenched interests dematerialize, fewer powers hold people together, diplomacy isn’t as balanced as it has been when billionaires weighed in, and war starts. That’s the story of th…

I mean, that's a gross oversimplification and while a neat story, it's really the same as saying rising CEO wages resulted in a lowering of measles cases across the US because they started going up as measles went down.

You clearly haven't studied WWI or its causes or you'd realize that the entrenched interests were responsible for the spread of the war in the first place. It's the opposite of what you're saying happened.

Re: Just Be Rich

#650

Post by twic »

kgantchev wrote: post #440
twic wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this company is growing at the rates PG says it is, then the existing investors should be happy to buy more of the stock.

But the existing investors are the ones whose wealth is being taken and being put up on the market. :) So who is going to buy the existing investor's wealth? Are they just going to buy each other's wealth?

Where do VCs get the money to invest in follow-on rounds? Same place.
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