How to fix the housing problem?

There are doubts about the authenticity of the case, and she only had an occasional cigarette.

There is no safe level of exposure to cigarette smoke, whereas modest sun exposure allows the body to synthesize vitamin D.

 

It's not for no reason.

Google "Pigovian tax" and start reading.

Freedom to sell thalidomide, too...? It's a perfectly safe and effective pain reliever -- unless you have recently become pregnant.

 

she only had a couple cigarettes a day towards the end of her life

regardless she smoked almost 100 years of her life and lived well over that

cigarettes in moderation are fine, like the sun, too much is not better

 

well at least you admit it's hurting the poor, you just think it's for a valid reason


"'World's Oldest Man' Is 114 Years Old, Smokes Every Day"

https://www.newsweek.com/worlds-oldest-man-guinness-world-record-smoking-tobacco-fredie-blom-947687

smokers just keep taking the title of the longest living humans, why not a non-smoker?

can you imagine if a non-smoker had these titles, anti-smokers would be shoving it in smokers faces every chance they got

the key commonality is moderate smoking, not excessive smoking

 

He's sort of correct. He's referring to the Henry George theory of economics. However, we still need "paying for the privilege" as a form of proper economic rationing.
The question will simply be where do those payments go to (i.e. if there are taxes on that property).

This is the fairest and most efficient way to do it.

 

Absolutely. Abolish privilege where possible, but it is not possible to abolish the privilege of secure, exclusive land tenure and still have a functioning economy above the hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding level. Market allocation of that privilege by repayment to the community of the unimproved rental value of the land is both the most efficient and the only just way to do it.

It's actually more a question of one payment or two. You could just pay for government once, directly, with a voluntary, market-based, beneficiary-pay, value-for-value transaction when you want exclusive access to the economic advantages available at a particular location. Or you could pay twice: once in taxes on your economic activity to fund desirable public services and infrastructure, and then again in land rent to an idle landowner for his permission to access the desirable public services and infrastructure your taxes just paid for.

Right: paying the community that provides them the market price for the advantages you deprive everyone else of, and not paying an idle parasite for doing and contributing exactly nothing.

 

You keep suggesting that low income earners who do the hard work involved in acquiring property, are somehow 'privileged'. As though it's all good times and high rolling. Your position is absurd.

 

LOL .. you lost that one big time, Bud

 

The scrimping and saving is just the work involved in this particular ambition. Every ambition needs 'toil', to be realised.

That you think there should never be toil in life is very revealing.

 

1) The poor can't afford to smoke, obviously.

2) No one is 'hurt' buy not smoking.

3) I don't give too craps about taxation. I'd much rather see recipients of public money tested for use of tobacco/alcohol/drugs etc and disqualified if found to be imbibing. If you want to indulge vices, pay for it yourself.

4) Once again, if you can afford to pay for cigarettes without compromising your financial obligations, smoke all day. If you're not on any kind of Govt assistance, go nuts. If you can afford to pay for the healthcare potentials without recourse to public health, go crazy .. smoke your head off. My ONLY objection is to people receiving any kind of public monies, spending it on vices. That should automatically disqualify them.

 

nope, I speak reality, but you can deny it all you want

 

so you want to hurt the poor more if someone helps them through a stressful situation like losing their job with a night out and drinks or a smoke?

 

I have to ask .. are you actually serious?

You realise that everyone chooses different methods of managing stress, right? So we're ALL obliged by social and personal decency, to choose only those methods we can afford. Further, how in hell does it help stress levels to waste money, instead of using it to get out of the stressful situation? That's idiotic. Blowing your last $50 on a night out is the action of a child or a crazy person. A responsible person would try to make that $50 last as long as possible, by not blowing a cent of it on self-indulgence.

More importantly ... if that $50 is PUBLIC MONEY, you are a thief and a cheat. Working stiffs fund you with the intention of helping you escape poverty, so if you drop that ball you are taking money under false pretences. Find a better way to handle your damned stress .. like poor people all over the world have to do. Go for a walk, listen to some pretty music, take a nap, put extra chili in your beans. Do something that doesn't cost the public, nor your health (which if you're poor, will ultimately cost the public also).

 

yes, if someone loses their job and their friend wants to take them out for drinks, smokes, a joint, whatever .... they should not be denied help as you wanted to happen

 

You're literally unbelievable. I sure hope you don't consider yourself a champion of the poor, because you're throwing them under the bus to hog resources for entitled cheats.

 

you're the one wanting them to pay more taxes and take away their benefits if a friend buys them a drink, a smoke or something... you're the one that is literally unbelievable

 

No, it's the extra work involved in carrying greedy, privileged parasites on your back while you pursue that ambition.

There's the toil that is necessary to produce result you want, and then here is the extra toil needed to pay a greedy, privileged parasite for permission to perform the necessary toil. I'm talking about that extra toil, which you falsely claim does not exist.

That you feel you have to resort to such absurd and disingenuous fabrications about what I have plainly written in clear, simple, grammatical English is far more revealing.

 

See? You ALWAYS have to disingenuously try to change the subject from wrongful property in land to rightful property in the fruits of one's labor. ALWAYS. You have no other form of "argument."

Only after they have acquired the privilege (e.g., a government-issued and -enforced land deed) from its previous owner. The hard work is mostly BECAUSE they are working to become privileged.

You made that up. It's very difficult to scramble from the treadmill up onto the escalator it powers. But once on the escalator, the privileged are borne upward at their leisure by the toil of those still on the treadmill that powers it.

Because it's not my position. It's a position you made up and then falsely and disingenuously attributed to me because you have no facts or logic to offer. It's always the same. ALWAYS.

 

1) Bullcrap. It takes continuous effort and self-discipline to retain private property, for the vast majority of us. You don't buy a modest family home and then instantly become a billionaire. You continue to work for it, knowing that at some point - possibly/probably not even in your own lifetime - your 'collective' will benefit from that small piece of security going forward. There is no 'privilege' involved .. it's all hard yards to a single end - physical security for the family. Very few property owners are in it to become billionaires. Most of us just want to keep our kids sheltered, and protect them from the vicissitudes of 'fee for service' (aka rented) housing. And the 'work' of keeping the property doesn't end even after we own it outright ... because there are very distinct limitations to ownership as opposed to renting. There is zero mobility, all repairs and maintenance are on us, and we're stuck with the physical limitations of the building or space we've purchased. My kids might not ever have to pay rent, but to avoid paying rent they have to live wherever our properties are, and in whatever conditions those properties allow. They can personally afford to rent in much better locations, and in much nicer properties - for example. Neither is 'worse', it's all personal preference. You either want the security of ownership, or you want the freedoms and mobility that go with renting.

2) It's very ****ing difficult to keep forking out rent for an entire lifetime, too. Orders of magnitude more expensive, and still being paid til the day you die. Not only that, but you don't have to get your hands dirty because you're paying someone else to do all the maintenance etc. You want to talk about privilege ... that's where you'll find it when it comes to the average citizen. Few of us are so rich that we can afford to pay off someone else's mortgage without needing even a cent of that to come back to us. In fact, it's more like paying off several strangers' mortgages - when it's over a lifetime. That's some serious privilege .. being able to throw away millions of dollars like that ... millions which could have gone to your kids. All just to avoid the hard work of ownership .. that's heavy heavy privilege.

 

Notice that you always have to try to change the subject from land to property because you know that you cannot defend private property in land.

Only while they are paying off the mortgage. That proves the effort and self-discipline are caused by being in debt, not by owning property. See how easily I always prove your fallacious and disingenuous bull$#!+ is fallacious and disingenuous bull$#!+?

Because you know that you have no facts or logic to offer and never will, you always have to resort to absurd and disingenuous strawman fallacies by just makin' $#!+ up and then falsely attributing it to me. It's always the same. And it proves that YOU KNOW your beliefs are false and evil. You are big on people exercising choice, right? Well that's a choice that you have made to serve evil rather than good.

No you don't. You just ride up on the escalator powered by others' labor, charging them full market value for your permission to access the opportunities government, the community and nature provide:

"The most comfortable, but also the most unproductive way for a capitalist to increase his fortune, is to put all monies in sites and await that point in time when a society, hungering for land, has to pay his price." -- Andrew Carnegie

Why can't you ever remember that I have already proved many times that all your fallacious and disingenuous filth is fallacious and disingenuous filth?

Of course one can benefit by being legally entitled to abrogate others' rights without making just compensation, whether through land deeds or slave deeds. It goes without saying that a license to steal will benefit those who own it.

You know I have proved that is false. Repeating a bald falsehood does not make it any less bald or false. In this context, a privilege is a legal entitlement to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation. So by definition, a land title deed is indisputably a privilege.

GARBAGE. It is a way for rich, greedy, privileged parasites to steal from everyone else. See Carnegie, above.

Notice that you always have to try to change the subject from land to property.

Were you under an erroneous impression that that could somehow be relevant?

There are certainly advantages to owning your home and having a yard when you have young kids. But the exorbitant, increasing, and unsustainable subsidy to landownership that you continue to rationalize and justify means that families with young kids are the very last people who can afford to own a home. You like it that way, you want to force families with young children to be renters by keeping landowner privilege intact, and thus unaffordable to them. You want only a handful of rich, greedy, privileged parasites to be able to afford to own a home without toiling and scrimping for decades to fill landowners' and mortgage lenders' pockets in return for zero (0) contribution. You hate the idea of home ownership being readily available to the majority for a few months' after-tax wages, because that doesn't punish them enough for not having chosen rich, privileged parents.

Your beliefs are despicable and utterly evil.

You always have to try to change the subject from land to property.

You know that is false. See Carnegie.

See Carnegie, above, for the refutation of your evil, disingenuous filth.

That's because you own the improvements, not because you own the land. The same applies to owning a house on leased land. You stand refuted, as always when you presume to dispute with me.

Economic research has established that high home ownership rates damage the economy by making labor less flexible and mobile. But that's just because the land is so expensive since owning it is so heavily subsidized.

Having your right to liberty forcibly stripped from you and given to the privileged as their private property is not a "personal preference."

I want the security of having my rights without having to pay a greedy, privileged parasite full market value for his permission to exercise them.

Of course. It's hard to run the race to the end while carrying parasites on your back the whole way. That is kinda the point. But at each step of the race, it is harder to get the parasite off than to just take another step. The parasites count on that.

No, only about double.

Being paid to whom? Maybe someone who holds a privilege of charging you for what government, the community and nature provide?

Nothing to do with owning land, as the same applies to a house on leased land.

Garbage and you know it.

Huh?? It is precisely the poor who end up doing precisely that! Give your head a shake.

Being robbed of millions is not a privilege, and you know it. You are talking absurd and disingenuous garbage.

If landowners had not stolen it.

There is no work at all in ownership, as Carnegie, above, just got through proving to you.

Disgraceful.

 

I'm of the opinion you don't understand the issue(s).

That is a patently false and baseless claim for any number of reasons.

Perhaps for reasons of propaganda and disinformation you failed or refused to acknowledge that the size of today's houses are double, triple, or quadruple the size of homes in 1950.

An honest, ethical and moral person not hellbent on disseminating propaganda and disinformation would compare cost-per-square-foot.

When you compare cost-per-square-foot, your false claim of 1000% vanishes into thin air.

I would also point out that a home in 1950 did come with a garage. It may have had a carport, but that is not a garage. All of your homes today come with 2- or 3-car garages. Granted, garages are not calculated as part of the living space, but garages occupy space and they do increase the price of a home.

Your use of averages is also deceptive and misleading.

There isn't one single housing market in the US. There are, in fact, more than 41,466 housing markets in the US.

Contrary to your baseless assumption, the US is not Iceland with a population of 379,000 people and a uniform Cost-of-Living.

The US has 320 Million people and the Cost-of-Living across the US varies wildly.

We need only look at data from the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD).

Let's say you and I apply for HUD Section 8 housing benefits so that tax-payers will subsidize our rent.

You get $1,401/month in Social Security benefits.

I get a Social Security benefit of $2,788/month, plus a pension of $1,878/month, for a total of $4,666/month.

HUD denies your claim for Section 8 benefits on the basis that you earn way too much freaking money.

HUD approves my claim for Section 8 benefits because I don't earn enough money.

Let us review again: $1,401 is too much money, while $4,666 is not enough money.

We can quantify those extremes in terms of wage rates:

$26.92/hour - $6.93/hour = $19.99/hour

That is how widely the Cost-of-Living varies across America.

To suggest that someone earning $18,000/year cannot rent or buy a home in one of the 41,466 markets where the Cost-of-Living is as low as $6.93/hour is absurd.

Thus, to avoid Göbbelizing, we examine each one of the 41,466 housing markets individually rather than lumping them together to avoid skewing the data and misleading people, although it would not be improper to group 3-12 housing markets --out of 41,466 markets -- in a specific geographic region together.

You fail to grasp the crux of the issue.

The price of homes and rents is based on Supply & Demand.

In a some of the 41,466 housing markets in the US, the Demand for Housing far exceeds the available Supply of Housing, which causes prices of homes and rents to rise continually.

Worse than that, the Demand for Housing often far exceeds the Rate of Increase of the Supply of Housing....in other words, housing cannot be built fast enough.

In some of those 41,466 housing markets, the land is saturated, meaning is not feasible to build new housing.

Notice I said "not feasible" instead of impossible.

It is possible, but only if you buy people's homes and displace people and then build more homes than previously existed on that land. To buy 4 homes that are sitting on tiny lots in an attempt to cram 6 or 8 homes into the same space isn't really feasible.

Perhaps if you bought 12 homes and displaced 12 families and used that land to build a high-rise apartment/condo complex it might be worth it.

Why not tear down the services?

Well, duh! What makes a particular housing market attractive -- ie, in Demand -- is convenient access to services like retail, grocery, restaurant, hospitality, medical, dental, chiropractic, optometry services, convenient stores, hardware stores, dry-cleaning, gas stations and the like.

That's why people don't live up in the mountains, because the nearest services are 100 to 200 miles away.

Note that increasing wages will not reduce the cost of housing/rents. All it will do is increase Demand for Housing and drive prices higher.

I would also point out that EPA regulations have slowed the Rate of Increase of the Supply of Housing to a near standstill.

Here's a 40-unit apartment complex that's been sitting vacant for 30 years.

Why? Because EPA, State EPA, and city and county ordinances say that in order to get a permit to refurbish/remodel the unit you have to conduct lead and asbestos abatement.

Sorry, pixies and fairies do not descend from the sky and remove the lead and asbestos for you for free. You have to pay for that and it is freaking expensive as hell.

That means you have to charge higher rents to pay for the cost of lead and asbestos abatement, and the cost of refurbishment, which means the low-income families who used to live there years and years ago can't live there now.

 

There is no arguing with someone who doesn't understand that land ownership is something you work for, while they seem to think within a limited scope of an antiquated theory that no one should have 'ownership' or use the land for personal benefit regardless of the amount of work one puts into it, because it prevents other people from using that land for any reason.

I find it amusing that they are working on a electronic device, which someone had to build, in a factory, and for personal profit. The chances are, someone had to ship it, using public roads, to deliver it to them, likely by a company that does it for personal profit. And making the giant leap to the assumption that they are wearing clothing, fibers grown and/or processed, by someone on land or a factory on land, manufactured into clothing on privately held land, for which someone paid another entity to purchase and pays real estate taxes to the community for the use of public utilities and services, and therefore prevents other people from using that land for whatever purposes.

Summary, the poster believes he is in the right on an antiquated theory that failed in the 1800s, and does not comprehend the idea that providing secure shelter for one's family is an innate action, that even the caveman and women participated in.

 

Just as slave ownership was. Of course you have to work to buy a license to steal. The current owner isn't going to just give it to you. It's called, "rent seeking behavior." You could look it up if you were willing to know any relevant facts, which you aren't.

<yawn> Facts don't stop being facts through being known for a long time. Duh. The Atomic Theory is thousands of years old, and like the facts about land, we know it is still true.

Of other people's rights without making just compensation for what they are taking.

No, you made that up. It is just another bald fabrication on your part. You always have to just make $#!+ up because you have no facts or logic to offer, and never will.

How much work would one have to put into it to own the sun, the earth's atmosphere, a person, a letter of the alphabet, etc.? Can you find a willingness to know the fact that putting work in is not enough to obtain ownership of others' rights to liberty?

I.e., it forcibly removes their liberty right to use what nature already provided for everyone, without making just compensation to them for what the land "owner" is taking from them.

I find it amusing that you have to pretend you do not know the fact that unlike an electronic device, land exists unconditionally and is not a product of anyone's labor.

The chances are, you actually imagine that is relevant to whether it is rightful to remove others' rights to liberty by force and make them into your own private property without making just compensation to your victims.

So, your "argument" is the same as that employed in former times to justify slavery. Check.

No, that is objectively false. Real estate taxes are to fund -- though only partially -- the desirable public services and infrastructure that make the land valuable, but are not related to use thereof. OTOH, people who don't own land have to pay landowners full market value for permission to access those desirable public services and infrastructure, even though their taxes already went to pay for them. I.e., they are forced to pay twice so that landowners can pocket one of the payments in return for nothing.

Thus stealing from them by abrogating their rights without making just compensation.

Facts do not cease to be facts through being known for a long time. Why can't you ever remember that, hmmmm?

No, that is false. It has always succeeded everywhere it has ever been tried, and to the extent that it has been tried.

You merely cannot permit yourself to know the fact that they did it without any of them ever owning any land, because you have already realized that that fact proves your beliefs are false and evil.

 

I don't argue absurdities and falsehoods.

You have yourself a nice day!

 

Thank you for agreeing that you cannot refute a single sentence I wrote, you know you have been demolished and humiliated and your beliefs proved false and evil, and you have no answers. It's always going to be that way as long as you presume to dispute with me.