Commodity housing is a crime against humanity.
Buying homes to use as gambling chips is a crime against humanity
IMHO the problem is systemic. There are very few ways to save for retirement without economic rent. Landlords suck, and so does the macroeconomic policy that encourages becoming a landlord instead of just saving money.
The only reason housing, an otherwise depreciating asset, can become an investment is through land scarcity (to be solved with land value taxes) and through housing scarcity (created with policy such as height restrictions, “green” belts, and difficult building permit processes)
And all to have a few thousand extra billionaires.
Yeah, but maybe someday I’ll be one of those billionaires!
Full-time jobs that don’t pay a living wage should be illegal. No matter how “beneath” you the job feels, if we need someone to do it “full-time” then anything less than a full living is a rip off, and you have to either advocate for taxpayers to subsidize the employer’s greed or that they overwork to make a living.
If you are not paying living wages for a full-time job, that means you are getting subsidized employees from the government.
part of walmarts onboarding process is how to apply for government assistance like snap
Not only that, the other side is also that owning buildings as investments should also be illegal.
In my country buildings and flats appreciate at a rate of 6% year-on-year on average. Rent is only 3% of the value of that property per year, on average. So a landlord can take 9% and have to deal with renters, their demands and the risk of them breaking things, or take 6% and do nothing at all. Keeping properties empty and off the market is enriching themselves on the suffering of people who now don’t have a place to live.
So in my opinion there should be a vacancy tax that exactly matches the value appreciation rate of the property. Then landlords have the choice between 0% (=loss of money due to inflation) or 9%. And if they still don’t want to rent the place out, they can still sell it to someone who wants to live there.
That proposal would still keep renting out property as a profitable way to go, while also helping people who want to buy property to live there, and the only people who would get harmed by this are people who purposely take property off the market to create scarcity to enrich themselves.
Assuming 25/hr minimum living wage: There are optional positions within businesses that are nice to have, but very simple, but can be opted to be done for any number of hours a day up to full time, and cannot be justified to carry 25/hr… You could have a company offering menial work on razor thin margins, but some people like working there, like scooping ice cream, which could not otherwise exist at 25/hr. There are small businesses that people want to work with that don’t make enough to pay everyone 25/hr (ex. some small gyms). There are cases where low revenue businesses could pay with future equity, but cannot afford 25/hr now. You have to account for these cases in your rules.
Then do universal basic income. Now people are free to spend a couple hours scooping ice cream without risking their safety. Assuming your basic income is enough to cover a dignified life
This is likely a reasonable solution.
You are both extremely bad at logic and math.
I’m very worried I may appear in this comic soon. I hate being an American.
You and me both. I have about two weeks left…
Land of the free, free to die on the streets
“But not these streets, we want people to come through here and spend money. Wouldn’t want to risk them seeing you and giving you that money instead.”
I don’t get it
In some areas of the country, being homeless is a crime.
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY”
POTUS
Feels like the problem is systemic and tied to the high price of real estate relative to the low price of wages.
Would be nice to get some kind of public officials involved. People genuinely interested in building public housing or, at least, implementing a citywide rent freeze until supply is released to match demand.
Millions of Homes Still Being Kept Vacant as Housing Costs Surge, Report Finds
The current system is broken fundamentally and cannot be fixed, because it was actually designed this way and is working as intended by all billionaires.
We are way past simple changes like that and relying on bureaucrats to do anything is just giving them time to make things even worse.
What we need is to send all the billionaires straight to giloutine, take their wealth, redistribute it and build a new system where no single person can have so much power to affect millions of other people.
History has taught us that the violent overthrow of a government, even a hopelessly corrupt one, never leads to a better state.
Yes, we need to strip billionaires of their power in the government. But we need to do it through laws and an orderly takeover of power through our electoral system. The minute we take up arms, things will go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye.
Of course, because no one should have opposed Hitler with force. Obviously this didn’t lead to anything better than the Nazi government.
Or no USSR republics should have fought to overthrow the Kremlin government and establish their own. Because none of those countries are way better off than Russia is now.
Or the French should not have tried to overthrow the broken and unfair Monarchy exploiting the poor.
In the same fashion, no one should fight to overthrow an extremely corrupt capitalist and cruel fascist government.
Let’s just hope that billionaires controlling the government will be nice to the poor in the next election 🤞🤞🤞
If anything, history has taught us the complete opposite.
Things might get worse in the short term, but sometimes a complete government overthrow is the only way to make impactful changes to a system that’s rotten to the core.
Poor North Koreans didn’t overthrow their government in time and now look at them. But of course, they can “vote” for a better government next time.
If only we listened.
The manager of the 7/11 down the street from me was homeless. She’d finish her shift and go spend the night at a “pod village” the city had set up.
