I literally quoted you saying “probably destroying their net worth” as an argument against it, so yes you are talking about preserving their home value.

We cannot build our way out of this situation. It’s literally impossible, builders will not build while prices are actively dropping. They don’t even like doing it when prices are flat like we’re seeing in some places now.

And why the fuck should grandma and grandpa be allowed to stay in a 5 bedroom home that they bought to raise children in 50 years ago but has been empty other than 2 occupants for the last 30? That is the worst kind of greed and waste. Fuck them, they should downsize and free up that place for a family.

The fact that you don’t understand how housing prices affect grocery prices is part of the reason why you aren’t qualified to be discussing this. Housing prices affect everything very directly.

Grocery prices are made up of 3 primary components, real estate cost for the store, labour costs for the workers, and the cost of the underlying goods from wholesalers. The cost of labour is made up of real estate cost for the worker, food costs, and transportation costs (the three biggest factors anyways). The cost of the underlying goods from wholesalers is made up of the real estate cost for the warehouses, labour, transportation, and the underlying costs for the grocery items. The cost of the grocery items (lets just say it’s from a farm for now to make it simply) is made up of… real estate costs for the property, labour, and the farming inputs (tractors, fertilizer, seeds, fuel, etc)

Do you see how many times “real estate costs” show up in that breakdown? When housing prices go up, the price of everything goes up quite significantly.

Think of it this way, how much money would someone need to make to keep the same quality of life if their rent cost went down 80%? For a lot of workers, earning say $60,000 and spending $3000 a month on rent, if their rent went down to $600, they would only need to earn $31,200 a year to keep the same quality of life, that’s a 48% reduction in potential labour costs.

So now your grocery store is saving 80% on their property rent, 48% on labour, and the same things are happening downstream as well so their goods cost goes down too.

Except now we’ve created a loop. The same quality of life isn’t accurate, because now that housing is cheaper, your groceries got cheaper too, so you either have a better quality of life, or you could take even less money.

All value created goes somewhere. Right now, a large majority of it is accruing to landowners. Until that changes, these problems will continue.

You’re talking about taxing grandma and grandpa out of their house and probably destroying their net worth You’re oh so close to understanding the real problem happening.

It is literally impossible for us to both preserve grandma and grandpa’s current home value AND have affordable housing at the same time.

Anything we do to lower prices will destroy their net worth, and without lower prices we can’t have affordable housing.

Grandma and Grandpa own at least 65% of ALL residential properties, it could be more because that statistic only includes primary residences so it’s quite possible that after including cottages and lake houses, second homes that they rent out, and with their investments in real estate trusts through Blackrock, Grandma and Grandpa actually own 75-85% of all residential properties.

The last estimate for Corporation owned homes in the US was on the order of 2-3% by the way.

Which number is bigger? 65% or 3%?

You jump to so many conclusions it’s like watching someone’s mind do parkour.

I didn’t say we shouldn’t make some people unhappy restructuring the economy. In fact, I’m totally on-board with doing just that. My focus in this has always been that the issue isn’t just the top 0.1%, or even the top 10%, the biggest problem with the housing market is the 100 million±ish home owners, ALL of them (including me)

I also didn’t say eliminate private ownership of real estate. People own cars and they depreciate. You just need to remove the part of housing that appreciates from the equation via government regulation. Buildings depreciate it’s the land values that are the problem. It could be solved as simply as a 100% capital gains tax on land value (not property value, because that includes buildings) or introduce a land value tax value so high that you can pay for a universal basic income, making it impossible to profit from simply owning land. Both of these would crash the economy if done overnight, so they would need to be introduced over time, but they would both end up with housing prices being entirely based on their value as living spaces, rather than as economic vehicles to invest in.

Your ideas of grabbing everything from Blackrock helps… who? the 60-70k people who would get one of Blackrock’s homes? How would you even figure out who to give them to, a lottery for poor people? What about the other 100 million people who are struggling with housing costs? You could grab every house owned by a corporation and it wouldn’t even come close addressing the scale of the issue.

https://luckboxmagazine.com/topics/is-blackrock-really-buying-up-homes/ - Source for 60-70k single family homes owned by Blackrock

You didn’t de-bunk shit. It’s still not enough money to matter if you ignore children and it isn’t even money, both are valid criticisms of your idea.

Bringing up BlackRock is just stupid. Blackrock is an investment management Corp, they don’t just manage the wealth of a few billionaires. You can go buy into their products right now starting at around $100 for ETFs if you want, and there’s plenty of non-rich people who are part of that $11 billion that they manage. Suggesting you can just go take all their real estate holdings is the same as saying you’re going to go take the money of grandma and grandpa, and while I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad it’s not in line with your “eat the rich” proposal.

The housing crisis is NOT being caused by corporations buying up houses. The housing crisis is being caused by the fact that our system allows ANYONE to invest in houses at all. The vast majority of houses in the US are owned by the family that lives in them, and those people benefit from houses appreciating just as much as wealthy people do. Until we stop houses being an investment for EVERYONE (which does include corporations) the housing market will continue to get worse. If you block companies from owning homes, and even if you block people from owning more than one or two homes, you will still have house prices go up because people still want houses. If they continue to go up faster than wages increase, they will always become increasingly unaffordable.

To fix this, houses MUST lose money. You must never make money off simply living somewhere because the value of the land went up around you as the population grew and new amenities attract more people.

You could take out all the people under 18 and it ]would still only be $76,000.

Humans are terrible at understanding large numbers. 20 trillion sounds like a lot, but to 262 million people it’s STILL less than the median family income per year.

And that $20 trillion isn’t how much these rich people make per year, in fact, it’s not even really money. That’s almost all the value of the shares these people own in companies, which you can’t just convert to cash at the market value when you’re talking about that quantity. If you took all these shares and sold them off, you wouldn’t get that price, who’s going to be able to afford that? There isn’t enough available cash with other people for $20 trillion worth of shares all hitting the market at the same time to value them at $20 trillion.

If instead you gave each person you’re splitting it to part of the shares, they wouldn’t be able to eat them, they wouldn’t be able to live in them, and if they all decided to sell them off… same problem as before, significantly less value. They would all get bought up by the remaining wealthy people who actually have excess cash available, for much cheaper than they’re worth and then you have the same problem you had originally except now instead of the top 0.1% you’ve got the top 4% or something.

At the end of the day, there are far better options for improving the lives of people than just taking all the money from the 0.1% and giving it directly to everyone else. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care about these people at all, eat them if you want. Just don’t believe it’s going to make your life measurably better, because it won’t.

$20 trillion divided by the US population is only $60,000 each, that’s well under a years worth of the median family income. As a one time transfer, that’s not doing almost anything to the economy long term.

The amount per year that these wealthy people generate is significantly less, so taxing them to prevent it in the future also wouldn’t really give other people that much money.

I’m wasn’t talking about going after anything, I was just pointing out that the rich don’t actually hold that much money in the grand scheme of things, and removing them won’t actually fix the issues we’re seeing.

As much as I enjoy the “eat the rich” sentiment, it’s not really a fix to the issues.

The median net worth in the US is around $200,000.

If you took ALL the money in the US, from every single person and distributed it equally, it would only bring that number up to around $500,000.

Sure that’s a decent bump, but if you only targeted billionaires and high millionaires, it would be a hell of a lot less. The vast majority of that bump actually comes from random boomers having a million dollars each saved up.

It’s the lone star state…

Outta 5 possible

Too simplistic to be cynical, just naive.

Pretty naive take on how governments work.

While on one hand I hope that people realize this is literally their government being purchased by a single rich guy and push back… I know they’re far too stupid for that.

There may be individual products that have gone down in price like for example eggs may have returned to more normal pricing from their highs, but that index tracks a standardized set of fairly normal products that people buy regularly and on average the whole shopping bill has gone up every single month.

So yes, they are delulu.

Even the US government is saying consumer prices aren’t going down.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

The percentage they’re going up each month has gone down from the inflation bubble we had just recently, but they have still gone up in price every single month for the last 7 years or so.

Unless you’re really old, I wouldn’t bet too hard on that. Things tend to happen quickly once they reach a tipping point.

The Arab spring revolutions were not even two years long and a dozen countries countries with 4 rulers being deposed.

I would absolutely bet money that before I die in 30-40 years the US will have fewer states than it currently does.

Silver lining?

You’re more likely to reach the revolution part of the history cycle faster, and reset the wheel for future generations to also fuck up.

Starting?

Israel and Iran have been at war for decades.

that was for actual citizens

The US needs to be rebooted at this point, it’s not working properly for the citizens anymore.

They do not need to be willing to sell, Eminent domain is part of the 5th amendment and government can use it to seize pretty much anything for ‘public use’ but it does call for compensation

Just nationalize SpaceX at this point for “national security reasons”