4 ms·

How about lowering the cost of healthcare, housing, and education instead?

• Bombthecat 5y ago
  How would you decrease housing prices? Right now it's impossible, because we barely build any new homes (much less then people would need them /want to buy them)
  • nradov 5y ago
    New home building starts are high and have been rising for several years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
  • nostrademons 5y ago
    You answered your own question. Build more housing. A lot more housing.
  • thebooktocome 5y ago
    Greatly increase property taxes on second and subsequent homes. Make the tax not apply to dense multi-unit housing, only sparse single-family homes and condos. Make housing covenants illegal. Both of these ideas are super unpopular to the landlord/speculator class, but they'd certainly open up the housing market.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      A land use or land efficiency tax would probably be a wise move in some metro areas.
  • babesh 5y ago
    You are living in the part of the country with rising housing prices? Go find out the housing prices in many other parts of the country. You can get a house in the Rust Belt for 50,000 and the Rust Belt is a big area stretching through many states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc… Heck, there are parts of California where housing prices have grown less than inflation. Want a house for less than 200k about 80 miles from San Francisco? We need to reindustrialize.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      > You can get a house in the Rust Belt for 50,000 and the Rust Belt is a big area stretching through many states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc… You can, but there are no jobs there, which is why housing is so cheap. The residents of these towns are leaving for the nearest growing city in huge numbers, leaving behind cheap housing and economic stagnation for those that remain. And in the places where the jobs are, housing is getting expensive. Even in the “rust belt”. They’re cheaper than San Francisco, sure, but with places like Columbus seeing their housing prices grow 20% year over year, it’ll get bad fast. > Want a house for less than 200k about 80 miles from San Francisco? Again, it depends on what you do for a living. How long is the commute from there to the nearest job center? I’m assuming the answer is “unbearably long”. Again, right now housing is cheap where people dont want to live.
      • babesh 5y ago
        So you are for building all this housing when existing housing stock exists rather than trying to revitalize depressed economic areas???? How is that efficient?
        • ashtonkem 5y ago
          Please point out where I’m opposed to revitalizing depressed economic areas. I’ll wait.
          • babesh 5y ago
            If you revitalize economically depressed areas then there is less demand for housing in the hot areas thus precluding the need to build so much housing in those areas. So focusing on building housing in the hot areas does not address the root cause.
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  That’s a good theory, we’ve been flailing around and failing at that for quite a while now. I have no confidence that anyone will figure it out, and in the mean time the working poor continues to suffer. I personally see no reason to block policy changed based on the theory that we’ll suddenly figure out another policy issues that we’ve been utterly failing at fixing. That’s a recipe for permanent inaction.