4 ms·

Hypothetical example: Tax it 100,000,000%. Turn a $1 house into a $1,000,000 house. Do you think they'd still want it? That's the power of taxation to change be

Hypothetical example: Tax it 100,000,000%. Turn a $1 house into a $1,000,000 house. Do you think they'd still want it? That's the power of taxation to change behaviour. (of course a real tax can be whatever is needed to "get the job done", it doesn't need to be ridiculous). If you don't want empty houses, tax empty houses (though as a distracting aside, the idea that empty houses is a big problem has also been fairly thoroughly debunked, but that's another discussion that it's important rn)

GypsyKing716 4y ago
Off by a few zeros. Humbly thought I might put that out there in the word problem.
doliveira 4y ago
Other than an ideological argument of preferring taxes over outright bans, I feel like the effect is the same. If foreign investors are indeed the ones pushing price up orders of magnitude above inflation, they clearly don't care about prices increasing tenfold. So it seems the tax would have to be insanely huge to actually achieve the same effect. And honest question: why do we want foreign investors buying homes anyway? I understand buying commercial locations, but not residences.
- eru 4y ago
  > Other than an ideological argument of preferring taxes over outright bans, I feel like the effect is the same. Taxes also provide revenue. And they allow people to make their own choices. If you think that having a foreign investor own a house causes Canadians to feel a collective 1 million CAD of pain per year, then it's only fair to give the foreign investor the chance to pay off the Canadian pain. (Also gray areas around bans are annoying: you have to draw the line of eg who qualifies as a foreigner and what qualifies as owning somewhere. And there's bound to be some weird corner cases and loopholes that people with expensive lawyers can work around. The reward for finding the loopholes is immense, because there's a discontinuity in the law. If you have a tax, you have a finer grained instrument. So you can eg charge people in proportion to how much time they spent out of Canada. Instead of going 51% out: you are banned to 49%: everything is fine, the tax can vary gradually.)

GypsyKing716 4y ago

Off by a few zeros. Humbly thought I might put that out there in the word problem.

doliveira 4y ago

Other than an ideological argument of preferring taxes over outright bans, I feel like the effect is the same. If foreign investors are indeed the ones pushing price up orders of magnitude above inflation, they clearly don't care about prices increasing tenfold. So it seems the tax would have to be insanely huge to actually achieve the same effect. And honest question: why do we want foreign investors buying homes anyway? I understand buying commercial locations, but not residences.

eru 4y ago
> Other than an ideological argument of preferring taxes over outright bans, I feel like the effect is the same. Taxes also provide revenue. And they allow people to make their own choices. If you think that having a foreign investor own a house causes Canadians to feel a collective 1 million CAD of pain per year, then it's only fair to give the foreign investor the chance to pay off the Canadian pain. (Also gray areas around bans are annoying: you have to draw the line of eg who qualifies as a foreigner and what qualifies as owning somewhere. And there's bound to be some weird corner cases and loopholes that people with expensive lawyers can work around. The reward for finding the loopholes is immense, because there's a discontinuity in the law. If you have a tax, you have a finer grained instrument. So you can eg charge people in proportion to how much time they spent out of Canada. Instead of going 51% out: you are banned to 49%: everything is fine, the tax can vary gradually.)