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Democrats in denial over Trump defeat, voters say: ‘Haven’t learned the lessons’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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What's the answer to that? On the face of it, this says that the electorate don't want public money spent on helping other people who need help. How do you achieve anything other than conservatism with such an electorate? The only thing I can think is that you have to promise to help more of the electorate, and that the money will be come from the very rich. In other words, the only counter to conservatism is a commitment to actual wealth redistribution, and to going up against the selfish interests of the super-rich. That's not yet even socialism, but it's still further to the left that the Democratic Party is willing to go. For now, its leadership would rather lose elections to fascists than challenge billionaires.
A few conservative pundits attacked it from the "undeserving" angle. The actual base didn't give a damn. The actual base thought it was a useless and tone-deaf figleaf of a policy. It was a wonkish policy only a milquetoast centrist could love - a market subsidy that had a long litany of provisos and qualifications. And one that economists stated would just serve to bid house prices up even higher.
The voters didn't reject progressive wealth redistribution. They rejected half-baked meaningless gestures.
Giving everyone 25K means housing prices go up by 25K. It was a very bad idea and would benefit the billionaire class.
What should have been done was capping rent and building more houses.
It wasn't "give everyone 25k"
Be more disingenuous.
Indeed only people who use it to buy a house. If everyone has 25K more, then housing prices go up by 25K.
How did you transmute "25k for families that haven't missed a bill payment in 2 years and who are buying their first home" into "everyone getting 25k to buy a home"?
Do you just disagree with whatever endgame you imagine she's reaching for, and are speaking to that? Like that policy is just shorthand for something like "everyone gets free money" and that would be bad, so her policy is bad?
How do you transmute giving everyone free money into fixing a housing crisis?
The solution is extremely obvious, and has been done many times: government funded social housing.
Giving people more money to buy a house does not create houses out of thin air. It does not fix a supply shortage, it only exacerbates the crisis.
Making it non-viable for housing to be an investment asset would be more effective. Social housing is perpetually underfunded, and big centralized schemes invariably lead to social problems because of the ineffectiveness of central planning and the failure to involve the actual people living in the housing in the design of the projects. Also, the vast sums of money involved become pork for the big construction firms.
The shortcoming of that is the decades of decline as you destroyed the largest store of wealth people had up to that point.
First time buyers have had bonuses across the U.S. for years. It absolutely has nothing to do with house prices being higher. Texas does it, Tennessee, Florida, California... Probably everywhere
And the point is by offering up X dollars you increase the aberage price of homes rather than making them more affordable.
You know, I was being facetious, I didn't actually want you to be more disingenuous...
Capitalism doesnt work, the end. Need a new and better system, not keep contributing to said system
In the meantime, other societies manage it better than we do. Maybe do more of that while we're coming up with an entirely new economic system?
Are... you lost?
Yes
Capping rent makes more housing less likely. Are you suggesting government built housing?
Not allowing one or two private equity firms to own a lions share of the market would help.
That's why you only cap rents on buildings that have existed for some time.
Businesses do not plan for 30 years or more in the future. If landlords can't make an acceptable rate of return within 30 years, they're not going to build a new house or apartment building.
So you can attach rent control provisions to buildings that are over a few decades old, and it will have zero impact on the financing and construction of new housing. It will only affect buildings after they've long since been built and paid for.
You do have to worry about rent controls discouraging landlords from keeping buildings maintained. But that's why good rent control doesn't cap rent, but simply limit the rate of increase. If a landlord can afford to keep a building maintained today, they will be able to keep it maintained in the future, even if rent increases are capped to the rate of inflation.
If anything, smart rent controls like this actually encourage the construction of new housing. By limiting rent increases on old buildings, you encourage landlords to knock them down and replace them with bigger and newer buildings that can be rented at any rate. In unregulated markets, landlords can increase profits by colluding to suppress the construction of new housing stock. Why invest the money in new buildings if you can just increase the rents on existing buildings by conspiring to prevent new buildings from being built? Smart rent controls mean that if landlords want to see their profits increase at any rate higher than inflation, then they will need to actually build new housing units.
Can ypu provide an academic source that supports your claim regarding "smart rent controls" or are you just pulling this from the ether?
I would suspect that once you knock down a building you'll replace it with luxury housing as you'll profit much faster as construction is remarkably expensive. I suspect the results of ypur idea is many times fewer affordable homes being available in the long run as landlords are continually looking to make back their latest investment.
Government built housing is how the UK solved the problem last time. Then Thatcher sold it off and there hasn't been any real interest in doing it again despite all the same problems coming back.
iirc its not so much a lack of interest as we literally banned local municipalities from building more (not straight up but we banned the mechanism by which they were doing it)
Yeah that will do it
Non profit housing, be it through companies owjed by the municipality or cooperatives who provide housing to their members are very effective means to limit rents and provide housing.
In many European countries it used to be normal for a large part of the rental market to be in the hand of such entities or even housing built to be buyed to own by lower middle class families.
Incidently rents started exploding after a lot of these got privatized in the 80s to 00s.