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The billionaire fortunes pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars of unearned appreciation owned by regular home owners.
It's the unearned part that matters most, at least capital investment has some benefit to the economy. Real estate appreciation adds literally zero value to the economy.
Yes, let's be mad at each other instead of the people creating the extractive markets
WE ARE THE PEOPLE CREATING THE EXTRACTIVE MARKETS
Can you explain how? I fail to see how families owning a single home to live in is more extractive than megacorps and banks leveraging leviathan assets to create an artificial shortage and rent market
Because when you look at the total ownership, individual home owners are making the vast majority of the profit from keeping prices high. Around 65% of homes are owned by the family that lives in them, and the second largest chunk of the market is dedicated rental apartments which need to be owned by corps or they would never get built in the first place and are a needed part of the economy, then a smaller chunk is the landlord who own their home plus one rental.
Corporate ownership of non-dedicated rental buildings (houses, townhouses, etc) is still a very small percentage of the overall market.
Should it be happening at all? Probably not, but at the end of the day most of the profits of housing and land appreciation are being reaped by single home owners.
There was a news article a few days ago about a new development land purchase that just went through in Vancouver, BC. 25ish lots were purchased from individual home owners, for a total of $100 million or about 4 million dollars per lot. That cost gets passed onto the people buying the new condos going in, and the profit is going to individual home owners who probably bought those lots for hundreds of thousands over the last twenty or thirty years.
So it sounds like a rock and a hard place. Homeowners don't want to lose money (and for many doing so would destroy their financial well-being), but they're also incentivized by banks and realtors to ask higher and higher prices. This also affects voting patterns (i.e. "I bought at an astronomical cost and if it loses value I'm fucked"). But it all sounds like the homeowner is caught between market forces that propel prices higher. The relatively recent introduction of blackrock to corporate homeownership has an outsized impact, like your example, where they spend a ridiculous amount for a property they intend to never sell which will also inflate the property value in a region. I'd be curious to see how that difference could be quantified and understood. Honestly it all feels like 2008 again
This is just anecdotal experience, but when I bought my house I was the only bidder who needed a place to live. The seller and the people I bid against were all looking for rental properties. I honestly only got the place through a fluke
You're right that this is a rock and a hard place. Which is why I don't expect it to change anytime soon. What needs to happen is that home ownership rates need to drop, meaning more voters will be renters, then they will have the political clout to push through policies that make things more affordable for them by destroying home values for the now minority of owners.
I give it about 30 years or so before we see that.
I disagree here. Rent is a siphon for your money to go to the wealthy landowners, just like these rising housing prices siphon more of your money to banks.
Unless you're saying that renters have more political leverage? Which I'm also not sure I agree with. It's easier to evict a renter than an owner. I think we need more affordable housing, which depends on building accessible homes, controlling outrageous rent, and addressing zoning laws, but all of this depends on a strong economy for those goods and a surplus of jobs that pay enough. Systemic reform of zoning laws and lobbying is where change is
By Purchasing up and holding the supply empty, artificially creating the housing crisis by lobbying against affordable housing construction and exploiting the rent economy of our cities. The rich are outcompeting us for resources.
What do regular home owners have to do with it? Most regular home owners only own one home.
No one mentioned regular home owners. Why are you making devisive comments not related to any point that were made?
The billionaire fortunes pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars of unearned appreciation owned by regular home owners.
Yes they did.
Bollocks, billionaire propaganda. Less that 3,000 people collectively control more than 90% of the World's wealth. It doesn't pale in comparison to anything. You're just a bootlicker, or contrarian, makes no difference. You're still wrong.
You'll notice it wasn't me though, so why am I being asked what somebody I'm actively disagreeing with means by "regular homeowners"?
I've made a million dollars in appreciation on my home in the last 15 years.
Are you telling me just because I own one home, that I'm not part of the problem?
No, you're not the problem there. The problem in your scenario is the landlords buying up all available real estate and leasing it back. Not you.
That million dollar gain has no actual value to you. You can't get that money out of the house, because you'll need to spend it to acquire new housing.
And in the meantime, your tax payments are going to increase: you're a victim of corporate investment in the housing market, not a perpetrator.
Capital investment strips wealth out of the worker/consumer economy (where it is traded for goods and services, and becomes someone's paycheck) and transfers it to the securities market (where it is used to convert worker productivity into more capital)
Capital investment is only beneficial to the economy when the working class holds the capital.
That's observablt false. Capitalism has lead to a massive improvement in living conditions for countries that have implemented it
Yes it also has downsides, but pretending it doesn't do anything good is rediculous.
You sound like Marx just before he recommends transitioning to socialism as the next logical stage of human development.
Marx was a genocidal maniac. You shouldn't read much into his lunacy.
How was Marx genocidal?
Literally his manifesto.
Where?
I still think that regulated capitalism works best for certain industries, and socialism works best for others.
It doesn't have to be an all or nothing choice.
And how do we know which industries would benefit most from capitalism or socialism? All industries experience diminishing returns of capital investment after a certain point, and that is how Marx made the distinction about which mode of production is "best" for which industry. It isn't inherent that one industry should be socialist and another capitalist, it is relative to how big the industry is and whether there is room for continued expansion.
One of the easiest ways is to determine which industries are most prone to the failures of the market.
Things that are inherently monopolies like roads, or power lines or things that don't allow reasonable consumer information/choice like healthcare, etc.
Your observation is only true where the working class controls the capital. Your point would be well taken if we all had significant shares providing passive income. Buy not even the wealthiest of the working class controls a share of capital proportionate to their productive output.
The worst injustices injustices in history have been perpetrated by oligarchs of some shape or another. We are in the middle of such an era now.
And the word is "ridiculous".
Real estate appreciation adds literally zero value to the economy.
It's actually a huge net negative. The housing crisis is the everything crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc
Tax wealth, not work.
And churches.
And money isn’t speech
Fuck Citizens United.
Confiscate all personal wealth over 100million. Break up any company worth over 50billion. Take all institutions of public service out of private equity: utilities, house, prisons, retirement, schools, postal, healthcare and public land management. Reform the legal system to not give the wealthy any advantage. Do not allow elected representatives to own stocks. Do not allow politicians to take private money for political campaigns. Allowing people and corporations to acquire this type of power has been humanity’s whole problem for thousands of years
you should run for president
Democrats would say this person is unelectable. After losing to Trump twice...
Unfortunately, I don’t know any billionaires who would be willing to finance my campaign
Get private equity out of hospitals and forbid them land ownership.
The current private equity hospital grift:
Billionaires technically don't have much personal wealth. They leverage their illiquid assets as collateral to take out massive loans. Which they can later cover with taking out even bigger loans.
The liquid wealth of the wealthy is very low, technically in debt. This is another way they can avoid paying tax as they technically don't have much of anything, and the reason why 'declining to take a salary' is typically meaningless.
They shouldn't control that much wealth anyway, even if it's not 'real' money
That feels like an easy loophole to patch- Treat loans as income. Maybe tax it at some separate progressive rate so people using small loans as intended don't get fucked. But if Muskerberg has $100 million in loans taken out against his stock, taxing $90 million of that as income would make a difference. Especially if the top rate is like 90%.
So a loan of $10 million has like $5mil taxed right away? You get $5mil to spend, and still owe the bank like $12mil? Those interest rates are insane, and will definitely affect the working class more than the ultra-wealthy. Specifically businesses, which will increase giants' monopolies. And you can't make businesses an exception, because then the ultra-wealthy will borrow through those.
The money is not the problem. Money isn't real, it's just a tool that represents power and resources. There's nothing you can do to tax or control money itself because what wealthy people have is all the resources, and they can leverage them with or without money.
You can't tax your way out of hierarchal Capitalism. The rich are paying as much tax as the current system legally asks of them - which is very little, when your wealth is in resources and not money.
The poor and workers are more affected by taxes and costs because most of our worth is in money. Once you have enough to start investing and have resources, your worth can grow rapidly.
I don't think the working class is taking out $10mm personal loans against their stock portfolios. And if you do it with a progressive model, smaller players won't be impacted much or at all. Otherwise, if it's being used like income it should be taxed like income.
I don't think the rich people's "resources" are that useful if they can't turn them into fungible money. Can't eat Tesla stocks. They have power through other mechanisms like access and owning platforms, but money is a big part of it. They can spend money on elections, on bribes, on buying platforms. So I'm not really sure what you meant by the distinction between resources and money.
Do not allow elected representatives.
Do not allow elected representatives to do what exactly? Trade individual stocks?
Feels like something is missing here.
Yea sorry it was meant to say own stocks. I fixed it
This article claims that Bernie Sanders and AOC are intentionally trying to redirect public anger towards useless methods the author views as useless, but where is the evidence for this?
The argument is right there in the article.
But Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez never indict capitalism as a system or call for a struggle against it. And they supported and hailed the Biden administration even as it was presiding over the greatest-ever accumulation of wealth on the part of the financial aristocracy.
For all their fulminations against the oligarchy, they carefully avoid advancing any demand that would deprive the billionaires of their ill-gotten riches. They pretend that society can be changed without a drastic redistribution of wealth, which requires the expropriation of the billionaires.
Tldr: critiquing the system only insofar as to not question capitalism.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they are plants. It could be that they actually believe social democracy can work or that they think they can't get support while opposing capitalism explicitly.
US needs to wake up and realise that you're going to continue to get at its kindest a rampant flock of capitalist lip service until you stop exiling and punishing politicians that run on socialist platforms
You get what you vote for