Why would someone listen to Dave Ramsey of all people? He is neither an economist, nor a Christian, he has nothing to contribute to the subject!
His shtick is real estate investment, of course he wants to see Joe Public buy a starter home. The trouble is: real estate as a government-guaranteed investment vehicle is what brought us the housing affordability crisis.
His "schtick" is having people pay down and reduce debt. What's noteworthy on this video is that he's calling for the government to fix the problem. He's normally anti-government involvement in business. This should speak to the severity of the problem when someone like him is calling for the government to step in a fix it.
The decision to implement benefit cliffs is absolutely intentional, because income requirements that cause people to fall of medicaid or SNAP completely are sharp, and maybe 10 % of the population rely on those. Obamacare subsidies are phased out gradually, because half the country relies on Obamacare, and if there were issues around Obamacare, that would have repercussions at the ballot box.
It serves to have an underclass that politicians can dump on, it seems.
> because income requirements that cause people to fall of medicaid or SNAP completely are sharp
How often do pay increases perfectly keep someone in the gap? Presumably some of them will be large enough, through changes of jobs for example, that the family would completely jump that gap.
> because income requirements that cause people to fall of medicaid or SNAP completely are sharp
Why would it? This is perhaps intentional as well. Only allow the program to benefit half the country. I'm sure you can predict how that political split occurs and insulates politicians from the ballot box.
> It serves to have an underclass that politicians can dump on, it seems.
It helps keeps wages suppressed. Politicians want money. They don't care about "dumping" on you, they'll make any excuse they need to keep the money coming in.
Maybe it's just incompetence, bureaucratic morass etc but it really does feel like the system was designed to fail, and trap us into this false choice of a broken welfare system vs. no welfare at all.
UBI and/or UBS (universal basic services) would be so much better but there was a sustained propaganda campaign to tell people that free things are communism and therefore bad. Now Western countries are becoming ungovernable due to regulatory capture, tax evasion and industrial-scale manipulation of opinion by the elites, so fixing these problems within the current democratic system is an extremely uphill battle. At least Mamdani's election gives us some hope in the US, but there's only so much one city or even one country can do on its own without worldwide changes.
There is no propaganda campaign needed to tell people that free things are bad. Nobody likes a freeloader. Western nations are ungovernable because they have universal suffrage, not because of some conspiracy. The fact is that a sizeable majority of people just don't have the intelligence to wield the political power given to them. A quick look at our present government is all that you need to tell that we are ruled by the stupidity of the common man, not some shadowy billionaires.
It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.
You don't reduce the regulation, you increase it's flexibility. Such as allowing dynamic zoning where an area that is zoned as medium density residential automatically becomes hybrid high density residential/low commercial once the districts zoned around it as low density residential are filled.
The issue is we zone something and it stays that way until it's manually reviewed and rezoned. The district has no ability to change itself according to the circumstances. It has to rely on a third party that acts without due haste and with great reluctance.
Land value tax is interesting because it encourages/forces more efficient use but you can do a lot more by cutting demand through limiting immigration and financialization opportunities.
Across the US, the majority (2/3-ish) of children already live in families where both parents are employed. I don't see free childcare moving that statistic more than a few percentage points at best.
I'm skeptical that this policy would encourage more parents to work and further raise housing costs, especially since this would mostly affect families with children who are pre-K. It is a big policy change but the number of families it will affect is quite small I think. If it does have any effect on housing cost I would expect to see it at the very low-end since it would help low-earners the most.
By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords. On the flip side, if we did things to make people's lives less affordable, would that translate into landlords giving back by lowering rents? I don't think so.
> By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords.
That seems pretty reasonable to me actually? When housing is so supply-constrained, any subsidies/incentives/bonuses/etc. will be captured by the owner of the scarcest asset (real estate). Building more housing at this point seems like it should be a P0 priority before anything else.
Yet meanwhile, women entered the legal profession in the 1920's but wages did not catch up until the 1960's when the Equal Pay Act was passed. Economics 101 would say you could snap up competent female lawyers for a little more than they were paid at their current firm and thus wages would creep up, yet this would not happen.
Not sure why you're being down-voted. Efficient markets for talent shouldn't tolerate racism/sexism/etc, but all the historical evidence is to contrary. It's almost as if rational _homo economicus_ is a bad foundation.
I don’t think so. It’s not that law firms intentionally passed up on bidding a little more for women because they were as good as men but cheaper. It’s because they thought the women were simply less good.
It takes awhile for people to change their view. If you come from a society that has for thousands of years said women couldn’t do jobs like be a lawyer as well as men, it’s not crazy that it would take you 40 years to figure out that wasn’t true.
It’s not a bad foundation when it comes to something like what we’re discussing, allocation of capital by professional investors in the medical space. They’re pretty close to homo economicus, but they’re still human so they still err.
It's not a surprise that especially at elite college it's classical economics that is taught in the gen. ed. courses. Its models are simple, and plainly visibly wrong.
If behavioural economics or political economics were taught instead, anything with models that have explanatory power it would be viewed as lefty and revolutionary, and that would really upset donors. Consequently we are stuck with homo oeconomicus.
The authorities aren't going to send you off to reeducation, they will just determine (accurately) that you are a me-first guy who must not be allowed on the public roads and won't return your license. A win for the general public because road traffic is a coordinated effort.
I don’t mind being admonished by a magistrate for my mad behaviour, but being required to attend what boils down to nonsense treatment theatre is a bit much.
Anyone who’s enough of a sociopath to intentionally park like a jerk knows the right things to say to appear repentant.
I wonder what Germans think of this waste of time / money / effort.
My guess here is that this is not treatment as sic but assessment and that if you’re not appealing for your licence back you could just skip it. Perhaps a German could comment?
It’s weird to me how right wing Americans seem primed to catastrophise about Marxist big brothers when they hear about any vaguely effective or equitable example of public policy.
> My guess here is that this is not treatment as sic but assessment and that if you’re not appealing for your licence back you could just skip it. Perhaps a German could comment?
The point is that there should be a mechanism to prevent such arseholes from getting it back if it seems likely that they'll continue their behaviour. This is one such mechanism.
The authors of the paper are most certainly fake chemists, the idpol-centered vocab gives it away.
Science is a social endeavour, identities as a scientist are relational. A chemist is someone whom the scientific community identifies as one, and it would certainly not call the authors on that paper chemists.
So the argument is: if you were paid in any stablecoin then prices of housing, coffee and cat food would not have gone up quite as much in the last five years. That does not make sense at all, the recent inflation is caused by insufficient supply.
Stablecoins are being adopted rapidly and at large scale in emerging market jurisdictions whose currencies are depreciating more rapidly than dollars, so converting whatever into what are essentially dollars is preservation of value.
His shtick is real estate investment, of course he wants to see Joe Public buy a starter home. The trouble is: real estate as a government-guaranteed investment vehicle is what brought us the housing affordability crisis.
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