Anonymous A started this discussion 2 years ago#110,895
I've lived in New York City my whole life. Here's what happens:
-Virtually every working-age person with subsidized rent works a low-skill service job.
-No incentive for employers to pay low-skill employees more because their housing is subsidized by tax payers.
-Anyone who works a low-skill job who doesn't have subsidized rent, has difficulty competing with people who make the same as them but don't have to spend >50% of their income on housing.
-These people get pushed further into poverty and eventually into these same programs.
So what's the solution? The main and only problem is wealth inequality. The mean wealth per adult in the US is $579,000! For many households a family could literally retire and live off interest if they just put it all in an index fund.
UBI is the best solution I've seen. And it can be easily funded by asset taxes, which ought to be tiered like income taxes and approach 100% after a certain wealth level. If we can figure out how to tax property, we should have no problem figuring out how to tax assets. For publicly traded companies, which is where the bulk of all of the ultra-rich's wealth is typically held, the market already does the job of appraising value, so tax that.
Second to that, zoning density laws should be repealed, public housing, along with most entitlement programs repealed too. Several industries should also be partially de-regulated. The medical industry being one -- prices have been driven up due to the artificial shortage of doctors created by bottle-necking the medical schools and slowing the construction of new ones.
Anonymous D joined in and replied with this 2 years ago, 21 minutes later, 59 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,232,711
Do you think poor people didn't exist before public housing?
The point is they have protection from the elements and a locked door and mailing address.
It's much better than having them spread out on the streets shitting in parks and throwing their trash in the gutters. That's how they live if there's no housing for them.
Anonymous A (OP) double-posted this 2 years ago, 1 minute later, 1 hour after the original post[^][v]#1,232,716
@1,232,705 (C) > public housing works well in vienna > this authors so stupid theyve heard of no place outside of murikkka where these policies work
A small city in a small country with a different culture. The problems in the US are different and that's what I'm discussing. This country is far wealthier than almost every country in Europe. Both in total and per capita.
> Do you think poor people didn't exist before public housing?
Obviously they did. But the question is: have these solutions made the problem worse?
And, yes, I provided another solution. Recognizing that public housing doesn't work does not mean doing nothing, as you seem to suggest. I literally said all this in the OP.
If every adult in the US had anywhere near $500k, the only people that would be homeless would be homeless by choice. As it should be. There should be help for the severely mentally ill in any case, of course.
> It's much better than having them spread out on the streets shitting in parks and throwing their trash in the gutters. That's how they live if there's no housing for them.
Have you been to NYC?