- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
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This will pass at the same time as the healthcare, world peace, and word hunger bills.
From the article:
With a divided Congress, the bills are unlikely to pass into law this session. But Mr. Smith said legislators needed to start a conversation.
Solid odds this will be a campaign issue, which is a great thing.
It will be a campaign issue and then nothing will be done about it. Fingers will be pointed.
This 1000%. A bunch of bullshit from all sides, all these “ought to’s” and a bunch of malarkey will get tossed around. The election will get won by Biden or Trump, and all this will just turn into the same thing it always does…empty promises and a shit ton of money getting made at the top while we’re all fucked.
Real change won’t happen by voting for it, it’s when billionaires find their heads in baskets staring up at the axe/guillotine/whatever that just cut their fucking heads off. Eat the rich.
The “Guillotine the rich” crowd sure loves saying they wanna do it but they never have the balls. You talk of politician “ought to’s” yet here you and many others are not executing billionaires. Put up or shut up.
I said, and I’ll copy and paste:
Real change won’t happen by voting for it, it’s when billionaires find their heads in baskets staring up at the axe/guillotine/whatever that just cut their fucking heads off. Eat the rich.
That’s a message to show support and willingness. I can’t pull it off myself, but if more people are aware and willing, the future is bright.
Disolving companies resolves problems only if the people who bought the products dont turn immediately to the replacement.
can’t wait to see conservatives line up in droves to defend wall street buying houses in a few months time
Everyone will talk about it, nobody will do anything to improve the situation.
Once you reach the ranks of the Senate, you have more financial interest in the future of your REIT-heavy investment portfolio than the price any of your constituents are paying for housing. Hell, more than a few Senators come straight from the halls of Wall Street themselves. That’s how they have the kind of surplus cash to run for office to begin with.
Or they could all be vampires, if we’re just making shit up.
Even vampires don’t suck this hard.
I agree your comment here was just bad lol
Like, volunteer on any campaign whatsoever and see how wrong it is
I’ve seen the inside of the Beto O’Rourke campaign three times over and it got worse every time.
don’t forget gun regulation
Gun regs have better odds, as high real estate prices don’t put Congresscritters in the hospital.
In fact, we’ve already passed more regulations recently in the form of Safer Communities Act, as well as reimplementing the Obama Era mental health screening that was removed under the Trump Admin. Sure, it’s not a renewal of the Assault Rifle Ban, but it’s something.
A great deal of the Safer Communities Act is simply sending more money to municipal and state police budgets. Given the sway these organizations have in electing state and local leaders, its certainly something.
Liberals: “We’re teetering on the brink of tyranny, democracy may cease to exist after 2024.”
Also liberals: “Please remove our 2A rights while fascists in red states expand their own.”
“remove our 2A rights” is a weird way to phrase “regulating gun availability to make it harder for people who intend to use them to kill people to get them.” you know the text of the second amendment includes the phrase “well-regulated,” almost as if they did not intend for gun availability to be the lawless wasteland that it currently effectively is.
I’m sure that if federal legislation is passed all these fascist militias made up of racists, theofascists, and law enforcement officers will all willingly give up their firearms and comply with the law 🤡.
I get it, it’s not ideal, but that ship has sailed. Additional gun regulations only pass in blue states, and only further weaken our defensive posture. If you truly believe trump and his retarded followers represent an existential threat to democracy in the US (as I do) I cannot understand why you wouldn’t understand the necessity for access to normal capacity magazines and non-nerfed firearms, unless maybe you think Jon Stewart is gonna come rescue you with a witty quip when some fascist has you on your knees in front of a ditch.
You should start believing conservatives when they tell you what kind of America they want to live in and what they’re willing to do to get there, cause although they’re fucking morons, they’re also dead fucking serious.
Your rifle isn’t going to protect you. Did guns stop the war on drugs? Did guns stop the Patriot act? Did guns stop the Japanese interment camps? Did guns stop Jim Crow? Did guns save the Natives? Did guns stop the anti-black city riots? Did guns end the robber barrons or the city bosses? Did it stop the attacks on Asians in San Francisco and New York last century or even two years ago?
Your gun means jack and shit. The biggest proof of that is you are not in front of a planned parenthood in Texas ready to battle with it.
Did guns stop the Japanese interment camps?
Fun fact, my great grandfather, an immigrant from Mexico, worked on a large Japanese farm during WW2 as a foreman. When fearful citizens came for the Japanese my great grandfather took ownership of the property and kept it running during their detention. Upon their return he relinquished ownership, having kept everything in order all while continuing to pay himself the same wage.
The biggest proof of that is you are not in front of a planned parenthood in Texas ready to battle with it.
I’ve taken and thrown punches for my fellow POC and the queer community, I’ve been arrested in protest, and have stood in solidarity when members of my community have required defending. I’ve been shamed for my culture and where I come from, looked down and spit up on for being less than - and I can still hold my head up high and stand with dignity exactly because I’ve always chosen to ‘battle with it’.
You might consider this interaction the next time you accuse someone of inaction just because their experience and principles differ from your own.
I won’t.
“HuRrDuRr LiBrUlZ”
Find a second brain cell. JFC.
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Do your part and vote 3rd party. If we want change we have to vote for it.
Our current electoral system is inherently biased against 3rd parties. We need to switch to approval/STAR voting to make 3rd parties viable.
Yeah, people keep saying things like this, and then just completely ignore that their view is led us down a 40-year path where our liberty and economic power has dwindled progressively with each passing election.
So no.
Your viable parties are shit. I’ll vote better.
It would help if third parties would do something other than put a candidate up for President every 4 years, fail, and then disappear for the next 4 years. That’s a waste of everyone’s time, money, effort, and votes. Parties that do this should be looked on with suspicion.
Get people into city councils, school boards, and county comptroller. Work up to state level government. There is tons of good to be done at that level of government–in many ways, far more than the White House could ever do.
Greens, this is about you, specifically.
It would help if, when we give the White House and Congress to Democrats, they actually follow through on their promises.
But they never do.
Voters do not have a viable way of holding them to their promises, because letting Republicans win is unacceptable. A good third party would help that, but they’re all busy trying to get into the White House and failing.
Our viable parties are shit because our electoral system is shit.
The 100 year path of wishful thinking that single person who votes will suddenly change their behavior such that they won’t vote strategically hasn’t got us anywhere. Our electoral system needs reform. It is inherently biased to make 3rd parties fail every single time. The game is rigged for 2 parties and only 2 parties.
and then just completely ignore that their view is led
You’re talking about a view different from mine.
All you do by voting for a 3rd party in a FPTP election is take a vote away from the major party you are most closely aligned to. You may as well just not vote
Both parties rule as conservatives. Can’t say I really align with either.
You’re right though. I may just as well not vote, given that we always get conservative outcomes.
As much as people are disenfranchised the two parties are not the same. One is conservative, and the other is trying to create a authoritarian theocracy.
One is trying to create an authoritarian theocracy, and the other is collaborating in that effort either overtly or by inaction. They are functionally the same.
our liberty and economic power has dwindled progressively with each passing election
That’s as much a consequence of legalisms - Bush v Gore invalidating votes in swing states, Tom DeLay kicking off a big wave of legislative gerrymandering, candidates party-flipping starting in the White Flight of the 80s/90s (WV’s governor flipped the day after the '17 election), the banning of earmarks in legislatures and the legalizing of unlimited campaign donations following Citizens United - as voting patterns.
So much power has been consolidated within the hands of party leadership and so much money has flown to affiliated party-loyal business interests that voting no longer shapes political behaviors. When Republicans can’t win an HISD board seat, they turn to the governor to simply take over the entire board by fiat. When someone in the Democratic Primary attempts to unseat an incumbent, the party spends tens of millions to defend them. When a third party bid emerges, they’re cut out of debates and excluded from news coverage save for the yellow journalism designed to dismiss you as a crank. (And, in fairness, there are tons of cranks in the 3rd party scene already).
I don’t think you can strictly attribute this to “not enough 3rd party bids”. We have consolidated political power in the same way we’re consolidating economic power.
Then you might as well not vote. This is not the right political climate to try to make 3rd parties viable.
Unless, of course, you want the country to become a fascist theocracy.
I literally only voted Biden because I thought it might help stop fascism.
He couldn’t find five minutes in his busy schedule of shoveling more of our money into other countries’ wars to be bothered with it.
Our current electoral system is inherently biased against 3rd parties.
That’s true until it isn’t. Year-over-year, the nation can only support two parties nationally and one dominant party state-by-state. But which party (and which coalition of leaders) hold power can change in wave years, particularly when strong third party campaigns force rival parties to cater to the independent vote to get over the 50% hump.
There’s a podcast called Hell of Presidents that does a great job of documenting the rise and fall of state party organs and their impact on the national scene. The rapid collapse of the Federalists, the rise of the Jacksonian Democrats, the collapse of the Whigs and emergence of the Republicans, the rise and fall of democratic socialists, and the emergence of liberal progressives, movement conservatives, libertarians, and neoliberal democrats all begin with third party bids in small states.
While we don’t have more than two distinct parties in the US, we absolutely do have factions within the main two parties that have regionalized and polarized constituencies that are fighting for control of the national party apparatuses. Even setting aside guys like Trump and Sanders, just check out Nebraska’s Indie dark horse contender Dan Osborn, whose union organizing is putting him ahead of both party candidates.
when strong third party campaigns force rival parties to cater to the independent vote to get over the 50% hump.
I’m not saying 3rd parties have zero influence, but they just don’t succeed frequently enough for it to be called fair. The spoiler effect is far too strong for that to happen.
we absolutely do have factions within the main two parties that have regionalized and polarized constituencies that are fighting for control of the national party apparatuses.
Absolutely. But because of the spoiler effect, the two parties are held together with glue. Reforming our electoral system would weaken that glue, and hopefully fracture them enough to make a difference.
they just don’t succeed frequently enough for it to be called fair
Statistically speaking, the majority of campaigns are going to fail. There’s one seat and, unless it is uncontested, a minimum of one losing candidate. But politics isn’t a one-and-done game. Its a game of coalition building and expanding name recognition. Starting off as a third party candidate, establishing a message and a political brand, and then canvasing your neighborhood to build up your appeal is fundamental to most successful politicians.
But because of the spoiler effect
The spoiler effect only matters to losers. If you’re the guy with the plurality of support, you’re in the best position to win.
Sometimes, the winning move is simply to carry the banner of the dominant political party (which is why you’ll have a dozen people compete for the Texas GOP gubernatorial nomination while only two or three bother trying to run as Dems). But other times, it really is about issues-based politics and name recognition.
Schwarzenegger was able to win in California by being a famous popular guy. Sanders won in Vermont by being a high profile well-respected mayor of the state’s biggest city. Joe Lieberman lost his primary but held onto his Senatorial seat back in 2006 by rallying the Democratic Party leadership around him even after he’d lost the state party nomination.
Bush beat Gore in 2000 not because of a Green Party spoiler effect (Nader actually pulled more Republicans than Democrats in the state) but because he had die-hard conservative activists willing to risk jail to shut down the recount with the Brooks Brothers’ Riot, while Al Gore’s party just kinda shrugged and gave up as soon as the Republican-leaning SCOTUS sided with the Republican candidate. Hell, the 2000s were awash with caging, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and outright election stealing from the top of the ballot to the bottom. Third parties didn’t have anything to do with that.
Statistically speaking, the majority of campaigns are going to fail.
That wasn’t quite what I was getting at. Roughly half of all positions are democrat held, the other half republican held. 3rd parties make up such a small percentage of the existing seats, hence the “they don’t succeed frequently enough for it to be called fair” statement.
The spoiler effect only matters to losers.
Not really. Take the green party for instance. They definitely don’t align with the democrats, but they can at least agree on some things, where as them agreeing with republicans is far, far more rare. So it is in the interest of green voters that green politicians get voted in most, followed by democrat politicians, then republican.
But when they split the vote due to the spoiler effect, it ends up meaning the worst of the worst options gets voted in, a republican. And that should matter to the 3rd party losers.
Third parties didn’t have anything to do with that.
They don’t have to. The threat of splitting the vote is more than enough for everyone to vote strategically, which means 3rd parties don’t get any votes.
Roughly half of all positions are democrat held, the other half republican held.
Its more 55/45, as Republicans dominate the rural sectors with a plurality of smaller seats while Dems dominate the large-pop singular seats. Even then, the real balance of power is in the financing of races, with local business magnets and special interest groups dictating the nominees of both major parties. Down in Houston, for instance, the candidates that consistently win the mayorship have to first win the endorsement of either the police or fire departments (ideally both), as these organizations command popular prestige, enormous campaign war chests, and a large body of active canvasers who will work on your campaign’s behalf. Similarly, everyone kowtows to the oil and gas industries.
Introduce an independent candidate for mayor, and that candidate will still need to suck up to O&G, fire, and police in order to win the race. And, once in office, they’ll be constrained just like either of the two major party’s preferred candidates would be.
Go up to the Rust Belt and you’re bowing to the interests of the automotive industry. Take a stab at politics on the West Coast and you’re going to need to cater to Silicon Valley. Everyone running for office on the Atlantic Seaboard is keenly aware of the clout enjoyed by the investment banks, the real estate magnets, and the DC bureaucracies. Add a modern-day Ross Perot to your list of candidates and you’re still juggling these interest groups in order to win.
Take the green party for instance. They definitely don’t align with the democrats, but they can at least agree on some things, where as them agreeing with republicans is far, far more rare. So it is in the interest of green voters that green politicians get voted in most, followed by democrat politicians, then republican.
But when they split the vote due to the spoiler effect, it ends up meaning the worst of the worst options gets voted in, a republican. And that should matter to the 3rd party losers.
Except you’re assuming people are choosing to vote D, R, or G and then ranking their preference. In truth, you’ve got a substantive pool of voters who simply do not turn out when they don’t like who is on the ballot. Turnout in the US rarely breaks 60% of the eligible base. But when it does, you can see establishment candidates falter behind insurgents.
At that point, the Ds and Rs will court you for your membership in their party. And because they have far more to offer than a Green Party leadership, more viable candidates tend to be attracted to the Big Two parties. Greens (and Libertarians and other niche parties) are stuck with candidates who can’t get onto the D or R ticket via a primary or appointment.
If you have a candidate that is genuinely popular and generates a ton of organic enthusiasm - a guy like Trump, who bounced from Reform Party to Dem Party and then on to the GOP unsuccessfully for decades, before catching fire among anti-Obama anti-immigrant conservatives - then that candidate is going to dramatically increase voter participation and win regardless of which party they run under. Similarly, Obama was able to undercut Hillary in the '08 primary by dramatically boosting turnout, particularly in states where Hillary failed to campaign aggressively. So Tennessee and South Carolina and Georgia went to Obama in landslides, undercutting Hillary’s thinner margins in California and New York and Florida.
Obama could theoretically have run as an Independent candidate for Senator of Illinois and won (in large part thanks to the Republican incumbent flaming out in a sex scandal), then challenged the Top 2 for the Presidency. But why do that when you can run inside the party apparatus and fall back to a cabinet position or VP slot if you lose?
The spoiler effect doesn’t come into play, because the people who have the most viable campaigns get absorbed by the bigger parties. That’s why Sanders and Angus King caucus with the Democrats and even run as Democrats on the Presidential ballot.
As another case-in-point, consider Dan Osborn, an Indie currently being courted by the Democratic Party entirely because he polls so well against sitting Senator Deb Fisher.
That’s true until it isn’t.
The way you change that is election reform. Not thoughts and prayers and spoiler votes when one of the 2 big parties is running a wannabe-dictator.
Think, if fools in Florida didn’t vote 3rd party in 2000 you’d never have bush or the war in iraq, and we might have given a shit about global warming.
The way you change that is election reform.
Can’t even get DC statehood with a Dem majority and Presidency. Couldn’t do it when we had a 60 vote supermajority in 2008. We’re certainly not going to get it through the courts, given how the SCOTUS is stacked.
Think, if fools in Florida didn’t vote 3rd party in 2000 you’d never have bush or the war in iraq
The majority of green party votes came from registered Republicans. 2000 was decided by mass deregistering, disenfranchisement, and intimidation of the state’s black voter population, combined with the Brooks Brothers Riot that halted the ballot counting long enough for the conservative SCOTUS majority to certify the election in Bush’s favor.
There’s quite a few southern states that use runoff voting. Their state legislatures are just as filled with the big two parties as everywhere else. Additionally, the US is not alone in favoring FPTP voting, but many of those other countries still have third parties that are viable in individual regions (Canada and UK, for example). The US is unique in how the big two parties are dominant everywhere at every level.
People focus a lot on FPTP, but it’s not the only factor at work.
Yeah it absolutely isn’t the only factor, but it’s one of the biggest ones. I neglected to point out it isn’t the only factor.
After FPTP issues, the next biggest one in my mind is the spending rules. I think that all candidates should operate from a “shared pool” of election funds. So if candidate A wants to use 1 million for the election, half of it goes to them, half of it goes to their opponent. No candidate should have a higher spending fund from another. It would drive down campaign spending, make bullshit political ads less frequent, and add a degree of fairness.
That, and there needs to be a full ban on lobbying (read bribery).
As for the few elections in southern states that use run offs, that’s not quite what I’m looking for, and those elections aren’t in a vacuum. The political power the two parties get from surrounding areas is enough to mean 3rd parties still don’t have a chance.
Please, tell me you’re a child who knows nothing about the US electoral system without telling me. People like you got us Trump
Too much of a baby to read and understand the spoiler effect that comes with FPTP? Too impatient and short-sighted to push for election reform (RCV or approval voting) and just want some low effort immediate option that requires nothing more than casting a vote? Child. Democracies require effort to survive.
You’re looking at 3rd party votes in the wrong light.
They’re an effective means of voicing discontent with the candidates from the two largest party. Unlike the third of Americans who don’t vote 3rd party votes demonstrate a willingness to go out and vote along with their discontent in the platform of the two largest parties.
We aren’t going to get RCV by just waiting for it to happen. It’ll take actual work.
And calling people who have different opinions from you on the Internet ‘child’ isn’t going to get them to agree with you.
Yeah I’m comparing 3rd party votes to voting for the less harmful duopoly + activism, you’re comparing it to doing nothing.
You’re right voting 3rd party is better than doing absolutely nothing. What a high bar
They should never have been allowed to buy them to begin with.
The second best time is now.
People require housing. Corporations are people. /s
I’ll believe that when one is executed.
Or charged with a crime. All the protections of a person with none of the liability. Seriously it’s beyond stupid. If someone said that to you you would laugh awkwardly and get out of the convo asap and depending who it was talk to their family about possible treatment from psychiatric providers. Yet here we are, having to all pretend like the psycho is right because they bribed a politician into making it the law.
Exactly. I couldn’t have put it better.
Yeah, but you can squeeze 285,000 corporations in one office building!
I mean it’s a free market, it’s not reasonable nor desirable to proactively prohibit all possible bad scenarios
edit: to anyone downvoting, read carefully
I read your comment carefully and still downvoted because its an incredibly dumb thing to say.
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Nice username, fam! I’ve not found an Expanse community around here yet, but I see lots of fans
Wtf, I literally just re-watched the scene 5 minutes ago, and I come on lemmy and see this. Are the planets aligned or am I about to die or something?
Final Destination, Expanse style? That sounds… unpleasant lol
I bet you downvote this!
Edit: shit! I meant to say “won’t!” I bet you won’t downvote this!
I only said that because I’m pretty sure 99% of the people here agree with me, you included but are downvoting as a kneejerk reaction.
There’s never a scenario on the internet where 99% of people agree with you…unless you’re just talking to yourself. Just let it go, not like you lose anything with downvotes.
Then you have expressed yourself poorly and have made no effort to correct that.
What the fuck do you think regulations are for? If we didn’t have them companies would skip crucial steps because they are expensive. Take Tesla for example, removing radar/lidar because of expense and they are bulky. But are nessesarry, shit they’re putting mics outside the car to listen for sirens.a
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why is that?
I read carefully, then un-downvoted so i could downvote you again
I was just saying that as I was about to send my 6-year old out to the corner store to go buy some cigarettes for me, since our free market hasn’t imposed any restrictions on that transaction.
Or if you look at the housing market specifically, in my area at least, I can’t buy a second home in the same area as an individual. I can buy investment properties that I’d need to rent out, but I’m forbidden from owning a second residence for myself.
State, Local, and Federal lawmakers are constantly proactively prohibiting bad scenarios. And in this case, it wouldn’t even be proactive, it’s literally something that’s going on right now that needs corrected.
Homes are for people.
If allowing ordinary people to be priced out of owning homes is your idea of a free market, then fuck the free market.
People are priced out of homes specifically because the market has been kneecapped by bad zoning policy.
Homeowners got theirs and then pulled up the ladder
It’s not a free market… that’s not an actual thing that can ever exist. It’s a state where the markets are in a perfect, frictionless state, where barriers of entry are non-existent and everyone has equal access to trade on the market… Ignoring petty things like needing to actually source things
It is, in fact, both reasonable and desirable for the government to proactively watch and interfere in the markets before they enter a failure scenario, that’s their job in the market.
It’s often willfully misunderstood, but what you’re describing is a half step from lasse faire capitalism. Which is the idea that a “free market” is a stable state, and we just need to let it settle long enough without interference. But that’s literally psuedoscience…
Fuck the free market. Fuck capitalism. Fuck you, too.
I could use a good lay
Got money?
Looking at companies like Blackstone, who buy up houses at auction, lightly flip them and put them back on the market as high-priced rentals. THEY’RE the big reason for the lack of affordable housing.
Remember that Blackstone and the other institutions are only financing it. These companies have names; like American Homes/AMH, invitation, opendoor and so on. There are a lot of them and they are all given billions to go buy as many houses as they can get their hands on… essentially bottomless pockets. And those are just the large ones. There’s plenty of people churning 100s of homes and letting property management companies do all the work, financing new deals with existing rentals as leverage.
Something like 6% of US Homes are owned by Chinese Investors. More than 1 in 20 homes.
I mean, would it be better if we had a thousand mid-sized car dealership style house flippers rather than one singular monolith doing the same thing?
Blackstone agents are operating at a national scale in a market that’s been flush with speculators and flippers going straight back to the colonial era. The high price of real estate is the consequence of housing as a commodity. There’s no more free land to develop on the cheap and no more suburbs for young people to push out into searching for cheap new constructions. Take everyone at Blackstone out of the market tomorrow and you’ll have a hundred smaller banks lining up to repeat their formula by the end of the month.
So long as cash is cheap, housing is in demand, and REITs are a thing, you’re going to have businesses looking to profit off the difference between sale rates and rental rates as well as the gap between the prime rate and the going mortgage rate.
Yes it would be better. Monopolies are bad. Near monopolies are bad. The more market power a company gains the more they can charge for no reason at all except “fuck you pay me”.
Monopolies are bad.
Cartels are equally bad. Unless you change the economic incentives in home building and real estate speculation, you are - at best - changing the discrete number of people who get to participate in the profiteering. I don’t particularly care if one national guy or fifty state guys get to ratchet up my housing prices. Big Number Goes Up all the same.
Absolutely. Especially since we just caught them colluding to raise the market price.
Did you just scoff at the idea of competition improving a market?
One big monopoly looks no different to the consumer than a cartel of mid-sized dealerships. You’re not fixing the underlying speculative demand issue, just changing the number of participants in the speculative racket.
The solution is to make hoarding rental properties an unattractive investment. Put an escalating tax on owning multiple residences. If the 5th property is at 40% tax every year it’s no longer a money maker in a competitive market. Put the money towards tax rebates for single mortgage interest. Now you have buyers back in the market and landlords looking to sell.
Home 1 : 100%
Home2 : 133%
Home 3: 175%
Home 4: 250%
Home 5: 325%
Excellent suggestion. I don’t mind people having a second home or a couple of rentals, but more than that is just greed.
Put the money towards tax rebates for single mortgage interest.
Or just use it to construct new multi-family units that are sold at cost of construction.
There WOULD be more suburbs to develop if we were allowed to work remotely. I would gladly move to the developing suburb of bumfuck-nowheresville if I could go there and keep my job, but I have to stay within a reasonable commuting distance of the nearest metropolis.
Monopolies are bad.
So are cartels.
So why are you advocating for one?
For the same reasons you are, i guess.
So preying on the victims of the growing wealth innequality and income gap. That will surely accelerate the decline of civilization.
Well said, people think that making certain companies go poof will suddenly resolve issues for a long time, without thinking about resource availability, the circumstances which led to the sutuation and the customers who enable them.
Which is the exact reason the government is supposed to step in when there’s this kind of excess in the sector. Especially regarding a need like housing.
And this is the sort of legislation that should be passed by direct referendum, will of the people, and not by representatives who have been bought out by special interest groups. Desperately needed but unlikely to happen.
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Stupid take. Nobody thinks rote popularity contest is a good idea. There’s too much to know. Too much to regulate. Have to employ experts.
If it were left to popular vote, do you think we would have the Exclusionary Rule? A ban on cruel and unusual punishment? A right to remain silent? Any criminal rights?
Any minority rights at all?
So just vote for the issues that matter to you.
Either way, you get more control than having someone else make the decisions for you.
“Abstain from votes you feel unqualified for while the unqualified radicalized masses vote every time” isn’t exactly the winning strategy either. Fact is a large portion of the population has no problem voting incompetently and/or under the influence of malicious talking heads.
I don’t see why you think the constituency would routinely make worse decisions than the people they put in power.
Fact is a large portion of the population has no problem voting incompetently and/or under the influence of malicious talking heads.
What makes you think politicians are exempt from this?
Honestly how old are you?
Direct voting is the future.
We have frequent ballot measures in California and as a voter I do a lot of work to understand those ballot measures that many do not have the time or the ability to do. California ballots may have 5-10 questions on them, and these things already take a long time to properly research and understand…Can you imagine the complexity when you’re talking about national issues and especially thinking of running the entire government that way?
It’s a full-time job. There’s no way it’s scalable to run a country this large with this many competing interests using direct voting. You’d spend your whole life voting on or researching on voting on things.
Ultimately, you’d wind up with industry writing all of the law proposals and a misrepresented version of those coming across some kind of voting device. We’d still continue our slow slide into some sort of industrial feudalism, just without the politicians to blame for it.
I think proportional representation and ranked choice voting are both better ideas.
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Mmm, your entire point can be negated by acknowledging that politicians and elections are usually bought out.
How is anything I’ve posted negated by the fact that corruption exists?
Capitalism and its endless profit motive should never be near the things that have direct effect on people’s well-being and livelihood. All the human basic necessities should be capitalism free, housing, healthcare, education… etc… If you want to built a better and healthier nation of course, but no one cares about the nation, money is above everything to these sick fucks.
Why stop at the basic necessities? Put all art into a public museum for example
Achievement unlocked: socialism
Though I absolutely don’t mind!
I kind of agree, but has this ever been done successfully? It seems to me at some point you disincentivize work to the point it all collapses
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Right. Examples?
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Don’t have time to separate the wheat from the chaff today. But I understand if you don’t have any actual sources to back up your assertions.
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So you say, and yet you still offer nothing.
It’s social democracy. It’s a slight socialism under a capitalist umbrella where social services are untouched by capitalism. All of Europe operates this way.
It’s a fair question. The first universal basic income experiments have just begun in the last few years. Based on this article there’s been a little success at least.
https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/multiple-countries-have-tested-universal-basic-income-and-it-worksI think we’re only recently getting to a level of technology that we need less human workforce and can still prosper when inevitably some choose not to work.
Thanks, I am in favor of UBI, but like anything else I think the cost of everything will just rise to eat it up. With various trials going on, we should have better data soon
But like, you bring up “human basic necessities” and soon the old arguments about Maslow’s Hierarchy rear their ugly head.
How does this limit a corporation from doing the same thing?
So a hedge fund doesn’t do it, but a specific company does the same thing and that’s fine. What am I missing?
The bill would require hedge funds, defined as corporations, partnerships or real estate investment trusts that manage funds pooled from investors, to sell off all the single-family homes they own over a 10-year period, and eventually prohibit such companies from owning any single-family homes at all.
It does include corporations. For instance the Bezos thing we’ve been hearing about the past couple days would be covered:
Arrived, a young real estate company backed by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, has just announced its entry into the single-family rental fund space. Arrived currently operates a fractional real estate investing platform that has attracted nearly half a million retail investors since its launch in 2021. The platform allows these investors to purchase shares of single-family rental properties with as little as $100.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-backed-real-estate-151102586.html
Just so it’s clear, they want to turn our homes into a mini stock market.
This bill won’t pass.
We already live in a completely fucked up dystopia, most people just haven’t realized it.
That sounds like the perfect opportunity to work in property management because the owners will be so diffuse that you could be very lazy and they would be none the wiser
If we actually had a democracy, there would be a total of 0 people against this. It’s so incredibly unfavorable to want corporations to buy houses for profit.
There are people profiting from this either by owning the investment firms e.g. through stocks or by working in them in highly paid positions. In a democracy, the majority might be for such a law, but certainly not everyone.
0 souls then
it’s cool they had the idea. hopefully they act on it
Please make it happen, it’s an important first step
Who ever tabeled this needs to run for your president. Seriously
Step in the right direction, hope some version of it gets passed.
The Republicans won’t let it happen.
I’m sure they’ll have plenty of democrats helping, too.
Wall Street is not the problem, a lack of new housing is, according to David Howard, the chief executive of the National Rental Home Council, a trade association. The country needs anywhere from 2 million to 6.5 million units of new housing, according to various estimates.
“Policies really need to be shaped and crafted so that they support the production, investment and development of new housing,” Mr. Howard said. “I think bills that work against that ultimately are just going to perpetuate the challenges we’re already facing.”
While I certainly disagree with this person on some of their specifics, and don’t necessarily agree with the “teeth” of this bill (10k per home owned isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, and can just be priced in to an already out-of-control market), seeing a trade organization argue for the actual long-term solution bodes really well for the future of solving the housing crisis.
That’s crazy that they say we need more housing when there are so many empty houses sitting on the market from corporate real estate investing and other house flippers. “Wall Street is not the problem, a lack of new housing is” really sounds like the guy with gasoline and matches in hand saying “it wasn’t me” at the scene of an arson fire.
A significant problem isn’t just the lack of housing, it’s the lack of affordable housing. Builders keep building single family homes in spread out suburbs which is problematic in its own way. But not everyone could afford those homes regardless of whether they are buying or renting.
Investors owning single family homes is a big problem, the bigger problem is exacerbated but not explicitly caused by that. Affordable housing simply isn’t available in places where it’s needed. That’s why people say we need more homes.
Not just single family homes. They could be building starter single family homes, but those are cheap. They could be focusing on middle class family single family homes, but those aren’t as profitable as the luxury housing. They focus on luxury housing both in single family suburbs, and when they build apartment buildings in the cities.
According to the home builders, if you aren’t rich, they won’t build you a home.
The funny thing about empty yet “unaffordable” housing is that if the market actually works correctly it gets lowered in price until a buyer is found.
Good luck with that… They’ll just stick them in REITs
You would think so. But the reality is that large companies would often rather let a property sit empty than devalue it by accepting a lower amount. And when they control enough of the market that there’s no good competition, it breaks the whole “free market” thing.
You or I would be hurting (I presume) if we owned a property and weren’t living in and weren’t making any money off of it. These holding companies just see a line on a spreadsheet under the “assets” column.
I did say “if the market works correctly” for a reason.
A lack of housing is very explicitly our problem. Houses that are empty are not unowned.
Until housing is no longer seen as an investment, which can only happen if we are allowed to build sufficient housing, housing will continue to go up in value, and thus more people will invest
Anyone who sees their home as their “nest egg” is part of the problem.
So you build 500,000 new homes and blackstone or other companies buy 450,000, meaning you only actually generated 50,000 new homes. No, corporate interests are the vast majority of the problem with housing. Your neighbor renting out their house after buying a 2nd isn’t the issue.
Assuming some large capital group buys all those homes, they’re going to do it to try to make money off of it.
More supply means lower prices
Constraining supply, either by not building, or by buying everything available, means higher prices, so they don’t have to sell as many houses to make the same revenue.
Gonna go ahead and throw out that people whose job it is to make said revenue saying that selling more makes them more revenue makes this not track
Until housing is no longer seen as an investment, which can only happen if we are allowed to build sufficient housing
It can happen through legislation.
Yes, legislation that changes zoning policy and incentivizes building.
That would be the neolib solution, yes
So, the correct one.
The head of an organization that represents landlords is advocating for building more houses. Now why do you think that is?
Because they want to build more to make more money.
Please explain how this is a bad thing? This is rental org explicitly stating that the lack of supply is hurting their growth and profit.
That means they believe that the supply/demand curve is so out of whack that cheaper housing will make them more money.
This is absolutely and 100% a win-win.
Because I believe, in general, landlords are a bad thing.
This guy is getting priced out of the market by big money hedge funds the same way he prices out families looking to buy their single homes. Making housing “affordable” by increasing the supply of new houses disproportionately benefits the wealthy. After all, if you have $100 million you want to spend on property ownership, would you rather buy one hundred $1 million properties, or one thousand $100,000 properties of the same size?
You want to make housing affordable? Stop letting parasites like these buy dozens of houses.
Making housing “affordable” by increasing the supply of new houses disproportionately benefits the wealthy.
Some people need to imagine how they can get cheap thingies while the people who they bought from still make a profit. Does this matter? With cheap houses they will have many children which will push for more houses until either the earth becomes just houses or their demands are squashed and they become sardines.
Does this matter?
Yes lol.
Also, fun fact, we can build really tall things.
Goodbye
Lmao
The trade organization is arguing for investment into their market rather than regulations that would improve the efficiency of their market. The bill is likely a negative for them, and they want something that would be a positive.
The situation is not caused by a lack of number of houses. It’s caused by the lack of efficiency in housing. It’s more beneficial to leave units empty than to fill them because there’s little penelty (and sometime incentives) to do so. There should be something like a land value tax that pushes for more efficient use of land, not investments that push for less efficient use.
The trade organization is arguing for investment into their marke
This is the only solution to the housing crisis. We have too little housing. We need more.
The situation is not caused by a lack of number of houses
This is not supported by math.
There should be something like a land value tax that pushes for more efficient use of land
Stop, stop - I can only get so erect! I’d absolutely love to see more of a push for LVTs, but we both know that’s our fantasy and not a serious discussion in the near term.
What about private equity?
They’re trying to get it passed, I doubt people sitting in on that vote would shoot themselves in the wallet?
Home Ownership and protecting the middle class used to be phrases so often uttered by the Republicans 40 years ago that I yawned.
I’m glad to see someone pick up the gauntlet. Boggles the mind that this hasn’t become a huge political issue yet.
In case you want to learn about the bill:
NYT article (archive link):
Press releases:
https://adamsmith.house.gov/press-releases?ID=637A8E58-8F0D-4CB0-AECC-1D4690A00725
Text of the bill:
https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MCG23660.pdf
