Comment by laidoffamazon
8 days ago
This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.
8 days ago
This is neat, but as a $NET shareholder and someone with another ~$1m in net worth that can't afford to buy a house for at least another 6 years this makes me think we should significantly increase taxation.
Housing price issues in the US are fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing. Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all. What's needed are local zoning changes and significant revamps of permitting and approval processes to remove endless discretionary roadblocks from anyone who doesn't like medium density housing.
Yep. The fact that in most places in the US it's illegal to build apartments above shops is insane. That's the norm in the UK.
It's in Germany too, but recently it's become the norm for new-rich people to buy or rent these apartments and then sue the shop and especially bar owners for noise violations.
Not allowing that kind of mixed usage in the first place completely cuts away all that crap.
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> fundamentally the result of every major city making it expensive or impossible to actually build enough housing
ZIRP certainly had something to do with this too! Don’t overlook ridiculous fiscal and monetary policy.
> Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all.
Henry George begs to differ. He would say that you start with The One Tax and the resulting pressure on zoning will be unbearable. Good reading: "Land is a Big Deal" by Lars Doucet.
> Changing taxes (in either direction) really wouldn't move the needle at all.
Mmm... if you introduced higher taxes for anyone who owns multiple houses and has rental income for one or more of those homes and you eliminated from the current tax code their ability to claim deductions, it would definitely move the needle on housing prices and availability.
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OP lives in Austin. If you have $1M net worth, you can probably buy a house there and live there. If you don't go do that, I think you're just punishing yourself.
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No.
The global housing crisis is the result of international organised crime owning or operating most of the large construction conglomerates, using real estate as a fiat currency to wash the proceeds from all their illicit business, and (org crime infested) private equity companies cashing in on the former situation, pumping assets by buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable.
CRIME is the real reason worldwide for people not being able to afford a house.
> using real estate as a fiat currency
Even if we take your premise as a given, the entire reason real estate is so valuable is that there isn't enough housing in the first place. Real estate is, by its nature, a bad investment; it's only the scarcity of it that makes the value continue to go up exponentially.
> buying up available real estate just to make it unavailable
There isn't actually any available housing in the first place, at the point of cities even approving projects, compared to the number of people who need housing. That's the problem. The most extreme example is San Francisco, where as of this July the entire city had approved only 16 housing units [1] out of an already comically poor goal of only about 10,000 housing units per year.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-only-agreed-build-16-...
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This is absurd. Does it happen? Yes. But this is not the primary driver.
We turned housing into retirement funds. The median family's wealth is their primary residence. We cannot have these assets depreciate in nominal terms for this reason, and we actually need them to appreciate in real terms for people to have a nest egg.
It's awful, but it's the truth.
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If you’re a Cloudflare shareholder, Kenton has increased your net worth quite a bit. He is one of the few people who is so unreasonably capable he can and has changed the direction of a multibillion dollar company single handedly. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not in this particular case.
I’m also fairly convinced he didn’t capture one tenth of one percent of the value he created, so I’m not sure how anyone can argue this is ‘unfair’.
As someone that was previously bullish on Workers but now fully disillusioned with a barely positive cost basis on it right now I disagree with this - if anything I feel burned for believing and continuing to believe.
Either way, people like me aren’t going to be able to capture even a tenth of the success of joining Google in 2005 or buying a $1m house in Palo Alto ~4 years after graduating (I’m 6.5 years out of graduating) because people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house.
Take it easy. These kind of thought won't help you. It's a rough time out there but thing change. Our ancestors survived famines and war. We should be able to manage this.
And yes, life is not fair. But don't waste it, it's finite.
"people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house"
What do you mean? People aren't human if they do not have a certain level of wealth?
Seems to imply that you may think people with less wealth aren't valuable or even human. What should people with less wealth than you feel?
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If you can't afford to buy a house, what you want is zoning reform, not increased taxation.
(I want both, but I don't want more taxes to solve the housing problem, because they won't.)
I want both too, but neither is going to happen in the next 4-12 years so I can only fantasize about punitive measures
You have $1M of net worth that isn’t a house (and is therefore likely to be liquid) and you can’t afford to buy a house? Where and how much?
I spend about $3.2k a month for a studio apartment in an HCOL area. I don’t even own a car.
You need to move, yesterday. Yes, moving sucks. No, ideally you wouldn't have to. But at the end of the day you are just plain shooting yourself in the foot if you continue to live in a place that absurdly expensive.
Like dude, you could buy an awesome house in just about any other part of the country if you truly have $1m in liquid wealth. You have options to own a house, you just have to act on them.
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It sounds more like you can afford to buy a house, just not in the area you want.
I bought a house in Canada with a liquid net worth of $75k (admittedly, 2 years ago, but still). 15 minute drive to a major city’s downtown, 0.3 acres, 3 bed 1 bath with an attached garage. Is it the nicest house? No, but it’s a house, and I’d much rather pay a mortgage than rent.
With a net worth of a million USD, I could buy a house pretty much anywhere in this country, comfortably, and we’re known to have one of the highest costs of living in major cities in the western world. If you move almost literally anywhere from where you currently live, you can definitely afford a house.
Your net worth is far above the median. If taxes increase, you are likely to lose wealth, not gain it.
Increases to income tax generally won't lower a wealthy persons wealth, just the rate at which they can increase their wealth. They already have the money, and it will keep paying dividends and interest.
Unless you're talking about a new kind of wealth tax, but those aren't particularly popular...
If you have 1m in liquid assets, you could outright buy 2 houses within easy drive of Austin, or a (smaller) high rise condo right in the middle of downtown.
When have increased taxes directly contributed to your take home pay?
It doesn’t. They’re just expressing their jealousy in a thinly veiled and highly embarrassing way.
It truly is embarrassing. Imagine seeing something and thinking, "how can I get the government to forcefully take some of that for my benefit?"
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It’s not very thinly veiled
How would that even be possible? Presumably some people get a top up if they are on a tiny wage, but ‘direct contribution to take home pay’ really isn’t the point of tax. It also sounds a fairly inefficient use of money.
Have I missed something in this conversation?
Yes you have missed something but don’t worry about it.
When health insurance is 10x cheaper because of it.
What's a $NET shareholder?
It’s someone who owns shares in Cloudflare (their market ticker being ‘NET’), but everyone here thinks they’re a financial wonk when talking about big tech and finance so they insist on making it opaque like that. It’s a dumb and cringey trend. Just say “as a Cloudflare shareholder”, I promise you the six bytes you save won’t be missed!
But then I wouldn't know how utterly badass this guy is, shooting around those sweet ticker designations that all us plebs wouldn't recognise.
A somewhat small subset of my net worth is Cloudflare, which has the ticker symbol $NET
TIL that stocks can have a "$" in their code.
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