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Your tax dollars at work - big public employee pensions keeping house prices up
2011 Feb 23, 7:02am 5,850 views 34 comments
by bert follow (0)
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Are you proposing that military personel all have to commit to a 30 year purchase of a house to take up residence?
No, I’m proposing your business model is taxed higher than it is, since taxing rents is superior to taxing wages or actual capital investment, and there are a trillion dollars or more of rents going undertaxed in our current system.
By taxing rent-seekers much higher, actual productive people and bona fide capital investment returns could be taxed less.
Win-win for everyone.
Ideally the military would have its act together and not allow rent-seeking slime like you chiseling our servicemen over finding SFHs to live convenient to the base.
However, doesn’t the landowner pay property taxes which helps pay for the good of the community?
Indirectly, yes, but with SFHs too much of the ground rent is being captured by the LL. LL’s didn’t create this value, but they are pocketing it. This is an economic fault in the system, a wealth drain from the working class to the wealthy via rents.
It is a large part why our current economic system is falling apart. Too much wealth collecting at the top, too much debt at the bottom.
This is all going to come crashing down eventually.
Not sure why so much name calling is necessary for you to get your point across. You have valid points.
I have no problem with the taxation you're describing. Taxing land vs income, taxing wealth vs income. Fine.
I'm not capturing any rent. My rent covers the carrying costs of these properties. I could raise the rent to improve my cash flow, but I prefer attracting long term tenants with a fair rent(though any rent probably wouldn't be fair to you) to get the steady equity pay down for securing my own future. Do you believe that I have the right to improve my wealth over time, or is any wealth other than putting my savings in the bottom of my mattress an anathema to you?
Please describe the scenario on how things could be made fair for military servicemen and their living circumstances. Soldier X joins the army. He gets paid wage y, enough to service a non downpayment 100% loan. No one can rent to him, so he's given a loan(offeed by a private bank or subsidized by the gov't?) to buy a home near the base without any down payment? He's shipped off to another base 5 years later. He must sell his home then? He can't rent it out, then he'd be the slime ll that you're against. Is that your solution? What if he can't sell it?
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Retired oakland city employees all getting 85% of current city employee wages. 1,125 from before 1976. That's a lot of spending money floating around Oakland for buying investment properties. At the same time, it will take 10% of Oakland's general fund to pay just for those pre-1976 retirees - money out of the economy that can't be used by others to buy houses. I don't see house prices going down anymore because investors are scoping up SFRs with all that cash floating around.
Battle in Oakland as pension fund payment looms
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/22/BAT51HNCSU.DTL
A battle over how to pay for a pension fund is looming as the biggest political battle in Oakland.
The city in 1997 issued a bond to give itself a 15-year holiday from regularly paying into an old police and fire pension. But the pension's investments soured, and now the city will owe $46 million on July 1.
It's an amount that some city officials say the city can't afford because the city also has to close a $40 million-plus shortfall in its $400 million General Fund budget by July 1.
City staffers have proposed issuing another bond to buy an additional five years of pension holiday.
It's an idea that has three city leaders so worried that they've launched an informal advocacy campaign to bring attention to it.
"We have to bite the bullet," said Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente, chair of the council's finance committee, which will discuss the issue today. "At some point, we're not going to be able to pay, and we're going to be broke.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/21/BAT51HNCSU.DTL#ixzz1EpEF2Cpv