40M Americans are at risk of eviction without a stimulus bill
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
If the money is going towards rent and necessities, its not stimulus, its a life-line.
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• The above stands whether temporary or ongoing.
• Land distribution is kind of free as long as it's unclaimed and there's plenty.
How many assumptions can be clumped into one headline. Can't let rents drop under market forces, can't let banks go bankrupt, landlords can't take a hit. Only the taxpayer can bear these burdens.
This is the part that should really upset the free marketeers. The market wants to change and CNN wants government to step in and promote stasis. Some might call it stability.
I don't think people should be out on the street, but someone responsible has to feel the pain for the mistakes here otherwise the root cause, whatever it is, will not be fixed.
In my opinion the mistakes are the decades long eroding of public services paired with the tolerance for growing inequality in society. Unfortunately neither party seems genuinely interested in addressing these root causes.
Now we pay the price for poor decisions.
Sure, that'd be fine (well, it probably wouldn't be, but I'll go with it for the sake of argument) if we had months or years for the market to react.
But it doesn't work that fast.
By the time rents correct you'll have millions of homeless. But I guess that's better because... reasons?
> I don't think people should be out on the street, but someone responsible has to feel the pain for the mistakes here otherwise the root cause, whatever it is, will not be fixed.
Huh?
The root cause is a once in a hundred year pandemic.
What other solution would you propose, other than a time machine?
Markets are generally the fastest thing to react to any change in circumstances. Rents in my area are already 60% of what they were pre-coronavirus.
The Aspen Institute report is, on the face of it, silly. 40% of renters are not going to be evicted. That would imply 40% of rental properties sitting vacant and there is no way landlords would accept that outcome. Landlords don't want (and probably can't afford) to have large amounts of housing stock sitting empty.
> By the time rents correct you'll have millions of homeless. But I guess that's better because... reasons?
The world has changed. People need to reorganise their lifestyles to cope with that change. It certainly isn't the governments job to try and maintain a delusional clinging to lifestyles that don't work any more.
> What other solution would you propose, other than a time machine?
Fixing a root cause doesn't help the current crisis. If I have a step on a nail then fixing the root cause (putting the nail away) doesn't change the fact my foot hurts. It helps for the next one; there is no reason to think this is a 1:100 year pandemic. It is probably a 1:20 or 1:30 year pandemic conditional on modern air travel [0]. People will need to get used to this sort of thing.
If you want long term solutions; loose construction requirements that promote abundant housing, monetary/fiscal policy that promotes low debt loads and high home ownership. If you want short term solutions; government guarantee of a place in mass housing (not particularly pleasant conditions, but indoors, safe & sanitary) + 3 meals a day. People shouldn't be starving on the street but people need to fund their own lifestyles - not taxpayers.
If you want radical solutions; end the lockdowns and let people work.
Be honest, what you're suggesting has nothing to do with cost effectiveness for the taxpayer and everything to do with believing that people should be made to suffer if the "market wants" (a phrase that you used above without any apparent irony) them to suffer.
It's definitely not about saving the taxpayer money. The $600/month we're debating in the United States is quite cheap compared to what you suggested. As a brief exercise in costing out your solution, consider what the government spends per day putting a person up in a barracks, incarceration facility, shelter, or literally anywhere at any time.
Nonsense. And two of your baseline costs (barracks and prisons) are silly because the cost includes total control over the lives of the people in the facility.
Take an annual cost of stimulus as $600/mo/person, and the cost of a homeless shelter as $2,000/mo/person (and that is probably an overestimate). Article says ~40M people at risk of eviction. That means a shelter plan would have to absorb more than 14 million people (the population of a large city) without rents collapsing to an affordable level. Even ignoring the fact that the renters will be out trying to find profitable ways to contribute to society, or looking for more rational living arrangements where they can afford it. There is no way the shelter plan would end up costing more.
The major issues are logistical in nature. I can imagine good arguments that it is a plan that can't be implemented if it actually turned out 10 million people needed new homes - but until it becomes impossible to find alternative shelters it is better to leave the landlords out of pocket. As a starting point the original alternative of "something has gone wrong, lets pump unearned money towards landlords" is worse.
> people should be made to suffer if the "market wants"
That is an attack that you cannot support. I've helpfully offered a bunch of suggestions where nobody has to suffer. Moving home isn't so bad it counts as suffering.
Those were examples, but when I wrote literally anywhere at any time I meant, think of anyplace where the government puts people up and feeds them - even just the cost of putting an employee up at a hotel and feeding them for a day - and use that as your baseline. The government just cannot do this cheaply, and changing the government so profoundly that this becomes their job is a weird idea.
Creating a new form of housing for millions of displaced people instead of simply preventing them from becoming displaced in the first place is tremendously expensive, immoral, and disruptive. There's just no reason to do it except sadism.
> I've helpfully offered a bunch of suggestions where nobody has to suffer.
You believe displacing millions of people rather than just giving them the money they need to make rent is not going to involve suffering. That is not "helpful," it is delusional.
> Moving home isn't so bad it counts as suffering.
The entire population does not consist of college kids away at school, or whatever you're fantasizing about.
Hotel accommodation is also silly; that comes with daily sheet cleaning and such. It'll save you some typing if you stick to relevant examples, is my point. You've listed 4 so far, 3 of them aren't related to the cost of providing basic shelter. Amenities are expensive.
> Creating a new form of housing for millions of displaced people instead of simply preventing them from becoming displaced in the first place is tremendously expensive, immoral, and disruptive.
Expecting taxpayers to swoop in and pay people's rent is also expensive, immoral, and disruptive. Taxpayers shouldn't be funding something they have no control over. And as I pointed out and I'm not sure you read, my option is much cheaper than $600/month/person.
> You believe displacing millions of people rather than just giving them the money...
No I don't. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of things I believe and that isn't something I ascribe to.
> The entire population does not consist of college kids away at school, or whatever you're fantasizing about.
That isn't relevant and you are representing that moving houses is an insufferable hardship. It isn't. I moved house this year, and I'm not even close to being a college student.
It's telling that you haven't offered any counterexamples, which is understandable, since the whole idea you've posited that government can do this cost effectively is just totally absurd.
> Taxpayers shouldn't be funding something they have no control over.
Unsupported dogmatism, and of a silly variety: taxpayers do this all the time.
> And as I pointed out and I'm not sure you read, my option is much cheaper than $600/month/person.
You asserted it without offering any real support for it. Congrats.
> Expecting taxpayers to swoop in and pay people's rent is also expensive, immoral, and disruptive.
Your calculation about what's least disruptive is completely wrong, so nothing else you say about this is making any sense.
> That isn't relevant and you are representing that moving houses is an insufferable hardship.
Becoming homeless is quite a hardship, and would be a widespread consequence if anyone adopted your weird policy ideas.
I used $2,000/month/person sheltered for my back-of-the-envelope calculation. What more do you want?
I'm not disagreeing, the issue is ~75% of your examples are bunk. You havn't really thought about what you are saying.
People will go without medicine.
In reality just paying the rent of 40M people is cheaper than anything else, assuming you care about society. Assuming a national average of $1000 per month rent, that's $40B a month, which is chump change compared to what the Fed is printing. Or, you can kick all these people out on the street, and give the money to the banks directly.
Of course its 40M people being evicted, not 40M apartments. So these numbers will be closer to $10B a month.
Imagine a retired teacher who decides to rent out a garage apartment to supplement her pension - is she taking advantage of 'inflated rents' if the rent amount barely covers a proportional amount of the mortgage?
Additionally, landlords have to pay 'inflated property taxes', 'inflated utilities', and 'inflated garbage service' - these aren't discretionary costs for a property owner unless you advocate letting people stay in their apartments, but without landlord contributions to water, heat, cooling, garbage.
As far as explicit coercion I really doubt that and I doubt it would be even necessary. For many, many reasons politicians are heavily incentivized to just flood the system.
Rents are coming down, but markets aren’t good at handling major financial crises like this, and lower rents mean nothing to those who are unemployed and can’t find work.
I bet good money that the decrease in rental prices after a eviction-pocalypse would be significantly more than a stimulus check.
I think the people making the decisions for the republican party care far more about blue ballots than black skin. The fact that blue voters are darker on average is just a coincidence to them.
The racists on the left think that we need to pump minorities full of welfare and government services in order to better subjugate them for their own benefit. The non-racists on the left think welfare and whatnot will help those people.
The racists on the right think that the minorities are a lost cause, dead weight to society and that we shouldn't waste a penny on them. The non-racists on the right think that we we got the government out of their business as much as possible these people would be able to help themselves.
Whichever group of non-racists someone's world view aligns with you will have a hard time spotting them on your own side because their racism just looks like good policy and you will see many more on the other side because their bad policy looks like racism.
The republicans probably do have more racists in their base because they're the whiter party and for historical "convince the poor white man he's better than the black man" reasons but IMO when it comes to actually pushing policy the racist party is whichever one has more policy you think is bad.
I have never once in my life encountered this hypothetical racist leftist, and a I've met a fair variety of racists. Why would you pick this topic as one to be a whataboutist about, when it's really not that ambiguous in the current US political climate.
If you thought that easy access to welfare was bad for people then you'd have met a hell of a lot of leftists who want "racist" policy.
My whole point is that one's evaluation of what is and isn't racist policy (assuming one believes in systemic racism in the first place) is based on what you consider good. Take a step back. Assume both parties believe that what they want is good for people and then assess the situation.
I'm not denying that there's racist hicks in the republican base. There's some racist hicks in the democratic base too (the stereotype of the waspy union worker who votes a straight blue ticket didn't come from nowhere) though IMO they're likely smaller in proportion of the party's base.
If you thought water was piss you'd have met a lot of people that like to drink piss.
Now they’re faced with a situation that can’t be solved without spending tons of money, which is a massive challenge to them politically and a big gamble given that we’re in an election year. The last thing they want to do right now is look like hypocrites to their base.
I think you mean massive cuts to taxes. I don't remember the last time they actually significantly cut the overall budget, hence the massive deficits they inevitably run up.
And that's where I find this disingenuous. They're sure concerned about deficits, now, but it's odd that they don't seem to have similar concerns when talking about massive tax cuts that enlarge the deficit while disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
Of course, the inevitable answer is to plug their ears and chant "Laffer curve", despite no recent tax cut having ever paid for itself..