Yeah the Right loves to blame poor foreigners while the Left prefers to blame rich foreigners but at the end of the day they at least agree that it is never the voters themselves who are to blame.
Also for real how can the voters (ie the average citizen) be the problem? The average citizen has no money and no political or regulatory power. The average citizen just exists in a system they have no control over and responds to incentives. Hoping that en mass people won’t do that is like politely asking a river to move.
To use the UK as an example, attacking rich foreigners for their "non-domiciled" tax status is extremely common. This is where you live in the UK, but for tax purposes hide your wealth in another system with lower tax rates, effectively paying no income taxes at all in the UK. Variations of this concept exist throughout the world in many countries and routinely draw politically ire.
Just this week: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-61017993
Wealth coupled with a collection of passports often creates far more opportunities to avoid tax than being stuck under the rules of one single State, rightly or wrongly.
Tax evasion is seen as a moral problem no matter how you accomplish (so hiding it with your other citizenship is just as bad as using a shell company).
Tax evasion is a legal term, not a moral one. Tax evasion isn't a problem in USA given that it has the highest compliance rate in the world. Jurisdictional arbitrage is a freedom and should be protected as such.
> The foreign-buyer ban won’t apply to students, foreign workers or foreign citizens who are permanent residents of Canada, the person said.
The article says some of those foreigners will be exempt. I will say this, the country needs the immigrants' money (ie spend in that country, on top of taxes paid)
While I agree that getting people to change their mind is pretty hopeless, I dislike the framing that they are just "responding to incentives" and therefore not only off the hook for the shitty outcomes of their choices, but also not responsible for the choices themselves.
This is false if you think about it.
What drives the price of a house is what people can pay on their monthly payments.
As rates go down prices go up as people can afford to pay more.
Unfortunately for home buyers this means the downpayment goes up. What you end up with is a bunch of first time home buyers who can in theory afford the mortgage payments but can't build up the $200,000 nest egg required as a 20% downpayment on a $1,000,000 home.
When rates go back up home prices will drop and so will the size of the downpayment required, even though the person will pay about the same monthly on their mortgage.
Lower rate help those with existing homes and therefor existing equity more than those without homes.
Why is financializing land and real estate a cause for the problem?
I argue it's not financializing, but the lack of allowance for production of more, when the price signals a demand for more.
When crop prices are high, farmers grow more, or make use of more land to grow. Ditto with electricity or water. Why isn't more land opened up for development, when price of real estate is high?
If you want a convenient scapegoat, blame the McGuinty government of the early 2000s. When the 2005 Greenbelt Act was passed, developers across the country warned of a housing crisis in the future due to the effect the bill would have on the price and timelines for new construction. 17 years later we'd prefer to blame China or NIMBYs, but the reality is Canadians, and especially Ontarians, did this to themselves when they allowed politicians and environmentalists to ignore the concerns of land developers and engineers.
> Yeah the Right loves to blame poor foreigners while the Left prefers to blame rich foreigners but at the end of the day they at least agree that it is never the voters themselves who are to blame.
Generally speaking I think you're mostly correct, but there are exceptions, and nuances.
I am one of the odd outliers who believes that much of the blame lies with voters, but at the same time it is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It's ~true that voters "should" "vote for better politicians", but consider:
- what if the particular flavour of democracy that we practice does not make this possible?
- what if the public's ability to make optimal decisions is a function of the quality of education they received, which is largely a consequence of government policy (and other things, like culture)?
Take HN for example: observe how many comments there are in this subthread (or the overall thread) asserting that "The problem is X", as if the causality behind the situation is due to a single variable. Might this error be to some degree (perhaps even a large degree) a consequence of causality (philosophy, epistemology, logic, etc) not being first class subjects in school (and culture/society), on par with science, math, and language?
And if one's answer to this question is something along the lines of "Oh, they didn't mean that literally, they were just speaking loosely, or expressing their opinion, etc", then I ask: why is it that we have ~culturally normalized (if not worse) speaking (and I would say: thinking) so inaccurately and imprecisely about so many matters that are extremely important, be it housing prices, immigration, war, politics, you name it? Might it be possible that we (~everyone) are "doing it wrong", at massive scale?
If I was forced to nominate a single variable that lies behind not just this problem, but perhaps ~all problems (mostly excluding natural disasters), it would be the inability of the population of this planet to think and speak/listen/conceptualize/understand at a level that is adequate to rise above the local optima we find ourselves stuck in (note: there's substantial unaddressed complexity here: some things are improving on a relative basis, etc - I am speaking in an absolute sense, which includes that which is beyond our current knowledge, or ability to know).
But yeah it’s the immigrants fault. Lets reduce immigration while we are facing a labor shortage.
The truth is, this problem has been growing for many years and public servants have allowed the issue to grow beyond any control (and actually profiting off it in some cases). Now, the rest of the population will suffer and it's become a hard problem to solve.
Finally, yes we have a labor shortage - but it may actually be a labor correction. Wages have been stagnant for years and inflation is running wild. Wages need to rise to catch up - artificially depressing wages with immigration is a recipe for disaster.
[0] https://www.cicnews.com/2022/02/canada-fastest-growing-count...
The government may be faceless, but there are lots of things that could have been done - including more "development-friendly" practices. However, there's always a cost - do you sacrifice environmental protections? Democratic government principles?
You can't just blame whatever out-group you dislike at the moment. If those neighbors you described vanished as of 5 years ago, the prices of houses would have risen just the same.
The reason that I blame government is because they explicitly had a responsibility to protect society from this. Officials have either neglected or outright contravened this responsibility.
Also, immigrants to Canada usually move to one of its three main metro areas - Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, which, coincidentally, have also seen the highest amount of housing increases.
Other places, like Calgary or Winnipeg, have not had housing explode in the same way (although prices have risen in smaller amounts there as well).
Keep in mind, the original article is focusing on Canadian housing, which, while complex, may be even simpler than the American model.
Wealthy-ish, semiretired older local people, or non-locals with vacation property who do everything they can to shut down any kind of housing project. Their methods include suing the town at great expense to the taxpayers and floating their own and sympathetic friends into town council.
It's extremely frustrating when a really well designed development that takes a year and millions to craft can get shut down in a single meeting by a very loud, adamant and group of busybodies.
Those very same people are the taxpayers. They have and should have the right to represent their interests in a court of law. If the town ends up being a victim of it, so be it.
Yes, of course they have this right, I don't dispute that. But when a single case like this eats up literally 10% of a small town's yearly budget, and the same small group of people repeatedly behave in this way, I also have the right to call them assholes.