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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate

2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate.

3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or change in zoning laws. Entire countries seem to be perfectly okay with watching its young people be priced out of cities and areas they work in as long as "number go up".

All the hand-wringing about political gridlock is just a cover for basic greed. Detestable.

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It’s even worse because there’s an adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS and school system. So all the incentives are towards not just home ownership but also additional buy-to-let ownership so that those with the means can afford private health care, dentistry, school fees for their kids/grandkids, inheritance for the kids who are priced out of the market, and retirement.

It’s a gravity well of incentives towards absolute property gluttony and creating an overheated housing market and massive social inequality.

> adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS

I remember about 10 years ago, "the idea" was that retirees would, as their health starts to decline, do equity-release in their homes to pay for their care needs (on the basis that the NHS would start to means-test care based on the value of all assets, including housing, so that if an OAP has £1m locked-up in their house and they probably have less than 5-6 years to live it's only fair that they liquidate some of that wealth instead of expecting the NHS to pay for everything - while those who don't own their own houses, would still benefit from free NHS care).

I left the UK just-over 10 years ago (but I still visit my parents a few times a year and do the WFH-thing-but-abroad) so I'm not as clued-in on subtler points of public policy, but I'm curious if that's still the case? ...or if the Tories reversed that decision in the 8 years they've held power? (after-all, it would be anathema to Daily Mail readers, who give me the impression that they fully expect to enjoy their house-prices even after they're dead).

Theresa May tried to sell this as part of her election campaign. It was a disaster. No one wants to be forced to give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into.

That may not be fair, but when most voters are property owners you're not going to get a different outcome.

This is an interesting topic because it highlights how the political and economic culture is broken and incapable of effective national strategy. I don't think housing, health, industrial policy, education, or anything else can be fixed without a complete overhaul of the UK's political parties, media, and systems.

It seems like maybe they didn’t pay in enough - baby boom demographics meant there were relatively more productive workers paying for relatively few old people, so each worker was paying a fraction of what it would cost to carry themselves through old age.

Also, not enough kids, and of those, not enough who wanted to go into medicine.

It seems like baby booms have a way of making things seem artificially good for a while, and then there’s a hangover.

> It seems like maybe they didn’t pay in enough - baby boom demographics meant there were relatively more productive workers paying for relatively few old people, so each worker was paying a fraction of what it would cost to carry themselves through old age.

Right but manufacturing technology better and more efficient, we produce far more "per worker" now

Yeah, but I don’t think we’ve seen commensurate gains with healthcare workers, except by perhaps reducing visit time per patient.

Perhaps the inference is that the owners of industrial technology should be paying more taxes on their profits, since the proportion of labor as an input is shrinking.

But getting people to pay twice for public services is a core way to increase tax revenue!

The core way that pushes this cost onto the working class.

> Theresa May tried to sell this as part of her election campaign. It was a disaster. No one wants to be forced to give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into.

It's not as simple as "give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into". If you have 20K in your bank account and no property, you have to pay for your care. If you own 2 flats worth 1M each and have 10K in your bank account, you pay nothing. The so-called "dementia tax" would have make this situation fairer. Besides, they wouldn't have to release equity while alive, but the cost of care would be paid by the heirs upon selling or inheriting their parent's property.

Imagine a scenario where you have 20K in your bank account. You child inherits only 10K, because you had to pay for your care. Now imagine you have 2 flats and 10K in your bank account. Your child gets the whole lot. Does this look fair?

Theresa May, that, as far as I'm concerned, should be sent to the Hague for architecting the hostile environment for foreigners, had only one non-demented idea in her entire political career: making social care fairer, and that's what killed her premiership. I can't think of a more emblematic example of what is going on in the UK.

> Does this look fair?

No, but because we should end means testing completely. I thought NHS meant you didn't have to do all the things we have to do here in the US.

A few years ago, I had to do an annual wellness exam so I could keep my health insurance "discount" at work. There was some miscommunication within the three parties: 1. Doctor's office 2. Lab 3. Insurance and I had to act like a mediator between them. I thought that was bad enough but NHS sounds worse now.

The Conservative government that's been in power for 13 years has consistently underfunded the NHS. While the current vogue is to blame Covid, it's only been the final crack in a dam that's been bursting for years now.

They already paid for NHS during their active period. Why should people have to pay again, once retired? If you request them to pay for healthcare, after they are retired, then you shouldn't ask them for money during their active period.

Welcome to the beautiful world of empty, overconfident political promises that are smashed against the rocks of reality 30 years later.

This is why I plan to finance my own retirement and consider a minimum social security pension a happy bonus.

Because they paid £15k for their house in 1974 and it's gone up to £1.5 million through no special skill of their own. Their life expectancy has also increased 10 years in that time due to NHS advances so they will be living longer and costing much more than before to care for. The calculus as to what they own and what they owe has changed dramatically just during their life span.

This is obtuse; you're ignoring the observation that people with sufficient cash have to pay now, and the contrast with property owners. Sure, you may think it's unfair that anyone has to pay after having paid taxes, that's a legitimate opinion I happen to share. But just stating that and ignoring the rest of the GP post isn't helpful.

It’s I my broken because our electoral system favours conservative outcomes. If we had proportional representation then many of the issues that seem impossible would suddenly become easy to solve.

Edit: in before anyone asks for evidence of favouring conservative outcomes: Boris Johnson had a landslide 80 seat majority with only 43.6% of the popular vote. PR would mean more coalition governments, but those would largely be left leaning Labour/Lib/SNP even when the conservatives have higher than historically average vote shares.

So people are expected to pay twice for healthcare, just because they own a house?

No. At the moment it's people who don't own a property and have savings instead who "pay twice". People who couldn't get a mortgage to buy a house so saved instead are expected to pay more towards old age care than those who did get a mortgage to buy a house. The proposed policy change was to rebalance the current rules which greatly benefit property owners over involuntary renters of similar means, to make the rules fairer.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36489768

>It’s even worse because there’s an adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS and school system. So all the incentives are towards not just home ownership but also additional buy-to-let ownership so that those with the means can afford private health care, dentistry, school fees for their kids/grandkids, inheritance for the kids who are priced out of the market, and retirement.

It's also about rapidly declining population and people not willing to work. The result of welfare state.

If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.

How would you incentivize people to have children?

Make it seem to be profitable, obviously. France’s system is genius - supposedly, income can be shared between all household members regardless of age.

So the marginal tax rate becomes very low if you have three kids. Even incentivizes one parent to work less.

If there's a finite resource, you can't just say "if only the population worked harder, they'd have more money to spend so they can buy the thing we're discussing". Money is used as the tool to ration in our society, but it doesn't therefore mean that insufficient money is the problem behind rationing. This financializing of everything is the problem with too many analyses these days - fundamentally we need to think about provisioning before financing.

Hi, the Cradle to Grave Welfare state has existed since the 1940s.

Were people not willing to work in the 1940s?

There is a problem that the age demographic has changed.

There is the ever increasing problem of more people drawing down state pensions, using the NHS and social care, than there are young tax payers to support them.

Working hard doesn't influence housing supply vs demand in real terms at all. In fact it makes it worse because all those hardworking people will demand higher quality housing in exchange for their sacrifice. So end up with more people being unhappy with their current housing, not less.

> If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.

I don’t know if this was sarcasm, but this is the sort of absurd nonsense spouted by conservatives who’ve already gotten “theirs”.

Home prices that are astronomically high relative to average wages means that most people can’t afford to buy a home no matter what they do (other than becoming millionaires).

Greed is exactly the right word. There is a flat unwillingness to acknowledge or reason from the fact by so many homeowners that they are sitting on giant, completely unearned windfalls. There’s a huge sense of entitlement around these inflated prices.

It is an unearned windfall, but people deserve to keep their homes. It bears noting that the issue is caused by property investors, not homeowners. How about we go for the individuals that own more than 3 properties and let grandma keep what she earned?

She may have earned the house to some degree (the article outlines a number of government subsidies which make this doubtful), but she definitely didn’t earn the land value increase.

I’m reminded of this quote:

> Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.

Marx or Lenin couldn't have said it better. Marxists have a fetish with seizing private property and forcefully equalizing people in poverty.

Sure but most people just want to live in that house, not capitalize on it

Grandma, living in the same house she’s lived in since 1972, collecting a fixed income pension cheque once a month, is not what I’d describe as a “rich person.”

Look instead to the people who own golf courses, sports stadiums, super yachts, private jets and the like.

Everyone knows all property is owned by grandma.

Yeah I have to agree- all that increase in value doesn’t mean anything unless she sells it, which she won’t do until she dies anyway.

Yup. I think a 90% tax on real estate capital gains would be the solution. That would also disincentivize housing speculators et al.

In addition, a 90% tax on real estate income (rental income minus costs like mortgage, interest, maintenance, property taxes, etc) would also disincentivize people who buy properties just to rent them out.

> Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing.

They are risking. Land value can go up or it can go down. It just has been mostly going up (in real terms) in the past decades, but it's far from certainty. You can lose money by investing in real estate, just like in everything else.

The question isn’t: does grandma get to keep living in the home, there’s no one that’s against that.

The question is who, if anyone gets the million bucks, that she didn’t pay for or earn, when the house is sold.

This isn't true. Homeowners vote in favour of policies that benefit landlords as well. It will look like the landlord is conspiring against tenants but landlords hardly have any political representation compared to tenants.

The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate more valuable.

So if you have laws restricting that development you need to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want development."

Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.

The better off - and therefore more politically-connected - you are as a homeowner, the more you care about "I don't want the wrong people living next to me" compared to "I need to maximize short-term property values." (And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.)

> The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate more valuable.

Nope. It's to make money for the developers.

> Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.

Gentrification is a result of shortage. When wealthier people are priced out of rich neighborhoods, the only place for them to go is poor neighborhoods. It just so happens that poor neighborhoods with the least amount of political power are the first ones to be redeveloped when there's a shortage of housing.

> And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.

Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.

You can see a ton of development but that doesn't really mean anything. Often there's not even enough development to meet the rate of growth in a given city, let alone reduce prices meaningfully.

> Nope. It's to make money for the developers.

Sure.

Let's look a simple condo case: Developer pays X for property. Developer spends Y to build a building. Developer sells N units for Z. To make money, NZ has to be greater than XY aka the total value of that parcel is now higher.

> Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.

Yeah, short-term, why was that parcel before the condo building worth less? Because there was less demand for what was there before than for what was there after it. Development increase short-term values by providing immediate units with nicer amenities or better condition or more size or whatever. Probably pretty uncontroversial.

But also development increases long-term values by continuing to grow long term demand. Development, residences, businesses, services - in the most successful cities, all that flow of money produces more and more demand and value over time. Not a lot of demand to live on an empty lot in the middle of nowhere where there's not a nice house and there's no nearby jobs...

So flip the causation: if there hadn't been development to allow all the people in [popular city of your choice] in the first place, it wouldn't be so popular and have such high demand today. That's not completely separate from geographical factors like rivers, but it's also got a lot to do with development - take, say, the land where a river meets a train line and compare it to the land downstream without the train.

When you build new housing (as in, increase the number of units of housing that are available in total), you make your lot more valuable, which makes other lots less valuable. So a developer makes makes money by making their lot more valuable, but they do not "make real estate more valuable" generally.

This is much like, you know, every other thing in the world. When a shoe manufacturer makes shoes, their shoes have value, but the value of all other shoes are slightly less because there's now one more competitor for demand for all those other shoes.

With shoes, sure.

With housing, it depends. There can be a proximity effect. The old house next to all the nicely redeveloped new houses is now worth more, even if the total number of bedrooms hasn't changed during the redevelopment, because it is in a nicer environment (and a buyer might want to redevelop the old house, and live in a nice house in a nice suburb).

That's been repeatedly empirically shown not to be true. New housing depresses the price of existing housing (very slightly), even hyper-locally.

That's purely short term.

Long term development is good for everybody's property values, in the exact opposite way that losing businesses and residents is bad for those property values. Phoenix vs Detroit, say.

"Demand" is a dynamic thing, it responds to changes in the built environment of a city, region, or nation. London didn't spring into being fully-formed and fully in-demand at today's levels. It found a virtuous (for property-owners financially) cycle of both increasing housing units and increasing population and demand for certain areas.

There are in-demand cities that have relatively affordable housing (like Tokyo), that allow lots of housing to be built, and cities that have extraordinarily high costs of housing (like London) generally have a hard cap on housing development.

While there is obviously some amount of this whole thing where more housing allows more people to come to a city which can in some circumstances drum up more jobs or whatever, I think it's a significant oversimplification to say that more housing increases property values in the long run. Ceteris paribus, more housing depresses property values. It is possible for there to be a feedback cycle where more people in the area increase the overall prosperity -- and thus property values -- of the area, but I do not think that generally more housing is the most important factor there.

The thing is that large developers love restricting development because it limits competition.

If there is only a limited supply of land to build further on, it is much easier to corner said market of land and sit on it if the prices are not high enough for your liking. The cheapest development is the kind that larger developers do not bother with (one house to two or three on a single plot of land, rather than large complexes)

This is not the case in SF. Developers want to build, but entrenched interests fight and delay, often using the rhetoric that doing so only makes developers richer and the only reason developers want to develop is so the developers themselves make money (as if this is some kind of purity test of intent).

As much as I hate giving NIMBYs any credit, it's important to remember that developers don't want to lower the price of housing - they want to make money, but the higher the cost of housing the more profit they make.

For instance, suppose they build 100 apartments in the suburb of X. They know that for every $1k the price of housing in X drops, they lose $100k. So weirdly, they tend to leave housing vacant and sell it at a drip-feed so that they're always selling less houses than there are buyers - there is a huge difference between selling 3 apartments to 4 buyers, vs selling 4 apartments to 4 buyers. This particularly bad when there are few, large developers instead of lots of small developers, as the few large developers can collude to price-fix much easier.

Please don't interpret this as contradicting the fact that California needs to massively overhaul its zoning/construction permit system - the fact that it can take years to receive permission instead of weeks is a big reason for the price of housing (and raises capex requirements which results in fewer but larger developers, see previous paragraph). Ditto for all the zoning that mandates exclusively single-family homes, and other such pointless exclusionism.

Yeah, developers acting in their own interests isn't going to magically fix everything - there's no shortage of examples of how "chart goes up forever" thinking leads to nasty externalities and tends to run into a brick wall at some point, and how manipulative the big players in the real-estate market can be.

But painting NIMBYism in such reductionist (and long-term economic-investment backward) as "development would make real estate investors and developers lose money" would just result in people fighting entirely the wrong battles with entirely the wrong message to actually have a chance at changing things in a useful way.

SF is not the only place with a housing crisis. In fact I would say SF is a pretty extreme case.

Seattle and NYC are both examples of places that funnel all development into a select few areas where the market for land is cornered.

> the more you care about "I don't want the wrong people living next to me"

Then, by some modern definition, you are a nazi and a bigot.

That’s also the set castigating young people who want to live in expensive cities. Prudence dictates you must live far far away. Why are you even thinking of living in New York City, you fool?! Why live in a cesspool like you goof!! It’s become a culture war, too.

It's basically The Wire in the making here in the UK. In 10-20 years, if not now already, we are going to have full blown ghettos I'm sure. Whereas 10 years ago I felt safe in most parts of London.

Crime has noticeably gone up and I'm sure it's just going to get worse as gangs increase. Even in safe areas, muggings and knife violence are on the rise.

My children went to a really terrible comprehensive which I had to move them out of. The kind of stuff going on there is just making the next generation of criminals possible. And it's not the school's fault - they just don't have the resources to manage with bulge classes and staff stretched to the mental breaking limit.

It's an utter shambles the state of this country. Without strong leadership it's not changing either - we need an Obama or similar charismatic leader with progressive (or hell, even moderate) ideas at this point to make some change.

One thing this country has going for it over the US is that governments have a mandate to make large changes. In the US, nothing can ever change because of gridlock in congress with filibusters. So we still have some hope here, although lack of proportional representation makes it very difficult to get proper representation.

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

This is just a self-defeating excuse. "Monopolised" implies that they're somehow preventing younger people from voting. The only way in which this is a thing is by scheduling elections on days that are inconvenient for younger people to vote.

If you want change in who represents you, the first thing you need to do is vote. The second thing is to get others to vote.

While true, check out this demographic map for the US: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...). The majority of people are over the age of 30, and most of them live in owner-occupied homes. In fact, 66% of all Americans live in owner-occupied homes. I imagine these statistics look similar or even worse in the UK.

There is a real demographic advantage for the elderly, and those who own homes, even if we ignore the propensity for young people to fail to vote.

now compare how many people are in age of 18-35 vs 35-90

> 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

This, in my opinion, is the biggest factor compared to the other two. Politicians that want to win power have to win votes. Older people (and homeowners) vote more than younger (renting) people. A party that prioritises younger people over older people will be referred to as His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition.

The reason Liz Truss was kicked out of the PM's office by her party wasn't because her spending plans were economically illiterate. It's because her plans started rapidly increasing interest rates, so higher mortgages, which is starting the process of fucking over Tory voters.

Migration to bigger tier one cities is partly to blame. Many young people want to live in NY and rent a shoebox flat for life. They think that they can become Friends protagonists when in fact they become broke and blame government.

Or, it's where their job is, which requires them to come into the office on some sort of basis.

Or at least in North America, younger people don't want to live in soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing to do apart from visiting the same big box stores, chain restaurants and bars in exactly same looking plaza.

Real estate isn't immune to the law of supply and demand, which mandate that you can only pick at most two out of size (or quality) of the housing unit, location (and the quality thereof), and price. Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around.

> soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing

This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn. It's just a matter of who you spend that time with, and how you perceive that time, in the Stoic tradition.

> You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn. It's just a matter of who you spend that time with, and how you perceive that time, in the Stoic tradition.

It's not just about restaurants. I'm not going to be able to go to concerts or events. There will be no specialized stores. Even in the example you gave, many of these chains are absolutely terrible now. Going to a local place means better food. It's not all pretense.

As the saying goes: It's hard to have fun with dogshit in your mouth.

How often do people actually go to concerts or events? Why do I need specialized stores if I have the internet? Eating out is expensive and generally not good for you, calorie-wise.

Cities are fun, but people fail to realize that rural places are also pretty great. You just need to make your own fun, but you actually have the room (and money) to do so. I can go out in my yard and do archery, target shooting, etc. I live surrounded by woods and can go for a walk or just sit in there whenever I want...mosquitoes permitting. My house has room for any new hobby I want.

I will say that suburbs are probably the worst of both worlds, but I suppose you're closer to those concerts and better restaurants if you want.

>suburbs are probably the worst of both worlds

hit the nail on the head right there.

And what if you are not rich and you can't work for home? Would you spend hours per day commuting? That translates in loosing some years from your life.

classic hackernews shut-in that doesnt understand that people enjoy culture, i go to a concert/show at least once a month and they are the best things i spend my money on.

Yeah, OP is hilariously myopic. Lots of people would jump off a cliff during one of those walks if they had to live like that.

Once a month is so infrequent that you can afford to, you know, just drive there. Nobody is saying live in the boonies 4 hours from civilization.

How does suburbia stop anyone from going to concerts? I live in a very suburban area and go to shows about once a month too. Sometimes those shows are downtown and sometimes they are in the burbs (sometimes the even further burbs).

Yeah, and depending on location, you might not even be that much further from the happening spots. In city it's like 20 min for me, vs. previously 30-40 minutes; sure it's both ways, but this isn't that crazy.

Also you have more people and diversity. If you hate your neighbor there's plenty of others. In a smaller society, if you don't get along with ~3-5 people your fucked.

That's fine and dandy, but most people probably don't approach anywhere near that regularity. I enjoy culture just fine, but I'm a busy father and I also enjoy my hobbies.

All I'm saying is that most people that act like rural areas have "nothing to do" probably don't do all that much regularly anyways - and there are simply different things to do. We live 5 minutes from a state park with great hiking and have two public beaches within 5 minutes as well.

Some people have little interest in those things. You've also really only listed solitary activities. Sure you can do some of these things "with people", but it's a far cry from more social activities.

To answer your first question: a lot. There's people that are very different from you, that really don't do well without these interactions. They expect to go out 1-3 times a week or at least monthly. Small area community events can be awkward if you aren't from town, don't know everyone, who all grew up together.

Yeah, you're buddy might come over now and then for target practice. However this is very different from social events city dwellers rely on.

That's true, but I'd argue those that go out monthly could easily live an hour or two from the city.

Don't get me wrong - if I were still single I'd probably move to a city, if only for the dating prospects. Once you have a family though and limited free time the pros and cons change a bit.

I live in a suburb of a B-tier (at best) city, and have been to half a dozen concerts this year and at least two more coming up. Including several in objectively A-tier cities.

The idea that if you live in a suburb you can no longer go to concerts or events or "specialized stores" whatever that means, is just ridiculous.

> "specialized stores" whatever that means

I coined the phrase, and am now not so sure myself. It doesn't really need to be that special, either. If you live in a small area you'll have eg. 1-5 stores.

There will be a big box supermarket, a local one, and maybe some other wildcard option. Then there will be a couple local stores (hardware, outdoors, etc.). However, if you want anything specific or just don't like the shop, you have to go to a different city.

I don't know if you've lived in a small town, but this would include things like electronic. With no Best Buy or Circuit City, you were stuck with Walmart, or a local shop for almost twice the price.

It's true that fun and interesting cities would still command some kind of premium under more liberal permitting regimes, but that's not an excuse to be amplifying it artificially with policy.

Let me offer a counterpoint: I live in LA because it is home to the largest immigrant population in the US from the country where my parents were born. When I go to the grocery store, restaurants, concerts, festivals, etc. I am experiencing that cultural connection.

There’s numerous spaces I’ve been in where English is rarely spoken and it gives me the opportunity to maintain my language skills.

Do you think I could have that in generic suburbia?

I'm an immigrant myself, having moved around the US quite a bit and currently living in a part where there aren't very many people from my country of origin. I've never once considered proximity to a large community of people sharing my ethnic background as important in choosing where to live, but of course YMMV.

It's funny because I've always thought of LA as a conglomeration of suburbia, but perhaps you're referring to "generic suburbia" as one that's composed primarily of typical white Americans? Then naturally by definition you're not going to have the same kind of access to whichever cultural group that is missing from that town. But I disagree that those kinds of places are entirely devoid of "soul", as the GP put it. It'd be like criticizing Los Angeles (plurality Hispanic, approximately 0% Danish[0]), for not having Danish festivals and grocery stores, or Jackson, MS (roughly 80% black and less than half a percent Asian[1]) for not having enough authentic Asian restaurants.

Sure, there's an argument to be made that you can find representation of anything in a big enough city, and that holds in places like NYC or LA. But that's a truism.

[0]: https://www.statimetric.com/us-ethnicity/Danish

[1]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/jacksoncitymiss...

LA is not Manhattan but it’s not a generic sunbelt city either. It’s comprised of dozens of neighborhoods and cities many of which are dense by any American standard (10000+ people/sq mi). A number of neighborhoods that were previously oriented around the yellow and red cars still have walkable “main streets” (albeit each of these main streets are individually difficult to reach without a car).

But that’s kind of beside the point. What I’m pushing back on is the notion that you can live anywhere in the US and it’s just as good as anywhere else so you might as well live wherever it’s cheapest.

It’s not about suburbs per se since Orange County is as suburban as it gets and also checks some of the boxes I mentioned (although I’d argue not as many as LA). It is also extremely expensive.

I don’t care for the “soul” argument since it’s vague. I just specified something that is personally important to me and justifies living in an very high COL city.

There is something fundamentally different about the cultural life in cities. The suburbs are actually "soulless" in comparison.

https://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl010.htm

Worth pointing out that every Stoic I can think of was an upper-class city-dweller. Epicurus—Athens. Marcus Aurelius—Rome. Zeno of Citium—Athens again, but perhaps apocryphal. Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus—Rome again [0].

[0] I'm reminded now that Epictetus was not particularly wealthy, and did live an ascetic lifestyle. Perhaps the exception that makes the rule.

… You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant…

Have you actually eaten at a TGIFridays? The food is awful. I suppose if the actual meal is completely secondary to your enjoyment of the experience, you might be right, but for me, eating out is as much for the food as the company.

In my early 20s I used to sit at the bar at TGIFridays 3-4 nights a week and play trivia with my girlfriend (now wife) and other friends. It was less than a 10 minute walk from our suburban condo and across the street from our work so we would have lots of coworkers stop in and hang out. I’d usually eat some of their shitty wings and fries but the experience was definitely hanging out, drinking, and playing trivia. I’d imagine this type of experience is common whether you live in suburbia or NYC.

In a city, that 10 minute walk encompasses several bars and restaurants. Competition increases quality or decreases price.

> This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn.

I'm one of those younger people. The main difference here is, "the hip" restaurant in Brooklyn will have vastly different food than a hip restaurant in SF. Can't say that about TGIFs

I haven't noticed that there is "vastly different food" in SF vs Brooklyn. TGIF has bad food, but that's a different question.

    Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around.

This isn't saying much. Isn't this true in all highly developed countries?

Until they get married/have kids and do the same thing their parents and their parent's parents did...move to the suburbs.

One difference with "younger" kids now is they're getting married later...but once you have kids the suburbs look completely different and it's been that way for as long as there have been suburbs.

This often comes up, and I'm genuinely curious, is space really that much more important when it comes to kids? I grew up in an apartment sharing a bedroom with my sister, and tons and tons of kids grow up in an apartment all over the world; all the older European cities, Asian cities (Mumbai, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc).

Netherlands has the happiest kids in the world, where in Amsterdam a lot of kids would be growing up in an apartment. The flip side is, they get their freedom where they can go to places without needing their parents to drive them everywhere.

In the States that seems to be the case. I surmise that's due to our strong sense of individualism in our culture. Hard to see whether prosperity causes individualism or the other way around.

Define prosperity though. If it's strictly financial prosperity, then sure. But various studies have found people in western countries to be lonelier and less happier than their asian/european/south american counterparts where sense of community is higher.

The U.S. doesn’t generally build a lot of multi-bedroom apartments suitable for families. The emphasis is on single bedrooms and studios.

Furthermore, people also prefer the suburbs for raising a family because that’s where all the nice schools are built. For better or worse, inner city schools are avoided like the plague for parents with the means to buy a house in the suburbs.

> Until they get married/have kids and do the same thing their parents and their parent's parents did...move to the suburbs.

My parents moved to the city when they had kids. Specifically to enable a better life for us. More access to friends, better schools, more independence, better extracurriculars, more family time because no commute, etc. It was pretty great.

Living in the city also made college affordable because we could just live at home and walk to school.

I do notnthink suburbs are better for kids or parents. They can't go anywhere unless being driven, so they are either stuck at home or parent have to drive then around. There are less other kids to play with, kids are limited to backyard. Same for after school activities, much less is going on.

Unless you are talking about literal toddler, it is nit that awesome.

But how much time you have to spend in traffic each day?

Possibly none because WFH is a thing.

There's lots to do outside big city centres if your life doesn't evolve around consumiption of services provided by others. Big cities suck for most physical and creative outdoor activities.

No, people move to cities because of jobs and because the countryside is dying. No need for weird theories about Friends.

> Many young people want to live in NY and rent a shoebox flat for life.

Nobody wants to rent a shoebox apartment in NYC for the rest of their life. But if you're not rich your only choices are to rent the shoebox or to leave NYC, and people choose which one matters more to them.

And if not already rich in NYC then you're probably there because you're trying to become rich.

Do you think all 8+ million residents of NYC are trying to get rich? It’s not all investment bankers and engineers.

Big cities are not created because of dreams of "Friends", but because they have lots of jobs. That's why NYC is still attracting people. If it had zero jobs, it would go broke in less than a year, no matter how many TV shows are shot over there.

I grew up in NYC, when big parts of it were still affordable. That was a time when people migrated there without assuming an impoverished lifestyle and locals didn’t get priced out. It breaks my heart that we now accept that big cities are for the rich or the masochistic. There was a lot of magic in my childhood, that will now become a thing of the past, unfortunately.

You should read about Vienna, which is a relatively large city that’s bucking the trend.

At least where I live, the difference in wages between big cities and even tier-2 cities is night and day.

And forget wages, sticking around in small cities is often career suicide. As a young person, you can’t be blamed for wanting McKinsey in NYC on your resume instead of Acme Hardware Store in random town, Idaho.

Mck pays the same in all cities in NA :)

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners...the entire system is rigged

Homeowners, irrespective of age, vote more. This is in part enabled by material comforts. But there may be other layers of causation.

The first two are problematic per se (though I'm uncertain of the effect size). But the last is fundamental--if someone can vote but can't care to, they're not going to have their interests represented.

> But there may be other layers of causation.

Having a permanent, of sorts, attachment to a location incentivizes people to vote to protect their interests in that location.

The real question is, if you are profiting from this system: How can you stop people from caring, or alternatively how can you make them vote against their interest?

This is ofc a rhetorical question as you can see the answers play out very clearly in nearly every conservative party in the world (and much more subtle and convoluted in the parties left of them).

> How can you stop people from caring, or alternatively how can you make them vote against their interest?

Voting against their interests: nothing. That said, I've often found folks deemed to be voting against their interests to be doing nothing of the sort.

Those who don't care are, for me, also fine. They're self selecting out of having a voice. If they want to have one in the future, they can engage. The tragedy is those who want to engage but can't. Due to registration requirements, ersatz poll taxes, difficulty of getting to and from poll sites or keeping tabs on the election calendar.

(Apathy is unlikely to be solved with reforms versus education. I've never met an apathetic voter who cast a blank ballot in protest. If they show up, they tend to find something to vote on.)

> The tragedy is those who want to engage but can't. Due to registration requirements, ersatz poll taxes, difficulty of getting to and from poll sites or keeping tabs on the election calendar.

I hear about this every now and then, but is it an issue in any real number? Maybe the problem of the "difficulty of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see arising due to the nature of this country being large, spread out, and automobile-centric.

Even Georgia, which was recently under fire for so-called voter restriction laws, hands out voter ID cards for free or a non-driver state ID card for under $40 that lasts nearly a decade. I can only imagine that anyone who is unable to obtain one of those has much bigger problems than voting every few years.

So things depend on the state, but IIRC some states have been way more brazen about others.

For example, at one point a proposal was floated to force changes in Texas polling center distribution, but only in counties with over a million people, which was pretty nakedly partisan. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/23/texas-voting-polling...

Abbott, Paxton, and Patrick are the 3 horsemen of the "woke" apocalypse. They will do anything to prevent anyone who isn't an old, white, Xtian (those who profess to believe in Christ but do not follow his teachings) from voting, especially in Harris County.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/01/harris-county-electi...

> Maybe the problem of the "difficulty of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see arising due to the nature of this country being large, spread out, and automobile-centric.

It's not just distance and cost, but time. Someone working 3 jobs simply doesn't have time to stand in line for hours.

Nobody has time to stand in line for hours to vote. Not even retired people would do that!

> Someone working 3 jobs

According to the BLS[0], less than 5% of working-aged people hold more than one job, and presumably a fraction of that have three jobs. Surely society shouldn't optimize for a small minority of the population.

> doesn't have time to stand in line for hours

Data on this isn't great, but one source I found[1] puts a cursory total average across all states in 2020 at around 15 minutes, with the worst average wait time being Indiana at 42.1 minutes. It's confirmed by a 2020 academic paper[2] which puts the nationwide median at 14 minutes.

I can imagine that there are outliers who have to wait unpleasantly long, and that same paper referenced above indicates that people may have unequal voting wait times based on where they live. Ideally voting should be easy for all those eligible to vote.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm

[1]: https://www.lgbtmap.org/img/maps/citations-polling-place-lin...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00024.pdf

Countries like Australia have compulsory voting and are still suffering the same issues. You are right - there are other layers of causation.

We even have preferential voting. The problem is nearly two-thirds of MPs - out of 144 of them - own more than one property. Which is more than three times the national average: less than 20 per cent of Australians own more than one property.

Even the so-called "left leaning" party are landlords.

We are run by the landed gentry. They'll continue looking out for their own. Houses are the safest asset as they're practically 100% Government backed.

"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners".

Sounds like democracy?

> "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners".

> Sounds like democracy?

Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because they're not being forced to move around, because again they own a home) and encouraged to vote even if they're expected to die before the results take effect.

>Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID.

uhh what? we're talking about britain here. I don't know what kind of yank(?) political dysfunction you're alluding to, but nobody has any trouble voting because of a lack of ID here. you don't need one to vote. you notify the electoral roll when you move into a house or flat, then a few weeks before election day you get a bit of paper in the post, you can bring it to the polling station to prove you live there.

You’re a little out of date with your info

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-england-...

The article says that 70% of them hadn't bothered to bring their ID. Hardly the result of draconian laws, is it?

It also doesn't say how many of the 30% actually had the right to vote. It only says that they "brought a type that was not accepted".

That is not correct.

During the recent elections in England about 14,000 people were denied a vote due to lack of ID.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-65988959

Though since the correct ID is basically every kind of ID that's valid to buy age restricted goods like alcohol and stores have become more and more strict at checking that over the last few years that mostly seems to have been older people. (The government also permitted some other kinds of ID that older people are more likely to have access to in order to reduce this, but it didn't completely eliminate the problem and I'm pretty sure it wasn't expected to either.)

The press has, as usual, not been entirely honest about this. In particular, there was a talking point about how only one non-passport and non-driving license form of ID that young people are likely to have compared with much more forms of ID that older people will have, but that one form of ID is a blanket scheme that providers of ID sign up to in order for it to be valid as proof of age. There is no equivalent blanket scheme for ID that older people are likely to have.

Great Britain has 67 million people. 14,000 people is unlikely to swing any election, even if they all voted in lockstep.

14,000 in the right places could easily topple a government in a tight election because of FPTP - although one can obviously not choose in reality.

In 2017 for example the minimum number of votes across the country needed to take down Theresa May (or more realistically have her form a true minority government) was something like 2500.

We have an extremely disproportional electoral system.

That would have been 2500 in exactly the right places. 2500 in exactly the right places could also have given the Conservative Party even more seats.

If we are talking about 0.25% on average then I doubt it could have changed much in these local elections (back in May in England and Northern Ireland).

If anybody wants to play with the data from the General Election in 2017 they can do so here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2017_United_Kin...

Sort the table by "Mjrty." in ascending order. Right at the top we see wins for SNP, Labour, SNP, Labour, and Labour that easily could have been wins for Lib Dem, Tories, Tories, Tories, and Tories.

67m is the UK population, not the GB population.

And 67m is nothing close to the size of the electorate of the local elections that number comes from.

And as another commenter wrote, a small number of votes can matter a great deal.

This article says that 70% of them just didn't bring any ID with them. That's on them.

It also says nothing about the remaining 30% except that they "brough a type that was not accepted". We don't actually know if they even had the right to vote.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-england-...

Those who did have the right to vote could have gotten a free Voter Authority Certificate before the election:

https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certif...

The government has introduced a requirement for photographic ID for all UK parliament elections, as well as local elections in England. This has been quite heavily discussed, so I'm surprised you haven't heard about it.

> yank(?)

To be clear, it’s not a real problem in the US either, but some people like to pretend it is. Don’t believe things you read on Reddit or wherever.

oh I already know it's not, you don't even have to be alive to vote let alone show ID

I was referring to the idea that in an aging country, even if young/old people would equally show up to vote, the older people will have more votes.

Which is democracy. It is fair in that sense, although surely it will not feel that way at all times.

You could imagine a system where similar to how we split votes into geographical regions via things like electoral colleges or having a locally elected representatives, there could be a similar splitting of votes into age ranges to ensure each group is sufficiently represented

(Not advocating for this, just an interesting thing to think about)

Indeed, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch. It's just an unusual and new idea to see young people as a minority as this never was the case to this extend.

As it comes to housing though, I remain convinced that the issue is not as political as many make it out to be. See my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486626

Meaning, even if the young seize more political power, there isn't going to be a law they can pass that says "cut rent in half".

There is also no law they can pass to reverse climatw change. Once some things are fucked, they are really hard to fix

California is one of the worst affected states for housing, and yet

> they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats

Pretty much everyone starts driving around 16-18 and has a driver's license

> manage to get off work on election day

CA is an early voting state where ballots are mailed to you ~1 month in advance. You can drop them off at your convenience at one of the numerous drop-off locations.

Really, CA makes it as easy to vote as possible including same-day registration. There is no excuse for young people to not vote, except for their apathy.

I'm glad to hear we've finally put down that 1776 nonsense and restored California to the British crown.

Make America Great Britain Again!

This is a wholly imaginary problem.

Oh come on. If there was the mass of people who couldn't get registered to vote, the Democrats would pull out all the stops to get them registered.

You mean the SDP? They haven't been an independent party since 1983, and have been politically irrelevant for even longer.

Does the UK not have any equivalent of the US “motor voter” system? When we update our info at the department of motor vehicles, there’s a checkbox on the form to automatically register to vote. So getting on the register is mostly automatic once you have the paperwork in order to get a driver’s license (which is a necessity to function as an adult in most of the US).

I would guess that few countries have the type of situation that exists in the US where a driver's licence is almost essential in order to go about daily life.

Many people in the UK don't bother with a licence. It can be prohibitively expensive when you consider the costs of lessons, a vehicle, and of the licence itself.

    Many people in the UK don't bother with a licence.

Eh. "Many" is such a vague term. Like, 5% could be considered many. UK is a driving country, period.

    where a driver's licence is almost essential in order to go about daily life.

This is true in all highly developed countries if you live outside the largest cities. You need to drive. It is baked in the cost of your life. Renting is much cheaper outside of the city, but somewhat offset by the cost of driving.

“in the 5 years from 2015 to 2019, an average of 74% of people in England had a full driving licence“

The provisional licence is enough as a voter ID though. I just used it in the last election.

I note your statistic refers to "people" and not "adults". Usually, some proportion of the people of any given country are ineligible to receive a drivers licence on the basis of their age. It seems that age is 17 in the UK, although I'm not sure whether that counts as full or provisional until they've got a bit more experience. I'll assume full.

According to https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati... there's about 1.2% of the people in each age group <17 in England, which means 1.2*17 ~= 20 of the people in the England are ineligible for a drivers licence. So there's only about 6% of people in the England who could have a full drivers licence, but don't. So either they give licences out in the cornflakes at Tescos, or almost the whole adult population of the UK wants a drivers licence.

It's 74% of eligible adults, not 74% of the population.

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/culture-a...

Such problems only exist in third world countries, such as US or UK.

My country solves this by issuing a plastic ID card to each citizen. You apply for it at your local town hall, and it is free of charge. You can use that ID for voting, or any other interaction with the government when they need to confirm your identity. Hell, they even issued a smartphone application recently, that can be legally used as ID.

And in the US if you don’t want/need a driver’s license then you just get a state issued ID card. Easy peasy.

Does that card allow you to vote? Is it free to obtain? Do people know that such option exists?

I need a Google Chrome plugin to block all HN comments that include the term "third world countries". That term is so grossly out of date. Read about it on Wiki. Yes, in wealthy countries, it is a proxy for very poor countries. Still, I do not like that term in 2023. It feels lazy.

And more HN vagueness in this post: "My country" Why not just say your country name? After all, most of the world is developing. You don't have much to lose.

A provisional driving licence costs £34 (though you could also pay for the photo). I expect some young people get one primarily in order to be able to buy alcohol.

A passport costs £82.50 and is rather less useful as ID inside the UK because it doesn't show an address.

Every household gets sent a form once a year to register those people who are eligible to vote - ours is pre-populated with details of the current registrants

Thanks. I assumed there was something in place, and that the post above mine was a bit off the wall.

We usually have checks and balances in democracy so that a majority can't vote to say, take all the money from some minority group that has less voting power than them. What is happening now is that a "loophole" has been discovered wherein instead of just directly taking all of the money from some minority class the property owning class just instead condemns them to a lifetime of renting whereby just enough rent is charged to ensure that they are by and large never able to move out of renting, but not so much as to sow the seeds of a violent revolution (yet). Its democracy in the same way that voting to end all medical benefits for people over 65 would also be "democracy", which is to say it would be naked inter-generational and inter-class warfare.

I get what you're saying and I'm against inter-generational hate.

There is no plot against young people. Remember that most old people have children. If today's young people would time travel to some decades back, they'd too make the most of the conditions then. I would not imagine any young person that owns a home to sell it at a discount out of solidarity, they too would self-optimize without any consideration for anybody else.

Young people today aren't especially targeted, they are at the end of what was a demographic/economic/infra/building boom. Those conditions cannot be recreated.

I don't think that the older generation "hates" youth, I don't think they think about them at all really. In the conversations I've had with Boomers and older people, although there is the standard derision for youth that is stereotypically expected of older generations, I would say there is more an immense blindspot and unwillingness to consider even a slight sacrifice of any type, even for their own children. The expectation is that the youth will just have to work hard like they did in there day and a complete unwillingness to confront any sort of conversation about what hard work could buy in their day vs the present one. I've watched boomers talk to each other about their kids or grandkids being unable to buy a home amongst each and other and I would describe the overall vibe as being one of detached "oh well, sucks for them" type acceptance, and trying to console each other that their kids are doing fine in other ways (they buy a new iphone every other year!!!). Your comment actually mirrors a lot of their attitude, especially the part about how the youth of today would definitely do the same things, so why feel guilty about doing it, a hypothesis that has no way of being disproved and which exists largely as a balm to soothe their conscience as they try to deal with the cognitive dissonance of watching their children suffer, and then voting for parties and policies that will prolong that suffering.

You wouldn't imagine any young person doing something to help another person out in some sort of solidarity and yet I generally see this exact mindset in terms of voting for left wing parties that will raise taxes, including theirs, voting and campaigning for increased density which will affect the character of their neighborhoods and possibly decrease their property values. Hell I have never voted for a party that would decrease my taxes and I am pretty up front about needing to be taxed more as I am very fortunate with my employment and income situation. I've had conversations at length with boomers advocating for tax cuts which would cut funding to education, arguing that it is pretty convenient that they want these cuts right around the time that they have no children in public school and asked if we should also cut medical funding, funding that they disproportionately draw on and the response has been universally "No", that funding is good and necessary.

So I don't think that they young are "especially targeted" and more that anyone who is not a boomer and up is targeted and that happens to include the youth. We can tell ourselves a bunch of stories but stats around home ownership, lifespan, healthspan, median income, etc, etc, etc, a laundry list tells the actual story of what the current relationship is like between generations. You don't have to hate someone to harm them greatly...

This pretty much sums it up. I doubt it's some special boomer mentality as much as a "people" mentality. People are fairly selfish and don't want to reduce their quality of life.

What's shifted over the last few decades is that people live longer. Boomers basically just got lucky - they didn't have a huge older generation above them, so the cost of social security was fairly low when they were young. They managed to buy houses at a time of massive urban expansion, meaning their total lifetime cost of housing was pretty low.

And now they're heading towards retirement, with vast unearned housing wealth and having spent decades with housing as an almost insignificant cost, they've got no incentive to change things.

You forgot to mention that boomers had high mortgage rates. According to https://themortgagereports.com/61853/30-year-mortgage-rates-... my parents, boomers, would likely have had 16%+ and 12%+ rates when they bought their first homes. Contrast this to myself, a borderline Millennial/Gen X, who bought houses after the 2008 crash and currently have a 3% mortgage. Makes me wonder why Boomers are the always the primary target of younger generation's ire.

The interest rate at the time of buying is actually fairly irrelevant. What matters is the total lifetime cost of housing. Even though interest rates were high, purchase costs were much lower in terms of multiples of income. It's pretty clear that many boomers have benefited from a very low total lifetime cost of housing.

The low interest rates/high house prices is now turning into a double blow - at least here in the UK (and for anyone that needs to move house in the US) - as low interest rates meant low monthly payments, which has inflated house prices further. Now people are having to refinance massive mortgages at higher rates, the cost is becoming even greater.

Ultimately you just have to look at statistics of home ownership rates by age to see that things are getting worse for younger people. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-research/resbull/2022...

Step on a bus sometime. The hate towards younger children (below, give or take 10 years) is easily noticeable. Oh and the hate towards male youngsters starts again at 17 or so, especially if there's somewhat more color on the skin, but of course nobody really dares to treat them like they treat a 6 year old.

young people are absolutely targeted - education was fre for older generation, and young people get a lofetine of debt.

In boomer time government probided free milk for babies, now baby formula is the most stolen items and is kept under lock and key in super market

Todays politicians talk about growijg up ina. councill home as a market of being through hard times. They dont even get thay councill homes are gone, and if they were growing up today, they would be on the street

Yep, democracy in action. Although I suspect if polities were smaller and more independent then certain areas, with more poor and young people, would vote to prioritise policies to incentivise housing construction.

Large polities result in the same policies being applied to regions that are fundamentally different in ways that make policy good for some and bad for others.

I think housing issues present a good case for confederalism or even anarchism. States rights in the US or Swiss Cantons are examples where different regions have more control over policies and thus can suit them to their own specific needs. The smaller the polity the better. Also why special economic zones tend to produce good outcomes.

> Sounds like democracy?

Here is an example -

16 year olds who have a keen interest in their futute, are not allowed to vote.

A 90 year old, who does not even remember that USSR has already collapsed, votes for a war-Mongering government.

18 year olds are drafted into the army and sent to fight a war, and they never had a chance to vote at all. Maybe their entire experience of democracy is getting sent to faraway land to die.

Their experience is indistinguishable from tyrany

The last time the United States had a draft was 1973. The last time the UK had a draft was 1960. Who is the 18 year old who is drafted into the army and sent to fight a war and getting sent to a faraway land to die? I mean. Russians, for at least some value of faraway. But I don't think they're the central example that you're thinking of.

That's 50 years ago. It's literally not even one lifetime ago.

Given that you'd have to be 18 to be drafted (maybe 16), the minimum age of those people would be 68.

>The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or change in zoning laws.

The prices in high demand areas, are going to be high, whether residents can legally oppose new developments or not. How much does a house cost in California or New York?

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners.

This doesn't explain the constant increase in property tax levies being passed in Washington State.

If you're going to cherrypick a single example to rebut the existence of an overarching trend in the UK, you could at least pick a state with an income tax. Or, perhaps, not beat the dead horse at all and talk about Britain.

Washington state just decided that capital gains were not income, and imposed a 7% tax on them.

Besides, I don't see how the age demographics in Wa state would be materially different from Britain's.

If you're so fixated on Washington state, you should really learn its history. And also British history. They're very different places with very different politics. You're comparing a flyover state (speaking as somebody born there) to the center of a colonial power.

And a 7% flat tax is a trifle.

Exactly. 20% is also very low. Maybe consider complaining when it’s progressive up to 90%.

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