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Comment by 9283409232 | Hacker News Reader

I swear most cafes I've been to are already selling coffee for $6-$10.

That’s almost entirely for rent.

IMO if we actually wanted to overhaul our economy, we could do it by just having POS’s print the portion of each bill that goes into rent.

Then the culprit of COL increases would be quite clear.

Especially given that wages are themselves also driven up primarily by rent.

Agreed, and the cost of any new building that went to taxes, permits, development fees.

That is all baked into rent, including the developer's profit margins

That's my point, the data is obscured in such a way that all we see is an abstract price going up, but not how much of that price was directly or indirectly influenced by the cost of bureaucracy.

Permitting etc. is 0.5% to 2% of development costs, which is itself a small subset of what rent pays for, and only for the first 5-10 years.

This number would be $0 for most cups of coffee (made in paid-for buildings) and <$0.02 for pretty much all the remaining ones, I think?

Rent on the other hand is 15%+ for every cup of coffee in perpetuity (not counting second-order question of what % of wages go directly into residential rent).

Sorry I was actually making a less related comment than I initially indicated. I meant (loosely) indicating how much of new builds for things like developments in general go to bureaucracy or land, since in my city it seems like they heavily subsidize existing homeowners and have intensely increased in recent years, having the indirect effect of raising the floor and pulling up the ladder.

I agree with your response though.

I would agree to this if we also displayed the amount going toward taxes.

Eh, given that everyone pays income tax (largest portion by a mile) I think most people are aware of what drag that adds onto the economy.

Most people have no clue how much a storefront pays in rent.

Then we'd need the receipt to itemize all the things we got thanks to those taxes, like the roads the beans came in on, the traffic lights and road signs that allowed the trucks to deliver those beans safely, the clean water/air, the health inspections that make sure the backroom isn't totally rat/roach infested, the building codes that keep the roof from falling on us while we order, the schools that educated the employees, the power grid that keeps the lights on, the police that keep crime away, the Office of Weights and Measures and consumer protection laws which ensure we're getting what we paid for, etc.

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