Hacker News Reader

Comment by HarryHirsch | Hacker News Reader

It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.

View on HN

Land price will adjust accordingly in response to any positive economic news. If you want an unalloy good to come out of these programs, tax lands.

Otherwise, any welfare program will just get some of its value captured by landlords.

Land value tax is interesting because it encourages/forces more efficient use but you can do a lot more by cutting demand through limiting immigration and financialization opportunities.

I'm not sure why people don't immediately get serfdom vibes whenever they mention a land tax.

Probably because most of us are already unlanded serfs, except we also get vibes now. Yay, 1000 years of progress!

It’s the same reason people don’t get serfdom vibes when a government proposes to take over childcare.

Governments buying goods for people with tax money turns them into dependents, sometimes permanently. It’s easy to overlook that.

Land value tax won't help unless you greatly reduce the zoning and regulation over what can be built on the land.

Putting the land to its most efficient use isn't possible if all you're allowed to build is a two-story detached single family house.

Georgism is the way to prosperity.

You don't reduce the regulation, you increase it's flexibility. Such as allowing dynamic zoning where an area that is zoned as medium density residential automatically becomes hybrid high density residential/low commercial once the districts zoned around it as low density residential are filled.

The issue is we zone something and it stays that way until it's manually reviewed and rezoned. The district has no ability to change itself according to the circumstances. It has to rely on a third party that acts without due haste and with great reluctance.

Our property taxes are already crazy high and continue to go up every year. How does this help?

Across the US, the majority (2/3-ish) of children already live in families where both parents are employed. I don't see free childcare moving that statistic more than a few percentage points at best. I'm skeptical that this policy would encourage more parents to work and further raise housing costs, especially since this would mostly affect families with children who are pre-K. It is a big policy change but the number of families it will affect is quite small I think. If it does have any effect on housing cost I would expect to see it at the very low-end since it would help low-earners the most.

In Quebec it was a 20% jump in mother employment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...

And had all sorts of negative outcomes for the kids: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/long-term-study-of-...

Exactly. Now landlords will charge more. The owner of assets get all the money.

By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords. On the flip side, if we did things to make people's lives less affordable, would that translate into landlords giving back by lowering rents? I don't think so.

> By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords.

That seems pretty reasonable to me actually? When housing is so supply-constrained, any subsidies/incentives/bonuses/etc. will be captured by the owner of the scarcest asset (real estate). Building more housing at this point seems like it should be a P0 priority before anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com