Also, the city allows buyers to take what used to be a family home (e.g. 4-5 bedrooms), tear it down and put up a 1-2 bedroom house (more modern, more amenities, e.g. garage, sauna, etc). Why policymakers allow this if they believe there's a supply problem is beyond me - on my block the number of bedrooms has gone down by about a quarter in the last few years as a result...
The issue is that the same argument made for programmers can be made for back office & middle office as well, which when added up are much more than 1000 programmers. I agree that the bonus:salary ratio should increase drastically for trading/sales vs other roles, but for corporate culture/uniformity and practical business (need to quickly reduce costs) reasons it's done this way to some degree.
It makes sense when you think about their business - because banks are extremely pro-cyclical, they need an 'out' to reduce compensation when their profits blowup or economy turns. Easiest and quickest to drop bonuses.
Any tax on wealth would have similar effects: You own a business with notional value $2M? Pay X% of that each year, whether or not the business generates that amount in cash. You are a retiree with $2M in CDs or bonds, generating your retirement income? Pay taxes on the capital before you feed/clothe yourself. Etc, etc. Yes, property taxes may impact the middle- or non-1%-upper-class more than a wealth tax, and [a modest degree of] shelter is a basic human need, but market-based property taxes are significantly easier to implement (how to value privately-held businesses? how to deal with offshore assets?). Perhaps good + implementable > perfect + unachievable.
How about starting by taxing many people's main part of wealth, their house, at market value (i.e. no Prop 13)? Let's not let perfect get in the way of good..
How so? I understand that doing research on regulation is by its nature political, but that doesn't mean 'ideology driven'. For instance, you may argue from this data that Obama is the most-regulating president in history. Or, as some researchers have done, you may argue that regulation hasn't killed dynamism (see work by Goldschlag and Tabarrok). Data is data, what you do with it may be ideological or not...
This doesn't seem that unreasonable - weren't/aren't medallions over $1M in NYC, which is a factor more expensive than labor, fuel, or maintenance of a vehicle...
"Solving Problem X" is not an exciting headline if the community is aware that Problem X has already been solved. The point is that the community may not be aware that tool/approach Y can solve problem X, and might want to see how it is done, to learn about Y, and consider how Y is better/worse than existing tools/approaches.
My understanding was that employers have fiduciary obligations to their employees when they setup a 401k plan - does offloading 401k administration remove those obligations or transfer them to Captain401?
1. RRSP & TFSAs have limits much lower than the assumed contributions, so there are tax differences between the two alternatives.
2. Even slight tweaks to your assumptions (e.g. reduce investment returns to 6%, increase condo returns to 2%) equalize the two scenarios. If you're going to use such an ill-conditioned model, you really must spend significantly more time justifying all of its assumptions, or else show sensitivities to them.
The assumptions made by the author are ridiculous, namely:
- In the 10-year comparison, rents paid are not factored in at all.
- In the forward-looking comparison, condo prices are assumed to be flat, mortgage rates go up (why? can't they be locked in now?), while equity prices go up 6-8% per year
- Taxes are not factored in at all - capital gains on a primary residence are tax-free, while investment gains will be taxable (eventually, even if buy-and-hold)
- Mortgages allow an effective leveraged investment on home equity, so your gains (and losses!) on home values are magnified
It's a worthwhile debate, and there are merits on both sides, but such blatant bias has to be pointed out.
Also: in the US, unlike Canada, there are tax benefits for a mortgage...
The problem with this reasoning is that while new buildings / tenants may be marginally beneficial to the city, if the rate new condos pay is significantly lower than existing buildings, then fairness issues arise. To me, this is analogous to incentives for building factories, etc - why does the big / new factory get a tax incentive while the small / old one doesn't, if it generates the same spinoff investment / employment / revenue? Put another way, the marginal revenue gain may be positive, but lower than the community average revenue gain (or gain in comparable properties) - how is that fair?
> City's deal with their homeless populations in different ways, but if any city is overly generous it quickly gets swamped. Further, cities can export their homeless by being overly draconian.
I doubt the issue is as simple as I believe you intend - I don't think there are many examples of draconian cities eliminating homelessness via exports. I also don't think overly generous cities are swamped as much as you believe - size of city & climate are larger factors in homeless population size than generosity.
Is there a way to track & regulate these? e.g. if drone operators are breaking the law by flying too low, then do police have the means to cite violators? If so, I don't see what the issue is - they're not enforcing their own law very well. If not... well that's a whole other problem.
Even if true, I don't know what to make of such a statement - needless interventions for ALL diseases/causes may kill a lot more than any ONE single, narrowly defined disease/cause - that says more about the classification/definition system than interventions... it's only if interventions on any ONE disease kill a significant proportion vs the disease itself that that intervention / interventions are truly dangerous...
- An error was found in 2012 and was just recently (Nov 2014) corrected
- He's re-released his notes & lectures on the subject
- A workshop will be held on the topic in March
That doesn't seem to be unusual / isolationist behavior, though it's obviously a complicated topic and since Fermat's Last Theorem has been deemed 'solved' already, the fact that it makes a FLT proof easier isn't much appreciated by the press / community.
If they're really investing a lot in their workers, then they want a perfect fit or ideal type of background. If they believed the writer was a risk to pack up and leave a year down the road, it makes sense that they wouldn't take that risk...
Why Vanguard Total Stock Market? Why not SPDR S&P 500 ETF? Why not include international stocks, or bonds, or real estate? Choice of index is a hugely important decision, and can't be waved away so easily...