Yeah I think the issue with inflation issues is even if it’s zero now it was a shit show previously so as far as people concerned it’s no better
Yeah and for the people who saw real wages decline, and there are a lot of them, all this talk about how great it is really amounts to a slap in the face… and makes it very unlikely they’ll ever get that spending power back.
According to your feelings… not the measurables.
maybe the data is correct but it doesn’t really matter. if someone thinks the economy is bad, pointing at aggregate data is absolutely never going to change their mind.
For sure, which is why there needs to be a months long messaging campaign to argue and show how the economy is doing well. People get their positions from the information they read and the feelings they have more than looking at the data themselves, and when you cede that space like Democrats have for the past year or so, your success doesn’t translate to approval.
Looks like Biden is going to start a major push in the next week or so, which is about damn time.
You’ve had measurables presented to you repeatedly, including two in the post you’re replying to. Stop being a dick. I’ve asked you numerous times.
Maybe you’ll have better luck with the “Averages are the only statistics that count, so fuck your feelings, you dumb poors,” style of argument at the local country club or Chamber of Commerce.
They need to put way more effort into finding out why voters (especially 2020 Biden voters) think the economy is bad and get to work fixing that. They should have started over a year ago.
They also get their positions from what they are experiencing in their lives.
Do you actually think Commonwealth is basic his opinions on suboptimal messaging from Democrats?
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He actually addressed housing costs still being too high, and proposed a $400 a month tax credit to address it… Of course that was only for homebuyers, so the renters still get fucked. But that’s the President of the United States basically admitting that housing costs have outpaced inflation, and housing is unaffordable for people who don’t already own. Fuck his feelings too?
@commonWealth, 67% of Americans own a home. It’s actually been ticking up a % or so every year for the last few years.
So while conceding the point that it’s a really shitty time to buy a home, that shouldn’t be determinitive in the election.
Half baked theory on housing market is that our generation waited forever to have kids with a large % not wanting them at all and then people finally got optimistic enough to have kids during the COVID stimulus sugar high/work from home boom, resulting in a sudden and sustained surge in demand for single family homes.
And that’s something like half of Millennials who own and 25% of Gen Z, and a chunk of them are at higher prices/rates than older generations have - by a wide margin. Those who are stuck renting are suffering way more inflation than the CPI number would indicate.
Should it be determinative? I don’t know, but if the strategy is to tell them how dumb they are until their morale improves, it could be determinative.
That’s part of it but not all. Low rates led to a lot of homes being bought by investors to turn into rentals. Something like a quarter of all homes sold were sold to investors last time I saw the number.
There was already going to be a housing shortage but that made it even worse - and made the losers in the deal suffer worse, and also spurred on a lot of all cash/no contingency offers which drove up prices - both closing prices and (dunno if there’s a term for this) effective all-in prices after repairs.
All-cash real estate transactions are on the rise, representing 34.1 percent of U.S. home purchases in September 2023, according to Redfin data.
These aren’t all investors, but no matter who the buyers are, it is impossible for young people to compete in this market.
As a side note, subsidizing demand with tax breaks to first time buyers is dumb. Supply needs to be encouraged. Building and density incentives need to be our policy
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Yeah if I were a Dem strategist, I’d do something like a $30K one time tax credit for first-time homebuyers to use in a down payment, I’d make it illegal to sell a single family home without an inspection, and I’d expand government mortgages - maybe something like the USDA rural program (currently a 4.5% rate) but for first time homebuyers it can be anywhere, and I’d get rid of title insurance to get the Riverman vote.
Maybe also offer sellers a tax credit for accepting an offer that wasn’t all cash over an all cash offer? I dunno, something to tip the scales and even it out a bit.
First time homebuyers face four massive problems: they can’t afford enough of a down payment, they can’t afford the monthly payments at these interest rates, they can’t compete with all cash offers, and waiving inspection is insanely risky when what they’re buying is probably worth anywhere from 3x to 20x their net worth.
All of these programs would be massively inflationary fwiw
Well that’s a first, CN managed to call me dumb before I made my post this time. But my ideas would increase demand and thus encourage supply. Homebuilders don’t need incentives, and I say that as someone who has owned several homebuilding stocks in his retirement account the last couple years - all among my biggest winners.
Density incentives would be good though.
Not necessarily. They’re only applying to a subset of the market, and if calculated well, they would just bring the people getting screwed up to roughly a level playing field.
The people benefitting from these policies are still going to be limited in how much they can pay, so as long as the policy is set up in a way that it limits how much they can play to ~current FMV of homes, it’s not going to be inflationary. Now, we may find out that investors can just go 10% higher and the problem isn’t fixed, but if so you can address that side of the problem at that point in time.
I thought the initial baby bust at start of pandemic and the later boom mostly balanced out?
middle class? maybe. Lower class? Absolutely not
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I think college education costs shows us exactly what happens when you make it easier for people to buy something. It just makes it more expensive.
You need to either have more houses available or less potential buyers if you want them to get cheaper.
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Not sure if you’re jumping in now without having read the previous iterations of this debate, but I’ve been making the point that CPI does not capture inflation fairly for the lower class. Rent inflation has been way worse than CPI, and makes up a bigger portion of the lower class’s expenses than it accounts for in the basket of goods.
Basically my argument has been that there are two major dividing factors that separate people into four different groups. The factors are: did you own a home before March 2022 (when rate hikes started) and do you have to pay for childcare. Those two make a massive difference.
Spitballing here, but I’d like:
- Ban corporations from owning residential housing
- Increase taxes on any non-primary home, and massively increase it on your 4th+ home
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