Semantics.

No, show her your Bionicle collection.

You don’t need to adjust for income. How do you get high value land with a low income? How do you own high value land and not derive an income from it? You’re imagining an extreme edge case of some family that’s been passing high value land down, generation after generation, without ever leveraging this advantage into financial success.

The more valuable the property, the larger a component of that value that tends to be in the value of the location itself, as opposed to the capital improvements to that location. Low income housing, as cheaply built as it is, is built in an even cheaper location. Conversely, a house but for higher income people is built more expensively, but even greater is the access to good schools, jobs, shopping, low (blue collar) crime rates, and so on that a high value location provides.

And that’s just residential real estate, which is almost people even think about. With commercial and industrial sites, location becomes even more important.

People who talk this way don’t know what land value is. They imagine there is a relationship to quantity, when location is almost the entire driver. Maybe a thousand square feet of space in upper Manhattan or San Jose or something is comparable to a hundred acres in rural Wyoming, or wherever.

And what about the poor in cities? They already pay a land value tax… to the owners of the land. You will say that if the owners are taxed, they will raise rents… but if they can just raise rents like that, why haven’t they already? Normally, a tax can be “passed on” because a tax on a thing affects the supply of that thing: the tax raises costs, which lowers profits, which drives capital out of that industry and into another, which reduces the amount being produced, which allows the higher price.

But land is fixed in supply. If you’re imagining a way of increasing or reducing the supply, you’re not thinking about land, but capital improvement to it. The supply can be neither increased nor decreased. Its existence is not dependent on any industry or thrift or other service on the part of the landowner and, as such, any income derived simply from owning a location and leasing it out to others is unearned. It’s essentially extortion, one person renting to another the “privilege” of existing, and if there are any landowners not collecting the full value that can be collected, it is either because they haven’t found the highest price yet, or out of the kindness of their hearts.

The occupant should own the land. Absentee landlordism shouldn’t be a thing.

Empty housing is empty land. It just has a house on it. And there are times and places where landowners will spend decades sitting on infill waiting for land values to go up. Additionally, land that could be developed into high density housing but is being held at low density at the behest of the area’s politically connected residents, is kind of like “empty” land. It isn’t a binary.

Land value taxation is inherently progressive. That’s probably why it’s never been implemented.

“Income tax on their properties whether they’re rented or not” is just a long way of saying “land value taxation”.

It’s like we turn into that old person that goes into their entire medical history when asked this question.

When money is loaned into existence, both the supply and the demand are created at the same time. When there are real investment opportunities (opportunities to make money by expanding production and improving productivity) allowing the money supply to expand makes it easier for expansion to occur. The problem is when such opportunities are thinned out, and people just start rent seeking for want of real investment opportunities. At this point cheap credit fuels not expansion, but just pushes up prices of existing resources and facilitates the transfer of wealth into the hands of people that already have wealth to use as collateral.

Your suggestion would create a money supply that was fixed until and unless whoever happened to be in control of the central bank for whatever political reason decides to expand it. It also has no means of contracting the money supply, not as stated. The current systems relies on financial institutions presumably needing to be paid back, and thus generally issuing loans when repayment looks likely (which will sometimes be a good business plan). This keeps the decision as close to the business reality as you can, making borrowers and lenders the eyes and ears of the system. Centralize that, and you cut off an enormous supply of information, information absolutely necessary to make these decisions.

Personally, I think the problem with the current system isn’t a banking problem, but a problem of rent seeking opportunities just being left out there to serve as sources of private revenue. It’s the equivalent of selling tax farming contracts but then letting the taxman keep everything they take. Start treating them as sources of public revenue (start with land value taxation), and you won’t have banks making loans for non productive “investments”. Without these opportunities, there would be no basis to continue making loans when there aren’t any real investment opportunities to put that money into. The credit supply would naturally wax and wane with the rest of the economy.

You’re assuming marginal cash has the same value for everyone. It doesn’t. Losing 20% at the top bracket might barely be felt. Maybe can’t buy quite as many classic cars for the collection, or can only have eight yahts, instead of nine. But at the bottom, that 20% can mean the difference between being able to make rent and ending up homeless, or between being able to pay the power bill or not. It can be the difference between having to get a payday loan or not (and thus cause a loss of considerably more than 20%).

Look up the term “marginal utility” for an academic treatment of the subject.

How do we conclude that inflation is wage driven when inflation consistently outpaces wages?

Sometimes search is just buggy. I had the same problem when I first started: couldn’t access certain communities from my instance until one day, I just could, for no particular reason I could see.

I used to do pest control. For a while, I worked for a company called Alpha Ecological where my job was to solve customer problems. Then they got bought out by and integrated into Western (Rentokil Global), and my job changed to convincing people who didn’t need recurring service to keep paying for recurring service. I tried to keep working there and ultimately had a nervous breakdown. Didn’t even quit properly. Just stopped leaving my apartment for a month or so.

Now I drive a truck. Driving is a wonderful job for folks with ASD who don’t have any motor impairment.

I think we’re “supposed” to destroy ourselves for the sake of advancement for a few reasons:

1. To preserve the myth of Western egalitarianism. Supposedly, we have a classless society. Anyone can make it if they just put in the effort. Mind you, this isn’t true: plenty try and fail, and even those who succeed sacrifice their life to advance from one class to another. But we’re supposed to believe that the only reason we don’t have certain things is because we don’t want it bad enough, and/or lack the discipline to succeed. The goal: get people to always look inward for the source of their suffering, and fail to recognize the very real economic parasitism that prospers at our expense.

2. A manifestation of that old but persistent notion that to be righteous is to suffer. If you are happy, if you aren’t suffering, you must be doing something wrong. Good food tastes bad. Good exercise hurts. Good work is miserable. To be good in spirit is to mortify the flesh. Put on your hair shirt, run five miles, drop and give me twenty, and then complete a twelve hour shift. Sleep is for the weak.

What offends people who take this advice more than anything is someone who hasn’t lived this way, and yet is happy when they are not.

I’m wishing for a total collapse comparable to 2008. I wasn’t in a position to take advantage back then. Now I am. Such a correction might be the only way I could ever afford a house, at least anywhere near people I want to live near.

Problem is, that probably won’t happen. Last time values were propped up by subpar borrowers who couldn’t pay their mortgages. This time they’re propped up by corporations and wealthy foreigners getting into the rental business. I wonder how long values have to be significantly above rents before they start cutting their losses.

As I understand it, Beehaw was basically being brigaded by spam accounts on Lemmy.world, and Lemmy doesn’t yet have moderation tools to deal with that kind of issue. If what I read is correct, Beehaw and Lemmy.world both agreed that, for the moment, defederation is the least bad option.