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3d ago
Old improved land is an area that I am not sure how they could deal with it. In Miami they just blew up the Mandarin Oriental Hotel which was like 10-20 stories to build something much bigger. But the physical investment in the Old hotel is still 100-300 million. Land values have been rising. What’s the tax rate on that? Land values went up enough that it makes sense to tear it down now. But for a while maybe the property was worth 300m with 200m in capex. Raw land was worth 280m. Now the raw land is worth 400m so you blow up the old building.
Even though they have 200m in capex in the property and it’s worth 300m would they be taxed at the raw land value of 280m? Which would have basically zeroed their 200m in capex.
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3d ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S
The data doesn’t agree.
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3d ago
It can only really be done at the city level. You simply don’t have high land prices outside of a few locations. It’s basically not relevant for most of the US. You don’t have land appreciation in most places. I guess you could still do it elsewhere but then you would basically be doing wealth confiscation from farmers instead of assets in general.
San Francisco could do this and replace other taxes because land prices are a significant portion of wealth.
Dude I’ve been paid 7 figures multiple times. It’s not a skills issue. They don’t even interview or phone call white men.
And the statistics agree with me. Labor market participation rate is crashing.
And as Bezos says when the anecdotes and the data disagrees trust the anecdotes. But the data also agrees with me.
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3d ago
Based on what you are saying I would run from the trade. I may change my mind if you are in an okay second or third tier city.
I hate the pricing in all the tier 1 cities right now. The city I am in the most in the States for the type of condo I am assuming you are describing the rent price would be about 3500-4k a month and the costs to own after 20% down would be 7-8k a month. Those numbers do not work to expect appreciation.
You just laid out a plan to move within 5-7 years. To sell the place you are buying you will pay 5% broker commission (most likely still), transfer taxes, appraisal, etc. It runs about 7% all-in for a lot of cities to sell a property. The first 7 years of a mortgage payment the principle pay down is basically 7%. So all the equity you paid in will disappear to selling costs.
All the real estate association publications on appreciation are basically bullshit and dominated by a few geographically and regulatory restricted places. I could do a long post picking apart issues with every real estate index but the short part is they all ignore key factors even the ones that only do repeated sales.
At your age you want to buy property. It feels like the “adult” thing to do and the next stage of life. Condos also are a very hard area to actually make money on. Current pricing is awful to buy in most markets unless you assume 30 year rates drop 300 bps.
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3d ago
I largely did a sole developer framework because it’s the cleanest. And was specifically referring to the New Eastside in Chicago was I believe was a golf course in the ‘70s. But you also have situations where a neighborhood get “hot” so everyone decides to do projects near each other. Many would call this gentrification. But it involves many developers and individuals deciding to invest in a community with expectations of appreciation. Everyone doing a new project here because it’s now a good neighborhood are contributing to making the belief that’s it’s now a good neighborhood becoming the truth that it is now a good neighborhood. The community would have free riders who just owned but also thousands of people doing some of the work of boosting property values. Who decides it’s PNL that should be internalized versus PNL that wasn’t their work? The local alderman? I don’t know of any accounting method to decided “earned” versus “unearned”.
Regardless LVT isn’t a realistic tax in politics. It’s only something people think about in San Francisco and only 4-5 areas in the States have land values high enough to consider it. And California already has the stupid proposition that fixes your property prices to when you bought it. So LVT in San Francisco needs to normalize property taxes before taking the next step of LVT.
IMO they also miss out that land speculation has value. Someone buying a rapidly rising land area and building a parking lot to sit on for 10-20 years can be good for the community. Brickell is an example of this. You do want to keep some parcels in a growing community not built so you can build bigger later without needing to tear down an expensive building.
I would disagree that going to 80-20 Georgian is a good idea. But it probably should be more than it is today.
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4d ago
It’s impossible to get a job now. I had some business failings a few years ago. Tried to find a reasonable pivot to survive and not blow my savings. With 2 Ivy equivalent degrees I did the apply to anything on LinkedIn and think I submitted 5k applications. Maybe 3 interviews. Luckily business is now going well but it’s basically impossible to get a job.
It’s why there is a huge increase in left the labor market that isn’t showing up in the official statistics. I have no idea how to get a job in this environment especially if you need to do any kind of career pivot. It actually scares me a lot if business goes bad again that I would be able to find something to survive on. I guess I could work at McDonalds.
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4d ago
Prime age male employment rate is only 86% now. It use to be 95% or higher doing economic expansions. So we have millions of men not working right now in America.
There are a lot of ways to live without pay today. Military disability (which is mostly fraud now), food stamps, housing vouchers etc. If you quit subsidizing unemployment you would get more workers.
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4d ago
Yes because it’s already a common tax. Florida has had it for a long time. Usually I believe it’s more framed as a discount and not a tax.
But few places have significant amounts of wealthy part-time residents.
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4d ago
I don’t think you can run an experiment on it. Because land values do vary and to get high land values to tax you generally need a combination of geographic restrictions and government regulations to generate high land prices to tax - plus some kind of historical corporate agglomeration effect to generate a lot of wealth in an area.
Houston or Dallas is for all intents and purposes wealthy areas. Land values are cheap. LVT only really becomes interesting in LA, San Fran, NYC, Miami, maybe Boston.
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4d ago
My opinion is getting rid of rent control would be great. It would be great if NYC kicked out all the poor people living on benefits and cheap rent.
And this harms me. It probably would make sense for me to live in NYC. I would have some career agglomeration effects. The costs structure of NYC is very bad for higher paid professionals especially if you can’t convert income into untaxed equity etc (which you leave for a year when you realize).
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4d ago
I am so bad at not taking bait. And in this case for me it’s doing a Georgists/LVT debate. I believe they have a false-model of the world and there are higher deadweight costs than they think. Developers do need incentives and one of them is land appreciation. Best example I have is a developer had maybe 40 acres of land near a major US city. I lived in this development. The first 50-story tower was built in I think 1980. It’s now mostly finished and my guess is there are now roughly 25 fifty story towers with the most recent one being about 100 floors. A lot of their profits were land appreciation and the land appreciation incentivized them to add amenities and parks etc. It also makes sense to build 1 big building at a time instead of of fill the whole site with little buildings and then tear down the little buildings as land values go up that justify bigger buildings. I think land appreciation is an economic incentive to invest in a community. So taking that away is a dead weight costs.
I also think all taxes have a deadweight costs. But taxes are the price we pay for civilization so we must have them. So we should tax land. But we should also tax everything we can. But we should try to keep the taxes on everything low to minimize the disincentives of doing good things. I think income taxes are fine but should be lower. The PAT for NYC I think is fine because in a more globalized world more people are avoiding claiming residency in NYC and not paying the income tax. The rich do live in multiple locations now and many rich do spend 4 months of the year in NYC. They won’t claim NYC as their residence. But they should be taxed and their shouldn’t be an arbitrage of avoiding claiming NYC residency which many people do.
Sometimes it’s good to admit when your enemies do something smart. I like Mamdanis Pied-a-Terre tax. My gut says most of these are likely tax dodgers which isn’t fair to the rest of the city. Either legally tax-dodging by limiting days or being smaller fish not getting caught. Making them pay a PAT tax or NY income taxes seems fundamentally fair to me.
And if it gets people to sell second homes and instead stay in hotels 2 months out of the year I think that’s a net positive for a city with limited housing.
I’ll disagree with a million things with Mamdani and NYC policy but the concept of a PAT tax feels fair to me. I would be in favor of lower taxes overall but a PAT feels like it would capture a lot of people who use NYC services but dodge their taxes which boost tax fairness in my opinion.
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5d ago
There is a saying which originated with science that “ideas progress one funeral at a time”. I feel like it would be fair to say that at the current time being butthurt over the Iranian Revolution would be outside of most of the intelligence leadership framework. It was 47 years ago. There would be some graybeards who experience it in the teens and ‘20s but most CIA staff today it would just be something in history books.
This is also assumed to happen in market cycles. And a reason why Aschenbrenner would have an awful concept of risks management. The 2000 tech crash was before he was born.
The counter would be that Trump would still be in the cohort with the memory. And the US does have realpolitik reasons to be involved with Iran.
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5d ago
The above poster said Jews don’t act as a monolithic but I think when you say there are a group of Zionists who are also SJW that is a strong indicator that most Jews do have a sense of Jewish interests. Being a Zionists and a SJW still fits fine within Jewish interests historically even if some of the ideologies of the two beliefs are inconsistent.
I would probably argue at this point SJW is against Jewish interests but pre-Oct 7 those fault lines hadn’t been exposed.
You will never get 100% agreement in a tribe but I do think the tribe had gut instincts on rough directionality of their interests.
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6d ago
The US right only has two allies - Israel and Argentina. Israel has well no allies. And as much as you hate it you do know Jews have a lot of power because of their brains and group loyalty.
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6d ago
Nothing needs to last forever. There is no bigger risks to Israel than a third world Muslim Europe. They would be surrounded by enemies in the entire Middle East. And of course Mamdani is already kicking them out of NYC.
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6d ago
A lot of people would disagree but I’ve come around from thinking you are crazy to believing you have been fundamentally correct on Jewish influence. Atleast as far as the Holocaust was used as a means of convincing western society that any form of racial identity was bad. Maybe that was even a good thing for a while. Plus my gut says 40% plus or minus 10% of the top .1% of wordcells are Jewish so they tend to win a lot of arguments.
I hope now that you are seeing a possibility of the right and Israel having a lot of shared interests against third worldism that we can work together now.
The problem with Zionism is they seem to have had an interests in both promoting ethnonationalism for Israel and erasing nationalism in western society. In the current world I think Zionism should be seeing a lot of benefits to promoting nationalism globally.
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6d ago
For the warrior class naked conquest was just land for your family. If you killed the rival tribe next door you could now install your sons and daughters as the farmers on the new land. Or as the ruling class with sexual slave tributes like the Mongols did a lot of.
For the most part all adult men are the warrior class.
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6d ago
Aggressive is a loaded term. I guess Iraq can fall under that category.
But all the things I listed were things worth defending in the past to the warrior class with foreign actions.
Culture wars destroyed a unified ideology worth defending. Mass migration destroyed a semblance of being one tribe.
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6d ago
We should pay them better in legitimate ways, but right now you can lie and say you’re disabled and get a 40 year pension of 50k a year while you work other jobs.
But military service needs to be about more than pay. It’s protecting your tribe and ideology. And honestly fuck the pay. People didn’t sign up after 9/11 because they looked at a pay chart. Pat Tillman didn’t give up NFL money because the army paid well. It was a call to service. Same as being a Priest or so many other jobs people use to do to improve America. The Civic pride America once had seems gone now. Lost in the culture war. I am not risking my life to promote Pride.
And that’s the problem with America being an “economic zone”. If you’re fighting for America it’s now for a paycheck. I am not defending my tribe. I am not defending my way of life. I am not defending my religion - Civic or theological. I’m not defending an ideology.
People will lay their life down protecting their children and their nephews and their brother. There is a strong evolutionary biological desire to do this. It’s a good trade for one in the family to die to protect the rest.
IMO all those benefits were not known WHEN they went to Iraq. The everyone gets disability benefits was not a thing until a few years ago.
I think when many of them went they were serving their country and probably at negative expected value to themselves.
It’s probably tough for people to remember now but post 9/11 there were people willing to sacrifice their life for this country and it wasn’t just a grift. The leading brand was Pat Tillman. If the towers went down today I’m not sure who is showing up now.
Maybe it’s better today people care more about what’s in it for them. I don’t see many people today myself included rallying because someone bombed NYC now. I don’t view them as my people anymore. Why would I bleed for Mamdani who’s been here 10 minutes. When the Towers went down those were my people.
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7d ago
Be me. Short memory stocks and lose 20%. Puke. Manage to basically perform inline with SP. Then watch trades all become profitable.
Still was a great puke. Would have lost another 30% if I did not.
How are you coordinating 100k snipers to do this? All communication is electronic so eavesdropping is breaking up coordination. How are you traveling? He was using a dumb car running on a gas powered car. Those won’t be manufactured in 20 years. Even if you have old cars driving one of those would be a giveaway. How would you even get gasoline?
All the infrastructure you would depend on to accomplish it is going to be gone. You can do a Mangione lone wolf sniper attack, but the next cog in the machine will take his job.
And yes the mobility aspect is important. Everyone will be driving electric smart cars because the experience is better. No one is going to want to drive themselves. It’s going the way of manual transmission. The consumer demand to support drive yourself won’t be there. The infrastructure to build drive yourself cars won’t exists. A human driver will likely be illegal in most situations in 20-30 years.
If you thought the 2020’s were bad with the government being able to cut you off from flying, payments, and communications then just wait until the 2040’s when your cut off from intelligence and driving. And all of this will be approved because it makes life more convenient. Nobody wants to go back to driving when you hit a button on your Tesla and snooze off for 20 minutes.
My point is any ability to exert pressure is going the way of seriel killers. We have mass surveillance now and they get caught early.
“ but both cryptocurrency and cryptocrime are now inseparable part of our culture.”
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