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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas.

“The reason is that property values, mortgages and taxes are much lower in downmarket neighbourhoods, but rents aren’t that much lower,” says Desmond.

This seems like an entirely underexplored question. Desmond seems to have arrived at a conclusion that supports his theory and then done nothing to challenge that conclusion.

If the top 1 per cent of income earners just paid the taxes they owed, the country would raise an additional $175bn a year.

This is a child's understanding of the tax code.

The right says the poor are hooked on welfare, but he estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars a year in benefits are unclaimed.

This is a non sequitur.

This whole screed just reads like a Bernie sanders stump speech, filled with applause lights and very little substance. Nearly every paragraph makes some bombastic claim that may be true in a lying with statistics way but almost certainly is not true in the way he's trying to use it to imply injustice. But he's not trying to reason, he's trying to preach.

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