Half of all renters in the US make major, long-lasting sacrifices to afford housing. A basic failing of US capitalism. Many millions suffer so a small minority - landlords - profit. The system is the problem.
I don’t know why Wolff is calling it a failing. Looks like it’s operating exactly as designed. Also we need to look at the bright side, shareholders are making a lot of money!
Countries with government supported housing tend to have drastically lower homelessness, lower crime rates, lower prison population, higher happiness, smaller housing price/rent inflation, lower racial tension and much more. Of course there are a lot of other things those governments tend to do that also affect those same things, but it’s not hard to think of reasons why government supported housing would help.
I guess the only argument for that i can think of is that goverments are mandated to uphold human rights and if housing is considered a human right then the argument could be made but i think that is not a waterproof argument
If we could rewrite most countries constitutions we should include all of this. We would need this on paper for governments to be truly obligated to the welfare of its people.
“Worked an extra job” and “worked a side hustle like uber or lift” are one in the same, add them up and they are second, so we are forced to work 2 jobs for minimum wage (as in minimum to survive). When are we going to dox all the billionaires and burn down their houses?
Good luck. Historically that kind of thing won’t happen unless significant numbers of people - say over 50% - are literally starving to death. The rich fuckers are keeping their greed juuuuust enough in check to keep the number of disorganized desperate people from becoming an actual threat.
“There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.”
determine the median quarterly rent within a state
Minimum wage is the lowest value rounded to the next highest $100 where that median rent amounts to no more than 35% of it.
people are hired for the week and paid at the end of it, a nominal rate of pay for up to 32 hours of work, 2.5* that is added on for between 32 and 48 hours of work, and between 48 and 64 hours of work earns you an additional sum of 2.5* the overtime rate, meaning overtime is more expensive than staffing appropriately, exponentially so if you’re really pushing it
holiday hours count towards the weekly total but working a holiday nets a whole extra week of pay for the worker who came in on that holiday, yes even if they themselves don’t observe it personally.
St. Monday is back from the dead! Mondays are now the third weekend day.
Owner occupant credit against residential property taxes, to hold the effective tax rates for homeowners where they are now, or lower it.
Massive increase in property tax rate, which now only affects investors.
Statutory future increases, targeting an owner-occupancy rate of >80%. If fewer than 8 in 10 residential properties are owned by their occupants, the investor tax rate rises to melt their profits. Statutory decreases in investor tax rates if owner-occupancy rate rises above 90%.
This will effectively kill traditional renting, as the taxes will quickly melt any profit a traditional landlord will collect. To maintain their profitability, landlords will have to find a way for their tenants to be named on the deed, making them eligible for the owner-occupant credit.
Land contracts and private mortgages will become commonplace. Commercial lending requirements will become more tolerant. Housing prices will stabilize, because the market will no longer see unsustainable investor influence.
The only properties that will be feasible to rent will be 2-4 unit dwellings, where the landlord lives in one of the units, and can thus claim the owner occupant credit. Apartment complexes will become condominiums.
How about fuck off, if your strategy for revolution is that the poor aren’t allowed to have their lives improved by anything except guillotining the billionaires, you’re not an ally, your a cynic who’s hoping things will get bad enough for guillotines to make a comeback.
I mean, the system is broken, something needs to change, fuck capitalism and all that. But the original stats say “renters or homeowners”. It’s not just the renters getting fucked by the system, despite Dick Wolff’s interpretation. Also, at no point does the data say half of the respondents. I’m thinking a lot the people who fall into any of these categories fall into the others as well.
Probably? I’m not familiar with the template source, but this specific cartoon was from a series of posts about “Jahy-sama” I read occasionally on Reddit before I started to really dislike Reddit’s policies and left in favor of Lemmy. I think if you search “daily Jahy-sama post” you’ll find a lot of them from last year and earlier. I saved some of the ones I liked.
Paint a spot of nail polish on the back of captured mice before you release them. When you realize you keep capturing the same one, time and again, you’ll understand the inherent flaw in live-capture mouse traps.
We The People are empowered to establish a law making it a criminal offense to hold more than 100,000 times as much wealth as the bottom 1%. We The People are empowered to make violation of this new criminal statute a capital offense, enforceable by guillotine.
You want to be a billionaire, you better make sure the bottom 1% has a net worth of at least $10,000.
Lol, this is exactly it. If you start writing capital offenses it won’t end with billionaires. It will spiral out until “undesirables” of many sorts are dying too.
Violence is not a political tool. That’s tankie shit. Authoritarians always come in proclaiming to “get rid of” the group of people you wish would be gone, but they never stop there.
In your example, if society has determined that someone has far too much wealth, they should just be taxed such that they are no longer in violation.
Violence has always been a political tool, but there will be no violence. They won’t even be incarcerated. They will voluntarily relinquish their excess wealth long before they ever see a guillotine.
Leave it as a civil offense to attain and retain that much wealth: you give them a billion reasons to fight, and zero reason not to. Making it a capital offense gives them just one tiny reason to stop and think about what they are doing. One small, tangible consequence of their actions.
Authoritarians
Authoritarians only understand authority, and billionaires believe themselves to be the ultimate authorities. Imposing the authority of We The People against them is the only way to to disabuse them of that notion.
Police brutality sends their regards. Violence to keep the poor in line and out of the rich’s sight. Violence to disperse big protests and demonstrations demanding action against them.
Do you want shitty housing? Because that’s how you get shitty housing. The government doesn’t give a fuck about your comfort. They are as much a slum lord as Bob or Sandy or whoever owns the place you rent now. They will go with the lowest bidder, and do the bare minimum. The only benefit is the government pays SLIGHTLY more attention to safety standards (depending on your government).
Well but when the Government provides Housing and it’s shitty throughout you can go and demonstrate for better quality of life which you can’t when the housing is owned by privates. They will just put on the street.
Homelessness is the market driven solution you dense as osmium apologist.
Where’s that copy pasta that the only thing more depressing than the brutalist commieblock housing complexes is the homelessness they were built to prevent post WWII devastation?
Shitty housing would still be a big leg up for the homeless and the near homeless. Lots of newly productive workers who aren’t worried about a roof. Win win
Because having a house makes productive workers? I fail to see your logic here. A city I lived in did this. It didn’t produce workers, it produced income for contractors as the buildings were outright destroyed by the ‘tenants’. Needless to say the city didn’t stay in that business long, less than a year actually.
If your goal is ‘workers’ while simultaneously bitching about capitalism…who do you plan on them to work for?
It kinda is? There is public housing IIRC, the issue is the supply of it available and how many people who would be hypothetically eligible that just don’t ever try for it, again because supply
You know how parcels and or houses are bought or rented from realtors? That realtor is now the city. The city also employs janitors to keep the housing maintained. If you got a problem that needs fixing you call that janitor to get it fixed.
So instead having a private landlord you have a public landlord in the form of the state.
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