| ▲ | nfw2 4 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
I think the deeper issue is a chronic misunderstanding of what wealth is. Most people engage with wealth in the form of usable goods and services. A banana is wealth. A house is wealth. A dollar in my bank account or a share I own is, at the margin, entirely fungible into things I can consume, so they aren't meaningfully different. This is an illusion. A share has value because it represents the hypothetical future productivity of an abstract entity that may or may not even exist in the future. At the margin, you can take an Amazon share and buy bananas with it. However you absolutely can't take the entirety of Amazon and exchange it for a trillion bananas. Those bananas don't exist. More importantly, you can't take the entirety of Amazon and transform it into housing supply. I think people are often too careful about "missing the forest for the trees" and then conceive of problems as overly abstract. The affordability crisis is, first and foremost, a housing shortage. Young people can't afford homes. Millennials are hitting 40 and realizing they may never afford one. Being secure in housing is pretty damn low on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Sure maybe we need a more progressive tax policy, but this myopic focus on billionaires distracts from the real problem which is a housing shortage. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | _factor an hour ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
1T dollars allows you to corner the best contractors, maybe most of them, for your own projects while houses remain unbuilt. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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