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The real American household poverty line isn’t $31,200, it’s around $140,000.
(www.yesigiveafig.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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My household makes good money and ya, if you include housing, it's gonna take a lot more money for us to afford our own place.
There is seemingly few things as broken and fundamental as current generations inability to own the place they live. Housing does not have to be this expensive, the paperwork doesn't have to be so hard, and the houses do not have to be made of cardboard to be economical.
We need to limit house ownership to those who live in it until everyone has their first.
or let them own as many as they want but pay 500% property taxes.
Just fucking tie the taxes to a logarithmic scale based on the amount of properties an entity owns. It's too easy of a solution.
valid
There is a radical / revolutionary idea around tax reform that frames taxes as being applied to LAND and not improvements.
The argument is that the value of a piece of land derives from the public investments / improvements. Like decent infrastructure, public transportation, good schools etc all raise the market value of a given size of land in a given location.
Then its up to the owner to find a use case / improvement that makes the tax burden "worth it". Like the market incentives are for the highest value of private investment / private use. You don't get rewarded for land banking or sitting on empty lots or making hotels into surface parking, instead you perhaps pay 5% of the value every year AS IF you were doing something that is worthwhile with the property.
Basically the system currently rewards speculation and idle property, and when the public makes an investment in services in an area, the profits get extracted by land owners who essentially privatize the reward by cashing out after doing nothing. A lot of people feel this is fundamentally broken. Not only that, but a lot of these land owners KNOW this is a rigged game and they run city hall and get the public to commit to investments that they stand to profit from.