this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Yeah, in a lot of ways, it feels like the great recession never truly ended in the sense that people had recovered from it; it feels more like people just got used to it. In the oughts, a lot of the pretenses of cold war capitalism got dropped in favor of a whole hearted embrace of the shallowest (ostensibly; I'm going against my nature and giving Friedman the benefit of the doubt here) possible reading of the Friedman doctrine. Everything turned to "how much cash can we scrape out of this for the investors?" Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you'll eat our bullshit anyway. Minimum wage hikes? No way! Your burgers will cost $20! Oh, well, I mean, that's going to happen anyway, but at least you guys didn't get raises lmao. You want a truck that just works? Eat shit, idiot, pay us $100,000 for a lifted mini-van in a masculinity-protecting trenchcoat. Need somewhere to stay? Great news, we're going to do nothing to improve the apartment and increase your rent $200/year. Or you could just choose to afford a half million dollar home; the free market is all about choice, after all. Want health insurance? Cool, that'll be half of your income, your boss gets to the carrier for you because it's a free market system all about the freedom of choice, and we're going to personally throw sand in your eyes if you ever actually try to use it. At least you can ~~go swim in the public pool or go enjoy your city's fine taxpayer funded services~~ nope those all got cut permanently in the recession, and now that money's going to paying out for cops fucking up instead.
The economy objectively never did actually recover from 2008, in terms of returning to the previous growth pattern/trajectory.
Japan's economy had more or less been in the same situation since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997.
They call this state of their economy 'the lost decades'. Growth never returned to the previous levels, and has been either stagnant or modest since, requiring massive active management from the government to keep everything from totally breaking.
... Sound familiar?
We have also been in our own lost decades, we just have about one less such lost decade than Japan.
In both cases, the only way to keep things going is to keep financializing more and more of the economy... but this results in an increasing wealth concentration gap and more volatility in financial markets.
The cure isn't really a cure, its a stopgap to prevent essentially a near total reset... but the stopgap itself is also harmful if you get addicted to it, and don't come up with a better solution.
The better solution is in fact to do that near total reset, and also set up something analogous to, or actually, a UBI.
But the only way you can do that is if you expropriate the capital owners.
So, the boom bust cycle of capitalism continues, until it breaks so hard that either everyone is basically dead (cough climate change cough)... or you have some kind of massive popular revolution.
The cost reduction for business needs to come into consumers. People don't actually need to earn more money to have more money. They can have more money by spending less.
In starting to think the solution is some big government intervention. The easiest thing is Land value tax which is happening in some countries but it's really enough.
The next solution would be forced purchase of land (bureaucracy needs to improved here) and then market driven bidding for manufacturing high density housing. The thing is the government doesnt need to aim to make a profit here. The loss of the building process can be gained back by taxes in growth in the economy elsewhere.
Energy and food are looking like they will get cheap soon with renewables and precision fermentation and lab grown meat. But taking land that has been horded by the rich, building high density and building railways will need government intervention.
In general, I agree, but this would require actually competent planning and policies... which is fundamentally impossible in a political system where money buys off the vast majority of representatives.
To fix that, you have to have ranked choice voting, abolish Citizens United, ban private money in political campaigns, make it only funded out of a commone government pool... stuff like that.
I agree, that's part of a solution.
Again, agree, Emminent Domain exists and forms a foundation that could be expanded on.
You seem to have similar ideas as to what I've outlined in older comments:
My conception of how to solve the housing crisis... well for starters, massive zoning law reforms + earlier mentioned expansion of Emminent Domain.
Then... institute a progressive, continuous, not tiered, tax on rentals. Houses, condos, apartments, whatever. Index it by some equation around AMI and an equivalent Area Median Rent.
As a private rental rate goes higher and higher away from Area Median Rent, the landlord is charged a larger and larger tax.
The money from this tax goes into a massive city level fund that is only to be used for constructing, maintaining, and otherwise purchasing and then converting housing units that are run entirely not for profit.
These housing units are available to people/families below AMI... generally, go along with a framework of being whatever % under AMI as paying a lower total rent.
Start with prioritizing transitioning the poorest into these affordable units.
Private ~~renters~~ landlords (EDIT: derp) will have to balance cost pass through with having an actual reality check on the actual number of people willing to spend more for luxury units.
Functionally, this achieves a very similar effect as rent control, but with less downsides, and acts as a stabilizing factor in the city's rental prices.
Luxury units can still exist, but ... less of them, or less extravagant ones, and its a much more direct way of the wealthy subsidizing the poor and thus closing the wealth/income gap.
And hey, if a wealthy person wants to live in a spartan place and avoid the luxury tax?
Nothing stops them from doing this.
In totality, it isn't totally state directed, it isn't totally free market, its much more hybrid, and ... oh boo hoo, the private landlords have a smaller profit margin, cry me a river and drown yourselves in it landlords, Adam Smith himself hated all of you a century (two centuries?) before Marx was even born...
...oh and this also incentivizes making new constructions that have reliable, basic, working features, and cutting out all the fake luxury bullshit that is used to justify a much higher rent, when in reality, it isn't necesssary and or nobody uses it.
Stop putting co working office spaces and gyms and dog parks and rooftop bbqs in every single new multi family highrise... all that shit isn't properly maintained from basically day one, and is basically unusable by year two, three, four anyway.
(side note: the entire ... its either BLS or FRED methodology for estimating rent ewuivalent home values based on 'what if you tried to rent out your home right now' is a farce, toss it out, start over)
I'm pressing X to doubt on much of this.
Renewable energy? Absolutely possible, if done properly... but thats a whole other discussion, and you'd basically have to Luigi the boards of every major oil company, possibly multiple times, before that would even maybe be politically possible, due to aformentioned massive money in politics corruption problem.
...
Lab grown meat? I dunno, seems like thats still a ways away from being comparably edible and cost effective.
Embrace the bugs.
Make cockroach or cricket paste into patties. Not too different from our current pink sludge paradigm, but is astoundingly more cost effective.
...
And yes, of course, all of this needs to go along with massive investments in public transit infrastructure.
Do so by either tolling every major roadway in and out of a city, make the suburbs scream... or just tap into the GPS that is now literally built into every modern car.
Tax people per mile driven in a high traffic, congested zone.
Make having a slog commute so expensive that people actually realize " oh wait ...i AM the traffic " and tell them to start taking a bus or light rail or subway... and of course use those taxed driving funds to make public transit as close to free as possible.
... That'd all be the scale that you'd need to do to actually generate the money to do this, but I have no clue how to make this politically palatable in many areas.
Americans are terminally car brained addicts who can't quit the lifestyle, even though its killing them, the planet, and the economy in the medium/long run.
I actually believe that, though this is what you'd need to do to avoid infrastructure and economic collapse... at this point, outside of a few major cities... Americans are too angry and stupid to do it, and will just prefer to slowly kill their way of life by continuing to demand it 'just work', no matter how you explain that its unworkable.
I generally agree with everything you said. You tax on housing is interesting idea I haven't heard before.
I do think electricity is going to have much more profound affects that people realise. We are regularly seeing negative pricing all around the world and solar, wind and especially batteries continue to drop in price and increase in deployments each year. Also electrification.
Simply to cost of production is far far lower than anything that has ever come before and the amount of people that can supply energy to themselves and others have increased dramatically. The market is much more competitive that anything that has come before. Honestly think people are sleeping on this.
Tax on housing sort of is what it is, but that is terrible phrasing.
It is a tax on exorbitant rental rates.
It is a tax on landlords.
Anyway, yes, more solar and wind would of course be great.... but the political reailty of implementing that at scale in the US is uh... basically zero right now with the fascist Trump regime in charge, and even if they all poofed out of existence... everything is still politically fucked.
Oligarchs have too much money and control the media, the narrative, and the minds of morons.
Any expert of team of experts can throw out a comprehensive plan on how to transition to renewables, and that is all undone by Joe Rogan being an idiot for a few episodes.
I think it's a tax on housing. It doesn't make a difference how it's applied. But I like how it incentives less luxury.
Good job America isn't the only country in the world. The transition to renewables isn't even slowing down without America.
Sorry yeah, I am American and doing the American thing.
In America, marketing, messaging, is everything, because we're a bunch of fucking morons basically, not capable of critical thinking.
But hey if you think the general ideas here would work with other messaging in other areas, go for it!
I'm a bit charged about all this as these kinds of policies being implemented or not is going to be a life and death issue, very very soon, for tens of millions of Americans when the Republicans functionally end Medicaid and Section 8 (our pathetic but at least existing housing subsidy programs for the poor).
In America it is now literally illegal to exist while homeless. So... if we don't fix the housing situation, and a whole bunch of people are made homeless... yeah, tens of millions will either die or be sent to jail/prison within a year or two.
Potentially including myself... I am disabled and rely on SSDI, which... at least currently doen't appear to be directly on the chopping block... but that could change in an instant.