Friday 27 February 2009

Fun Online Poll: Interim results

The seventy-two seventy responses to the question "What would you like the government to do ..." so far are as follows:

Outright winner:
None of the above - 89%

Also rans:
Use taxpayers' money to build 'affordable housing' - 7%*
All of the above - 3%
Use savers' money to subsidise borrowers - 1%
Use taxpayers' money to prop up house prices - 0%


Which pleasantly surprises me, having voted for "None of the above" myself. So that's what the readers of this 'blog think. Which begs the question, we know that the government is engaged in ruthless vote-buying, but whose votes exactly? I shall now put up the poll at housepricecrash.co.uk, to see how they respond.

* As an aside there is absolutely no need to spend taxpayers' money on 'affordable housing'. We've already got enough social housing for the poorest twenty per cent of the population, if we want housing to be 'affordable' for the better-of poor in social housing and for everybody else (including those on council house waiting lists), all we need to do is liberalise planning laws and replace Council Tax etc with Land Value Tax, which is effectively what we had in the 1920s and 1930s, and it worked just fine.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Also 75% of housebuilding costs are regulatory or at least they have gone up 4 times faster than the RPI since before WW1 when regulation didn't intrude. If making housing "affordable" as a way of stimulating building & getting out of the recession were desired by government (it would certainly work though it would reduce prices & make the banks even wobblier) then they don't have to make any subsidy to bring the prices down they merely have to stop artificially pushing them up.