The two 'shot guns' are not actually Nerf, they are Buzzbee, but they are just as good.
While I'm downloading pictures, they're building an office block next door to me. They've spent the past two weeks putting down this rebar for ground floor:
I watched a block of flats being built in Germany (also next door to where I lived, but I lived somewhere else then) and they used to do a whole reinforced concrete floor in rather less than a week. And their rebar looked about twice as solid.
What have we wrought in the UK?
2 hours ago
15 comments:
An old boy used to say to me (if he thought I was working too hard)- "Never kill a job, son. Never kill a job". Seems apposite somehow.
It's sad but true that much of the British Working Class has never been particularly good at working.
they (= just about anyone really) do seem to work much quicker than us on civil projects - but it's often in short bursts
over a year ago I posted on this entertaining German example of working fast without a care for elf'n'safety ...
... but to this day, the site they were connecting up with utilities is still derelict (& that's in a thriving area of Düsseldorf)
It's a long time since somebody said something nice in a British blog about Germany... (as far as I am following them). Even if it is only about a construction site, I do appreciate that very much. :-)
L, Nerf are very clever, they bring out a new model every couple of months and once a kid is hooked (as my son is) then he has to pester his parents to buy it.
D, going by their accents, few of them are British.
ND, top stuff. The large village/small town where I used to live is very 'desirable'. Twenty or thirty years ago, half the village was tiny little bungalows with massive gardens (the remnants of old farm houses?), but every year a few of these are replaced with blocks of flats. And hardly anybody bats an eyelid, NIMBYism is just not a main part of the German way of thinking.
N, there are lots of good things to say about the German way of doing things, but maybe I don't mention them often enough. Nick Drew has many more interesting compare-and-contrast examples on his 'blog (link as above) because he goes there a couple of times a year so he notices them more.
Surprised you guys cannot see the obvious?
The return to capital is higher in Germany. Guess why? . . .
Because more of the rent is collected for public purposes. Less capital is taxed (Im guessing, the only other place being wages). The main reason they can still compete making cars
So capital flows most excellently to Germany, out of Britain.
Its a natural law. You cannot escape it. Like water flows down hill.
Have you guys temporarily been captured by The Matrix of homeownerism. I can understand that when our first course of blame is the poorest class not our robbing masters. A slave mind set.
RS, don't speak too soon!
Don't forget that i used to work as a tax advisor in Germany and I know a lot more about the topic than most. A large part of what we did was explaining to people how to milk the tax breaks i.e. subsidies for landlords and for new construction, all of which result in much higher land values.
Rents are low because there is physically more housing and because there are implicit and explicit rent caps, rents are not low because of subsidies. I'll email you the relevant pages from my BA final year project (aka 'thesis').
Further, Germany has NO such thing as business rates, businesses pay Gewerbesteuer (= local income tax) and their Grundsteuer is only about a third as much as our Council Tax. So don't tell me that rent is collected for public revenue because it clearly isn't.
MW If you have comparative infomration on German taxes I'd like to see it as well. Out of curiosity mainly.
L, I've emailed it to you.
another one your discerning readers might like is this review of the 'lethal' railway arrangements in the same city
MW don't you speak to soon either.
Richard Murphy, high priest of tax havens, property owner and socialist is a tax expert and he has no idea about it. I do not do hero worship.
Nevertheless, I trust you so!
Rents will only be low when wages and interest are both high. This is the Law of Rent. You need to show that in Germany interest and wages are high relative to rent, compared to the UK for your hypothesis to be true in general.
Rent caps do not cause low rents in themselves. They certainly do make for appalling use of land. To build too many where they are not needed and too few where they are.
On the old supply and demand fallacy, do you know how many empty homes there are in Germany as compared to the UK?
So... finally, how much of the rent IS collected for revenue in total as compared to here (about 5%) If higher there you have it as the extra that goes to capital formation.
You are just stating the rents are low using minor cases. But you have not shown it yet in general.
Please go ahead.
RS, a few hard facts. I find it helpful to get actual hard facts agreed before debating theory:
Germans are not NIMBYs, there is a lot of new construction, in the right places and in the wrong places,
Rents are surprisingly low, relative to wages or compared to the UK, there are explicit and implicit rent caps. Many tenants rent for the long term.
The explanation is quite simply that there is more of the stuff to go round. i have no idea whether there are millions of empty houses (I doubt it) but there is still plenty to go round. This is what i call 'implicit' rent caps. If rents go up too much, the politicians make bloody sure that more housing gets built.
There is no disgrace in living in a flat rather than in a house.
House prices are surprisingly high (the fact that they haven't increased in twenty years is because they were stupendously, incredibly high twenty years ago). it is just that UK prices have now caught up in being surprisingly high.
A lot of new construction of family homes is done by the owner buying a plot of land and then hiring a builder separately. So they are well aware of the cost of the building (good value) and the cost of the land (eye watering).
German banks demand much higher deposits (40% at least IIRC) and so there is no credit bubble element.
German politicians are well aware of the destablising effects of rapidly rising and falling rents and house prices, so they do their best to keep them stable (and they succeed most admirably). Rises in house prices or rents are seen as A Bad Thing, just like any other kind of inflation.
Germany does NOT have Business Rates on commercial land and buildings.
Germany's equivalent of Council Tax is about a third as much as our Council Tax.
So they sort of achieve some sort of vaguely Georgist ideal (low rents, full employment etc, but with high land selling prices) by an intricate web of other measures (despite having very low land taxes, very high income taxes, very high tax breaks for landowners etc), the point is that Germans have some sort of sense of collective purpose, of looking out for their fellow citizens etc.
Those are just the facts, don't bother disputing them, you'd be wasting your time.
RS, here's an example of a nice flat you can rent for EUR 1,400 (call it £1,200) a month - inclusive of central heating, electricity, service charge, council tax - in a posh street in the posh suburb of Munich, one of the richest towns in Germany, where I used to live. It's 120 square yards, i.e. rather larger than a new Barratt's house, and tip top quality. It's infinitely better than what you can get for under £300 a week in the nicest parts of the UK.
We both know that total rents are a fairly fixed total figure, and they must be higher in Germany because it is a wealthier country than the UK. We also know that total rents are split between buildings rent and ground rent. It might well be the case that because the physical buildings are so much nicer, that a slightly smaller fraction of total rents goes in ground rents, but in absolute terms, total privately collected ground rents in Germany must be +/- the same, and probably more than in the UK.
That's German engineering for you.
MW
Im quite happy to work with you on this and figure out Germany for certain. Been meaning to for ages.
My deduction is that capital gets more of the distribution there because land values are relatively low. They might both be absolutely high. Big numbers tell us nothing.
My induction is not at all clear and that needs the facts I was asking for
But you have just given me a lot of speculation that is fulfilling your own deduction. Good stuff but its not facts from which we can induce whats really happening
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