Inane recent comment by The Fat Bigot:
Because there is potential to receive rent you assume, quite absurdly, that every landowner actually receives a benefit equivalent to the potential rent he or she could enjoy...(1)
Mr & Mrs Ordinary [live] in their two-up two-down house they finally paid for a quarter of a century after they moved into it.(2) At that point it is theirs. Not the government's, not the State's, not the Crown's and no rental income accrues;(3) it is just the little plot in which they live. And thank goodness for that because it costs no one else a penny for them to live there,(4) unlike under the twisted Utopia of "socialised rents".(5)
1) Logic (something alien to Home-Owner-Ists and Faux Libertarians alike) says that clearly the [value of the] benefit to the current occupant is more than the rent they could charge, or else they'd rent it out and move elsewhere.
2) It's the Homey/FL system which forces people to take out mortgages which take 25-years to pay off. With a full on LVT-CI system, Mr & Mrs Ordinary's CI/personal allowances would have covered their LVT; the purchase price of the land would be been +/- nothing, so they would have been able to pay off the mortgage after ten years at the most, and they'd never have paid a penny in tax. Does TFB want to make life a lot easier for Mr & Mrs Ordinaries in future, or is he using the fact that they had it hard to impose the same burden on all future Mr & Mrs Ordinaries?
3) Yes it does, see (1). Just because they consume/enjoy the rental income themselves does not stop it being rental income. If you have an apple tree in your back garden, those are still real apples even if you don't have to pay cash for them. And the rental income/value is generated by society as a whole ("Location, location, location"), see also: why rental values were higher under Ian Smith than under Robert Mugabe (if you were white, at least, and probably for most blacks as well).
4) Aha, yet more Home-Owner-Ist DoubleThink. As a matter of fact, the people on the better sites impose a real cost on 'everybody else' behind them in the chain, which is why the next arrivals have to pay proper hard cash money if they want to live in the best sites, or they have to make do with second-best sites, so their rental income/benefit is lower. That is a real cash cost, which the original land-grabbers are imposing on 'everybody else'.
[Imagine NIMBYs in one of Titanic's life boats explaining to the people struggling in the water that they were not imposing any costs on those doomed to drown, on the basis that those in the lifeboats were not receiving any cash income - or any other benefit - from their places in the lifeboats.]
5) Ho-hum. Under the "twisted Utopia" of Home-Owner-Ism, where the rents generated by society are collected privately, it takes Mr & Mrs Ordinary 25 years and a large chunk of their income to buy a "two-up, two-down", and they are paying an even bigger chunk in taxes on their earned income as well. The alternative is pay off your mortgage in ten years and pay nothing in tax. Can somebody remind me why Mr & Mrs Ordinary keep voting for this? Are they all masochists?
That the Homey mantra in (4) is DoubleThink is neatly illustrated by another Homey mantra, that if more housing is built, the housing and its occupants will impose a burden on those already there. It must be clear to all but a complete simpleton that the burden which the first-comers impose on subsequent arrivals is slightly greater than the burden which the subsequent arrivals place on the first-comers.
A bit like this selfish shit quoted in Selby & Tadcaster Press:
Another resident, Maurice Cawood, who lives in nearby Low Street, objected to the development for more practical reasons, and claimed:
“The site is to be accessed via a single road which would seem to be inadequate for the likely level of traffic that this additional site, together with a further ten houses proposed an an adjacent site, would generate. The local facilities – particularly the primary school and GP surgery – would be unable to cope with the additional demand generated by this large development and a financial contribution would not resolve this problem.”
At least the whining bitch didn't complain about the Hallowed Green Belt being completely concreted over:
15 comments:
if the fat one does not understand that the concept, of being able to enjoy "rent free" our property after 25 years, is an asset...then my faith in the English legal system ratchets down yet another 30 levels. I already exist at zero tolerance for the English legal profession.
Fuckwits, the lot of them, as far as I am aware.
It's always those who recently moved into the village that complain about new housing being built, despite the fact that they have either moved into a new house themselves, or prevented someone from the locality from living in an old house by upping the price with their additional purchasing power.
G, yes, new rules now apply, you can swear as much as you like. And guess where the bulk of the legal profession's income comes from - taxpayers money, land rent squabbles, corporate take overs, sorting out red tape introduced by their chums in government for the sole purpose of generating income for the legal profession etc.
B, you keep saying that, I'm not sure I've observed it in real life - NIMBYism being a fairly universal British trait - but I'll accept it as true for the time being.
when I qualified, about 30% of MPs were "lawyers". So any law changes automatically boosted lawyer incomes. Hence the sheer quantity of vaguely specified law that meant huge incomes for argumentative sods like the
Fat Bigot.
Do you know if the ratio has changed?
But, the guy in power for most of the last 10 years was a "barrister" (who would be unable to serve an expresso in Starbucks). I guess that the ratios have not changed much. The British Government works mainly to enrich the legal profession. Hosing money into the throats of greedy lawyers.
G, I don't know. I always got the impression that it was about 30%, in any event, disproportionately far too many.
What's also worth noting is that Blair brought in lots of Human Rights stuff, not uncoincidentally, his Mrs is a Human Rights lawyer, and Nick Clegg's Mrs has done pretty well out of being a specialist in EU law.
yes...it is odd how politicians suddenly become rich - how did Jim Callaghan become a wealthy Hampshire landowner, and Ted Heath get to own a house alongside Salisbury cathedral.
Cynics would talk about political corruption but I put it down to the intrinsic worth of these wonderful people.
I thought you'd enjoy my little contribution. Don't worry, I enjoyed it too - the thought of you taking a moment away from counting beans to read what I wrote and froth up into a manic bubble of hypertension gave me huge pleasure.
As usual you don't answer my points other than by repeating the very analysis I say is flawed. For example this gem of patent nonsense ...
"It's the Homey/FL system which forces people to take out mortgages which take 25-years to pay off. With a full on LVT-CI system, Mr & Mrs Ordinary's CI/personal allowances would have covered their LVT; the purchase price of the land would be been +/- nothing, so they would have been able to pay off the mortgage after ten years at the most, and they'd never have paid a penny in tax."
How in the life of all that is buggery can you suggest there could be a magic decade in which Mr & Mrs Ordinary would have bought the land on which their two-up two-down sits free of charge and have paid no tax?
It's a concept floating far above the highest cloud.
Sometimes you remember to slip into the equation that government expenditure in your dream world is massively lower than it is now. Sometimes you don't. When you don't, the picture you paint is perfect Gordon Brown economics - everyone gets something for nothing and the party never ends.
TFB, you clearly can't understand maths or logic and I can't be bothered trying to explain it to you yet again.
G, it looks as it that one hit home, perhaps rudeness is the way forward?
"Mr Graeme, you don't have the faintest fucking idea of how little I earn so kindly keep your personal attacks to yourself."
TFT, Graeme didn't say that you had a large income, only that argumentative sods like you had large incomes and though you might contest the epithet "sod", you cannot contest that you are argumentative, and a troll to boot.
TFB, do let me know where you live. As you are not imposing any burden on anyone else by your exclusive occupation of land, I'm sure I could count on your support at the Planning Commissar when I propose building a massive block of flats (or a factory!!!) right next to you. After all, the flip side is that my exclusive occupation of land imposes absolutely no burden on you.
Also, what would you think if I came to an a arrangement with my employer where I take a small pay cut but they provide me with rent free accommodation? Would you expect HMRC to jump up and down and say it's a benefit in kind and then easily work out the approximate market rent and tax it? In this case, I am living 'rent free' but having to hand over hard earned money to the taxman. The mortgage free owner occupier on the other hand enjoys rent free living but has no obligation to pay tax or generate income to pay for their housing services. Seems a very strange set of signals to be sent out by the tax code.
M, TFB has been perfectly frank about his career, his heart/circulation issues, where he lives and what he paid for his house etc. There's no need to go over all that.
Mark - I apologise for my language yesterday but something about the stupidity of what TFB wrote got under my skin and I remembered the "joys" of dealing with lawyers. But it did seem to expose his incapacity for rational thought. And now I know that his income derives from vaguely-specified law from prior to 1982. I wonder if that bears any closer resemblance to reality than his usual "arguments".
G, feel free to swear away, as long as you're not swearing at me. TFB once explained that me made his fortune in the 1990s dealing with mortgage misselling, negative equity that sort of thing.
mmm...blaming the sellers for the buyers' lack of intelligence....
a bit like the ambulance-chasers of our era
and those car-crash experts who create multiple whiplash injuries from simple ccar collisions....
jobs for the lawyers
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