Another instalment of "We Own Land! Give Us Money!" over at The Telegraph:
Home buyers who need mortgage help may be forced repay state... hard-pressed home buyers who have paid their taxes for years but then fall on hard times may wonder why a country that can house political extremists from overseas cannot afford to help victims of the credit crisis closer to home.
So let me try and get this straight:
When the government, for narrow political ends, gives land owners money/soft loans, that's called "help", and when land owners are asked to repay these soft loans, they are being "forced"?
What about the third leg of the transaction, when other taxpayers (many of whom are not land owners) give the government money to pass on to people who have over-extending themselves in leaping on the Ponzi scheme and expect a free ride? Are these taxpayers "helping" or "being forced"?
And what relevance does the bogey man "political extremists from overseas" have to do with it? That's what we politely refer to as 'totally irrelevant'.
Via Quiet Guy at HPC.
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UPDATE: Interestingly, The Daily Mail gleefully reports that "More than half of us - 54% - think unemployment benefits are too high up from 35% in 1983". Let's not forget that "homebuyers who receive Income Support (IS), income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), or Pension Credit (PC) may be entitled to help towards their mortgage costs, known as SMI and paid direct to the mortgage lender."
So do the Homeys want 'mortgage help' (paid to banks on behalf of unemployed people, as defined) to be increased or reduced? Or do they want IS, JSA and the like to be reduced and 'mortgage help' to be increased? Or what?
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Interesting choice of two different words to describe the same thing...
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17 comments:
This really is getting very silly indeed. How can we ever hope to make the UK wealthy again if the Man on the Clapham Omnibus goes on believing this stuff? Can't anyone see that subsidising homeownerism just deprives wealth creating labour of capital?
It's completely bonkers.
L, it is, we can't, no and agreed, respectively. The bulk of the electorate genuinely and devoutly believes that if house i.e. land prices go up we get richer.
The natural price of land is precisly £nil and everything else is down to explicit or implicit state subsidies and protection.
As a relative aside, my grandmother said "If you rent, that's money down the drain" the other day. I let it go, but what would you say is a good rebuttal? The first thing that came to mind is "interest is also money down the drain".
ie. Rent a house for 10 years at £10k, pay £100k, net assets zero.
or Buy a house, live in it for ten years paying £20k pa. interest + capital repayment, net assets £100k, balanced by the nearly £100k spent on interest.
Plus if you can afford to pay £20k then you can afford to pay £10k rent and put the other £10k in the stock market.
Good post. Indeed. Its globalised insanity. Im currently embroiled in a similar dissonant epic with David Ireland, CEO of the fake charity, Empty Homes Agency. He is sponsoring George Clarkes C4 series, tlThe Great British Property Scandal. They correctly identify the empty homes evidence but fail to identify root cause. Completely. Then immediately go on to propose a remedy, tax payer funded cash to do up empty homes. Clarke is a property developer!
When I point out to Mr Ireland root cause is speculation in property values he denies it, refuses to state what is the cause then with evidence and goes silent.
We are soooo screwed.
RA, you can't argue or reason with people like that. The whole land market is money down the drain, if you rent, it's money down the drain, if you buy with a mortgage, you are paying for capitalised future rents up front plus interest thereon, that's double your money down the drain.
For sure, buying is worthwhile from the point of view of an individual if house prices increases are greater than the interest you pay (if prices are falling, as they are now, you're better off renting), but all that means is that if and when you come to sell, your purchaser has to throw and even larger amount of money down the drain.
The fact that there will be Bigger Fools in future does not stop a home buyer being a Big Fool today.
RS, the stick is cheaper than the carrot. Slap 'em all with LVT, scrap all other taxes and all those empty homes will be renovated and occupied within twelve months. George C will be able to earn himself silly doing up houses. Win win all round.
Yup, it is just a tad confusing when we have Lord Freud saying paying out £400 million in SMI is unsustainable when last week Grant Shapps was boasting about another different £400 million which the government was going to magic up from nowhere in order to "help" people get themselves into the situation of having taken on paying for an over priced house and not being able to do so, and thus needing some SMI assistance !
If they must play these games, and it seems they must, well it would surely have only been sensible to boost the amounts of magiced up from nowehere money to find sufficient to ensure that the SMI scheme was always, no matter what, sustainable; seeing as they had just introduced a likely further call on it.
The fact that they didn't does tend to suggest that they might be not quite so clever and capable at organising carefully managed and sustained house price bubbles as they ptetended or portray themselves to be and on that basis alone should surely be booted out of office for having mislead and continuing to mislead homeowners ?
Anon, you are genius. Perhaps Shappsy and Freudy are wrangling over who gets to play with £400 million fantasy money?
More than half of us - 54% - think unemployment benefits are too high
They never say or perhaps they never ask. Out of that 54% how many have ever had to rely on 'benefits'
Would be interesting to find out
MW Merci - It is nice to feel appreciated, and as I do from time to time, with reference to my present circumstances, tell people, spending over 30 years in "that place" just a stones throw from the Mother of Parliaments {so no prizes for guessing what place, sorry } did obviously teach me something, it is just such a shame that the something it taught me proves to be of absolutely no value whatsoever when it really counts, like finding gainful employment, and only comes in useful in being able to recognise and point out "the latest pile of steaming cow-turds issued or delivered up to us by our beloved government?" which beloved governments biggest and most frequent "pile of steaming cow-turds" was/is always that they were/are entirely different and less in the pockets of one or other interest groups than their predecessors - and amazingly enough we've just had the Mighty Ding, our Leader, make such a statement concerning Lobbyists and their "supposed" influence and then, ho hum, how funny, had the governments Bureau of Corrections and Post Event Semantic Interpretations put out a statement to sooth the fevered Lobbyists who were feeling unjustly under attack and also to explain to the world that what the Mighty Ding meant to add when he denied the extent of lobby influence that was when any such influence existed it was of course all for the good as it only ever came from the "Good Samaritan, Not for profit, Not looking for advantage" Lobby Company which as any fule kno' only ever accepts commissions and underatkes lobby work from companies that wholly share its not for profit, not looking for advantage ideals ...
And so it goes ... on and on and on ...
PC, dole seems pretty low to me (£70 a week or so), but welfare reform (i.e. replacing the whole shebang with a universal citizen's income) is a separate topic.
Anon, hence and why you post anonymously, I guess.
More than half of us - 54% - think unemployment benefits are too high
More pressing matter is if any taxation falls on incomes below the level of benefits, it's destroying jobs. Who would incur costs to get to work, just to get less money than you do for sitting at home? Nobosy should be priced out of a job by income tax / NI
M, as we all well know, the marginal withdrawal rate on low-to-average earners is over eighty per cent, i.e. for every £1 you earn you lose 40p odd in tax/NIC, a few pence in VAT and 40p odd in benefit withdrawal. That's what destroys the work incentive.
Problem is, while £70 dole is pretty measly, some households claim all sorts of different benefits as well, tax credits, housing benefit, council tax benefit, child benefit, free school meals, free prescriptions etc etc and taken together, it can add up to quite a bit.
It's £67.50 per week JSA
as you say all the other bits can add up to a pretty penny, but they are not strictly unemployment benefits.
The Magic Taxes - not only do they pay for current expenditure and future pensions, they also now cover future mortgage payments!
"I've paid my taxes, I'm entitled to it."
All that is missing is a moan about bankers.
@ Robin. Re "great british property scandal"
This was simmering my urine. Particularly after they had outlined their solution - empty homes need cash thrown at them in the form of cheap credit. Then they went to Mayfair and saw 3x 20Million pound properties empty. Clearly the owners of these cannot be short of a bob or two so their "solution" starts to look a bit silly. So they quickly moved on to the homeless war veteran in the desolate north east who can't get a council house which made better copy for them.
I might have to blog on this...
At least Mr Ponzi's scheme was voluntary - he didn't take contributions from you by force. The housing racket is now so fucked that the Homeys need to steal money from taxpayers to prop the whole rotten structure up.
PC, it's a big topic, you know my thoughts on this.
Rob, that's the general idea "Oi've poid moi taarxes (or Oi did once decoids ago) and Oi've pooid for moi laaarnd, and now the world owes me a living.
QP, Robin has gone into battle with these idiots on Twitter @propertyscandal.
Rob, yes, land ownership is a form of privately collected tax anyway, they are now making it explicit by giving them publicly collected taxes as well.
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