And how much more expensive is rent in your town because it has 100 fewer units? That is the opportunity cost. Unfortunately, these opportunity costs are not borne by landowners, just by renters. And then when the government charges landowners higher taxes on their now more valuable property, the owners balk.
My town almost has zero renters - something like 5-7%. Most of those are accessory dwellings or STR for the lake in town. Very low property tax (paying $1200/year on a $400k 2k sq foot home with 5 acres). Shares a school district with 4 other local towns/villages.
The developer/advocates for this initiative tried to sell residents on "local businesses need employees..." - Sorry, I don't give a shit. If you can't hire people, pay them more + offer better benefits. Building "affordable" houses so you can import minimum wage worker populations that also benefit from state welfare/ebt/insurance is not good policy.
I teach whitewater kayaking and swiftwater rescue with my company https://whitewaterworkshop.com. I started doing it on nights and weekends around a full time tech job and then when COVID hit, demand for outdoor activities skyrocketed so I went full time with it.
I worked in tech for about 15 years where I paid off my student loans very aggressively, then once those were done I started pushing the same amount of money into retirement and savings accounts. My wife and I have no kids and were probably putting $50k+/year away. Turns out if you do that for 15 years, you end up with enough money to never need to worry about rent or health insurance again and you can choose what you want to do that is more fun. For me that was instructing and leading epic multi-week rafting trips like the Grand Canyon 3 times, the Maranon River in Peru, and the Alsek River in Alaska.
Above a certain level I could certainly get behind saying no she's not entitled to it. 100% marginal tax rates above $10 million in annual earnings seem perfectly reasonable to me.
That won’t stop her from being a billionaire. She could have ownership of a company that would make her net worth orders of magnitude higher than any earnings cap.
You cannot put a cap on a company’s worth, because it’s a guess.
They can decide to nationalise those companies as well, but then she could take her skills to another country. Then that country loses all of her earnings for sure.
The other way to stop her from being filthy rich would be to make people stop liking her books. Which at this point one should ask how much damage one is willing to do to stop a person from being rich.
Sure they would. The companies would just have to have different ownership models that incentivized more distributed ownership between more people. If we somehow said that no one could own more than $100 million of a company, then for every person who has $1 billion of a company now, there would be 10 people with $100 million instead. This would be a net benefit to society.
They would be the same 10 people all owning shares of each other's companies if you said one person couldn't own more than x of a company.
Where do all these other people who have the money to own all these shares come from? If they existed they'd be buying the shares right now, and probably own them. You hand wave that this would be a net benefit to society but don't say how, or even demonstrate an understanding of how any of this works.
This is all a misunderstanding of power, where it lies, how it works. We imagine the government has power and we can democratically change the fabric of reality, will our desire into existence with no blowback or fallout. The people that own these companies, they cannot be stopped. They exist because they have to exist, they emerge naturally. Someone always holds all the cards. If you try to pass laws to stop it they'll just hide it from you and do it anyway.
The key to avoiding lifestyle creep is "pay yourself first". Set up automatic deductions to automatically pull money from your paycheck before it ever gets to your bank account. In the US, you can put $20k per year into a 401k account and another $6k into an IRA account tax free.
I'm going to take your comment at face value and assume a good faith question. There are a couple arguments for higher federal debt levels. Federal Debt doesn't really matter the way a household's debt matters. The debt to GDP ratio isn't the same as a family's debt ratio because the government can always just print more money to pay down the debt. Will this increase inflation? Very probably but not necessarily. Is higher inflation an absolute bad thing? Also likely but not proven. Modern Monetary Policy would state that you can just increase taxes (in particular on the wealthy) to avoid inflation if you need to.
This explanation doesn’t pass the pub test without substantial qualification: we all know that governments can’t just print endless money and declare everyone wealthy. The missed detail is the impact on foreign currency exchange rates - and no country can survive without the global market.
Passive investing with savings from my tech job. My wife and I earned around 150k per year for 10-12 years but lived happily off of 40-60k per year for that time. The difference went into savings and retirement accounts and now we live off that nest egg and do what we want. I started a business teaching whitewater kayaking, packrafting, and swiftwater rescue which really took off during COVID but honestly the nest egg is what allowed me to do it pretty risk free.
Counterpoint, I'm a whitewater rescue instructor. My students and I are much more likely to see drowning victims than heart attack patients. Compression only CPR doesn't help drowning victims at all so we've had to add a "don't listen to your CPR instructor, do rescue breaths first" statement to our classes.
"Buy and dry" is the default outcome. Cities buy the farms nearby, use the farms' water rights and let the fields go dry. Agriculture uses 60-90% of the water in the west depending on river basin. Cities can afford MUCH higher rates per gallon for water than farmers can so the cities will eventually just buy out the farmers if nothing changes. I have no worries about Denver or Las Vegas or LA running out of water. There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.
> There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.
And then produce prices rise until even the most absurd federal subsidies can't stop people from planting things other than corn, and then produce prices are super high and meat prices are super high because corn gets more expensive too, and then we have massive food price inflation.
It's basically just a market correction, but a big one while our entire food system is reconfigured and American diets adjust.
But if nature itself is not producing water year after year and we are in prolonged drought, even paying higher prices will not ensure safe clean drinking water anymore for everyone in the cities. Maybe the future will be to start buying water like gas for $6 a gallon and I dread that day.
There is still many orders of magnitude more water than necessary for drinking. We could get by with a fraction of a percent. If things keep getting worse, you would simply see less lawns, pools, and agriculture. Following that, we would dump less fresh water into the ocean before people start dying of thirst.
We already do this. In Colorado there are over 50 "Transbasin Diversions" that move water from one river basin to another. Most of them transfer water out of the Colorado River Basin to the east side of the continental divide, usually the Arkansas River or South Platte River Basins. California also does this on a vast scale to move water from the wetter north to the drier south parts of that state.
There are many issues with transporting large quantities of water vast distances. From legal (it is illegal to transport water from the Great Lakes to outside of their basin), to physics (water is expensive to pump up and over mountain ranges and building tunnels is incredibly expensive.
Basically, just like there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build dams or pumped hydro electricity storage, there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build pipelines.
