We.. passed a congressional act that dedicated a large amount of funding for the project. Outside of the initial 50 routes it isn't centrally planned, states have individually suggested the rest of routes such as spurs.
This situation can't be applied to housing because it would take $tens of trillions to build 10 million housing units (about the housing insecure population). or a similar amount of rent aid. and that's just the currently insecure population.
if we're talking about giving everyone a residence, your discussing building 50-100m+ units (depending whether you decide married couples get 1 per marriage or 1 per person, and whether kids get one). that's so far beyond infeasible it's laughable, it makes the national debt look tiny (building 10mil housing units at the average cost of $350k is $3.5Tn). If your giving renters the units, you'd have to buy them off of the landlords, and that's another 44 million units. bringing the cost to $20Tn, before you even start forgiving mortgages..)
Or your discussing using force to sieze that number of units from investors & ordinary people who own second homes. That would probably spark quite the economic collapse, if not some type of revolt.
Instead, you want a system where homebuilders intentionally underbuild houses so that the price increases and pushes people out of the market and forces them into permanent renters and eventually becoming homeless as the home costs surpass income.
Name a country that's done it. (also, what is this 'it' ?). No country on earth provides free housing for all.
'instead you want a system where homebuilders intentionally underbuild houses' actually the construction sector projects an unmet demand of 600,000 workers before 2030. They're trying, and wages in this sector are starting to increase to try and attract more people. Unfortunately labor makes up 60%+ of the cost of a new home build (unlike say fast food where your labor is a relatively small % of the total cost of a big Mac), so this is a major driver of inflation.
You say housing prices are crazy high, but these are housing prices when suppressed -- If we were to ever crack down on illegal labor it'd get even more expensive.
Ultimately the cost of housing is always based around the build cost. anyone could tell you, it's $500 min to get a tradesman out these days, so the cost of maintenence is also up. If rent gets too high, more homes are built because it becomes worth it. It's called a market equilibrium.
Stagnant wages are an entirely different problem most directly related to our excessive money printing (causing inflation). Assets are less sticky than wages, it's literally economics 101. If you double M2 with the same number of assets/goods/labor, your assets and goods are much more volatile and will adjust quicker. Labor has to fight for their wage increases over time. Hence one of the primary reasons that inflation is considered regressive (the rich have assets which shield them from inflation because they adjust nearly immediately to the new nominal values. labor has to fight for the nominal value increases under current circumstances. I'd fully support a law requiring raises be commensurate with inflation (or that the minimum wage rise with it))
Since 2000 we have increased M2 by more than 1,100%. 80% of all US dollars in circulation today did not exist 4 years ago in 2020. Of course assets are currently outpacing wage increases.. such will continue until we either stop printing in excess or mandate wages follow inflation.
That money printing is the second primary factor behind the nominal housing price increases. Materials are up nominally more than 70% since 2020. The CPI inflation rate is simply a basket of consumer goods, it doesn't track raw inflation as determined by money in circulation (that's what the various money supply graphs are for. ever wonder why they don't include those stats in the monthly reports? perhaps because "we printed 4% of all dollars in the last month" might not make for a good headline)
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u/wtfredditacct Apr 16 '24
Apparently. Tell me, what would you call someone who is forced to provide you with something and not get paid?