by sershe | 2025-11-27 15:41:33+00:00
Exactly! Council took the houses/lots, in some cases cleaned them up, and after that the price is $100. What do you think it was before? The same local government, that assessed some intact houses with mortgages still being paid at $5k, might give you a hint...

Detroit in particular had a large number of non-mortgage, tax delinquencies - why didn't owners choose to sell at market "value" and instead walked away? Either they were all dastardly neoliberals trying to lose money but spite Detroit, or perhaps the market value was negative so there was no viable buyer? I guess it's technically somewhat of a "market failure" that it's cheaper to walk away than to pay someone to take the house off your hands (negative price). The reason is non-market though, it's more like, there are no debtors prisons anymore so nobody can force you to pay local taxes.

Regardless you made a specific statement - if supply/demand worked, price of the houses in Detroit would have gone to zero. And, sure enough, it has in fact gone to near zero, and factually below zero given house has additional (non-market) negative cash flows.

The rest:

"Which is still a 10% increase" "A house twice as big and twice as expensive is still twice as expensive." Hmm? What about the house that is 10% more expensive over time but x1.5-2 bigger? Also why is it that /median/ houses are x1.5-2 bigger (while the household size is decreasing, too), is it dastardly developers intentionally trying to screw affordability, or is it because a /median/ household wants and can afford a bigger house cause the median household is more rich?

For healthcare I already sent a link above. The closest correlate of healthcare spending across countries and over time is disposable income. You can spend millions of dollars to keep grandma alive for an extra 6 months, which is, apparently, what rich people do (e.g. https://mdinteractive.com/mips_cost_measures/2025-mips-cost-...). Could we spend it better? Probably. I think free market with insurance that works like actual insurance (like existing cancer insurance) would be better, but let's do medicare for all, sure, it's not going to be much worse than current system. But spend it we will, until we become poor.

For taxes, I sent you a data since 1979 after that. The data shows Reagan's reforms and later reforms had basically no effect on 1% tax burden relative to other groups.

As for European issues specifically, the only reason would be to find out what policies the US should avoid, since Europe is relatively poor, but I've never thought neoliberalism is their problem. More welfare state, more taxes on workers (https://taxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/OECDLab...), more regulation (in most countries), harder to build housing (in some countries like UK?). Too little neoliberalism. I don't expect to find any neoliberal policies "worse" than the US ones, so it's not worth my time, but do give a hint, maybe I will.

In the US though, the only problems with neoliberalism are either hyperlocal and affect a very small percentage of the population, or that it didn't go far enough. If neoliberal turn didn't end before, for example, reforming unsustainable welfare state to be smaller; or undoing environmental regulation; US would have been in much better shape right now, with less need for interest groups to fight over a smaller pie.