by littlestymaar | 2025-11-26 09:13:38+00:00
> You can literally open the page I sent you and they are selling vacant lots to neighbors for 100 dollars.

The they does the heavy lifting here: it's the city council that does sell that for this price. And it had to intervene because the private market never reached its own equilibrium.

> They have also done thousands of demolitions of the houses that nobody would have at any price. The reason they were not sold is not because of market failure, it is because there was no viable buyer. With property taxes and maintenance obligationss their market price was negative.

The market value was negative, but the market price never was.

> The market price of a marginal house in Detroit is/was recently below 0. Supply and demand.

Yet people of Detroit kept spending 30% of their income in housing, and you don't see the paradox.

> I sent you BLS data on housing as percentage of income for the entire 20th century. And census data on median house size. Spending on housing went up from 29 to 32 percent from 1960 to 2000

Which is still a 10% increase, and again we're talking about a topic for which the US compares favorably to the rest of the West. If you take housing + healthcare as I mentioned at the beginning (and I could have mentioned education as well) then the US is indeed in the same situation as the greater Western world.

> more than offset by other essentials in the same paper and for much more house

A house twice as big and twice as expensive is still twice as expensive. (And it's also twice as remote from work areas…)

> Last time we were talking about taxing the rich or whatever, I sent you the flat-ish 1% tax burden data since 1979, you didn't like it as it didn't have earlier data.

You sent me data from 1986 onwards so yeah it falls a bit short on context, and even there your data contradicts your point as I noticed (and you just avoided the question to move on another subject).

> Is it in the room with us right now? ;)

You are part of the negative impact of the neoliberal turn actually, with markets becoming a religion symmetrical to Marxism and the in-between being called “collectivism” and put in the “far-left” basket.

> . Would you agree that US is more neoliberal than Europe when you talk about neoliberal turn?

Is the sea bluer than the sky? It doesn't make sense to say one country is “more neoliberal”, the policies adopted vary a lot between countries depending on internal political balance. For instance the UK still has the NHS despite the turn but has dismantled its standing army to reduce government spendings, when the US is still spending relatively close to cold war level in its military spendings.

> In other cases, since I dunno much about Europe other than high level

That's why you should read more!

>>I cannot comment on their unique neoliberal negatives. Perhaps those are bad and they should do what US did instead.

No country can do the same exact policies as its neighbors for multiple reasons (internal politics, culture, economic structures) and no country in Europe could have had the Silicon Valley for instance. But I don't think any European country envy the US right now (they have silicon valley envy, but that's it).