Gaining in some places and losing it in others.

Then star with Greenwich Village.

both

The power to tax is the power to destroy

Pedal to the metal please. Saw it off and tow it out to sea and actively sink it.

> these mostly vacant buildings in a city with a housing affordability problem

Vacancy rates are extremely low in NYC at 1.4%. Anything below 5% indicates drastic under-supply of housing. I don’t think that vacant real estate for billionaires is a significant contributor; it’s almost exclusively an issue of supply.

Nope, bailing out banks is a bad idea, why would I think otherwise? Two things can be bad at the same time: socialism is a dysfunctional ideology just like crony capitalism is a bad idea.

Arizona, i find, doesn't so much subscribe to the red / blue dichotomy, seems blended and somewhat balanced, as far as i can tell.

Taxes = theft is one of the most tired, low-brow, and intellectually lazy viewpoints ever.

We all understand the concept of commons. We all understand the concept of money pooling. Don't pretend it doesn't make sense or it's evil when most people pay for private insurance anyway or even fucking Claude Code subscription plans which follow the same concept.

meanwhile they’re scheming against you to see how much you’re willing to pay before you can’t afford to eat anymore just to buy that extra home. it’s an absolutely beautiful thing. they deserve it all and rightfully so!

If you live in New York you rolled at least a 15 on life's D20. That's how good of an opportunity that location is. I started and lived most of my life there and started in poverty -- for there. That's still a better opportunity than most people ever get.

All these people pointing at the nat 20s losing their minds screaming like they rolled 1s.

>(including unrealized gains)

They wrote that whole article out just to make it all meaningless with 3 words in parenthesis.

"The plane crashed and everyone lived! (not including those who died)"

IDK what Bezos made as "income" last year but paper gains in asset values are not "income" for tax purposes, though some people might look at the increase in his wealth and call that money he "made" that year. But we don't have a wealth tax on a federal level at least.

It seems your article is saying the same sort of thing I already stated - "The share of taxes paid by the richest 1 percent (24 percent)", right?

You are talking about effective taxes rates, which are different. To discuss that, I would have liked to see a bit more detail in the article, like what the income sources were and the deductions and losses to offset gains. I think changes around capital gains and loans against equities could use some adjustments. The other taxes like payroll are basically moot as Bezos's payroll income is only about $90k per year anyways.

This post makes the mistake of counting unrealized gains as income. That's not how taxes or investments work. Unrealized gains are NOT income. That's how they mistakenly come up with the number that he pays less than 1% in income tax. Investments, in general, are not income (unless held less than 12 months or if they pay dividends).

Imagine you had to pay income taxes every year on the unrealized gains of your 401k, house, and car value. You too would be said to be paying a very low income tax rate. But again that's not how income taxes work because none of those things are income.

If Bezos were to sell those shares and actually realize those gains then he would be rightly taxed but that would also likely tank the stock as his 8% ownership is significant enough to drop the price drastically. 55% of Amazon is owned by 401k and other retirement accounts so if the price tanks average Americans take a huge hit.

Bezos does sell shares, all the time actually. You can see this in the SEC filings. And he is rightly taxed on those realized gains. But he's not going to sell all of his shares as that would be damaging to Amazon, the workers, retirement accounts, and his own investments.

Instead, the money stays in the company paying worker wages, buying new facilities, etc. This is even better for the economy because it keeps the funds in circulation. This generates even more tax revenue than if he did a 1 time sale of his investments. That's why unrealized gains don't get taxed, because its financially a worse outcome than keeping the money in circulation.

False equivalence. You're comparing liquid assets with an illiquid one here.

Only because I live it in and can't easily sell it to raise cash.

Let's say you own some stock and it increased in value last year. Do you feel like you "made" any money from that? I did and it did and I do.

Thanks for the completely content-free comment! You're a credit to the community.

2 million new apartments is doubling the number of apartments in NYC.

I call water safe, but you may say it's a tacit admission that you could drink 5 gallons in an hour an experience zero effects. I wouldn't call that an honest rebuttal

id rather some portion go to taxes and also result in diluting the ownership and control over the biggest more important industries.

then have the government spend that tax money on services and infrastructure that also increase overall money circulating in the economy

It's exactly the other way around. The USA is not a developing economy, we do not suffer from a lack of capital and abundance of investment opportunity, we suffer from an abundance of capital and lack of investment opportunity. The average American billionaire has no idea what to do with a marginal dollar, so he just bids up assets with it and maybe punts on spaceships or something. The average American, in stark contrast, spends the dollar satisfying very real as-yet-unsatisfied consumptive wants and needs, at which point the dollar gets spent and taxed and spent and taxed again and again and again. That's understatement: the velocity factors are 0.7x and 5x, last I recall.

You can read the balance of explanations off interest rates, you can read it off of valuation metrics, you can read it off of judgement calls about the quality of the marginal investment opportunity. You can't read it off the anus of a billionaire or the turd of self-serving think tank propaganda it pinched out, though, and that's where you are clearly looking for it.

Yes, and I'm asking what the context for that sarcasm is.

> On a 10% down payment an extra 1% increases the amount you need by 10%

Because you are not allowed to roll that tax into the loan?

Bedrock is only a little lower in the "Midtown Gap", and in any case a lot of those 4 story buildings could be 8-10.

If everyone who wants to pay $5k a month to live in NYC is able to; I’ll be super happy and pleased for them.

> bunk beds… $5000/month

The market prices full one-bedrooms at less than this in most of Manhattan. Flophouse beds would cost a fraction of this and they would get cheaper the more of them you have. They’d also slow the growth of rent price in NYC.

Let’s take your example at face value. Suppose Manhattan added one million beds to its existing ~3.8M bedroom housing stock via the “missing middle” housing that you described, perhaps over the next ten years. These might have small private bedrooms and shared kitchen/office/bathroom facilities. They might even include dorms, but I’ll focus on single-room occupancy units. You’d get the space for this from some mix of re-developing office buildings or upzoning or re-developing low-slung buildings.

The rent of these single-room occupancy units would be a fraction of the rent of a normal place. The people living there would be far less rent-burdened than they would have been otherwise, freeing up more income for consumption or savings/investment, boosting economic activity. Some of them would be new residents, whose income taxes (if they pay them) and spent dollars/sales taxes would be a net benefit to the city budget. Some of them would otherwise become transiently homeless due to affordability concerns, which would be destabilizing for them and expensive for the city due to homeless program spending.

Others would be people who currently live in apartments but would move to these units because they prefer cheaper rent, greater privacy (they might be sharing a room today), a newer building, or the greater efficiency of having multiple bathrooms. Maybe right now they are sharing e.g. a four-bedroom one-bathroom apartment with three strangers in Hell’s Kitchen for $1400/month. These people would otherwise be in the housing market for a full apartment, and removing them leaves more full apartments for people who want to occupy them, either alone or with roommates. Ergo we get downward pressure on full apartment rents.

The flophouses and dorms and SROs were a key part of the housing market that kept Manhattan more affordable and therefore livable in the 20th century, when density was up to 40% greater than it is now. It was deeply shortsighted to get rid of them. The idea that we should downzone even further makes no sense to me; you get to decrease affordability and decrease the economic benefits of agglomeration to the local economy at the same time, all so… there are fewer people on the subway, I guess? I disagree with the “too much density” argument on its face anyway. Density has clear economic benefits via agglomeration and productivity gains; diverse and dense housing stock via upzoning increases affordability via supply/demand and filtering effects; and the way you manage density is through appropriate infrastructure spending on housing, services, and public spaces which—you guessed it!-becomes cheaper per person the denser you build. Seoul has twice the density of Manhattan.

I live here. The thing making Manhattan unlivable is that a one-bedroom is $4500 in the east village due to not enough supply. Fix the housing costs by building more of any and all kinds of housing and then we can deal with the other problems via better governance and increased tax revenues. There’s nothing we can do otherwise that isn’t just rationing or some other bandaid solution.

That does not address the point. You say they should pay even more to address the idea that very few people pay most of the taxes, what is the logic here?

I'm someone who uses the same "loophole" the wealthy use to "avoid" paying taxes. Turns out you really only need around ~$100k to unlock it, and you still will pay ~0.5% interest over the overnight lending rate. But it's about as rock bottom as any non-united-states-government will get a dollar denominated loan for.

But it is not a tax dodging scheme. It's a tax deferral scheme wrapped in a risk-on loan package, that is used almost entirely to maintain ownership of a company rather than to defer taxes. On smaller scales you can use it to unlock money tied up in stocks, if you think the stock will keep going up (if the stock falls, you now might get margin called as well as coming out worse then just getting a regular loan).

Or economically literate and malicious. Many such cases.

many people are convinced on some level that things are the way they have to be for a reason. lots of people internalise capitalism. it’s a way to rectify the cognitive dissonance

It will result in fewer second homes existing, therefore more first homes.

How will this tax result in less houses available for people with no primary home existing?

It’s a tax on second homes. If a single person sells due to the tax and someone who had 0 homes previously, it’s spread the scarce housing stock.

Not to say we shouldn’t build more but acting like a tax on multiple homes is going to make houses less available to everyone is ludicrous.

Thoughtful reply.

>I claim that Detroit was hollowed out precisely by anti-density and pro-suburbanization practices.

>When you send factories to the suburbs and then put highways straight through the neighborhoods in your city where people actually live and work, that's not densification leading to bad outcomes. It is detonating a city via discriminatory urban policy

Isn't this overstating the role of policy?

1. Wage arbitrage by the Big 3 to avoid urban auto unions out to the suburbs

2. Post-WW2 economic manuf. wind-down [1]

3. Post-WW2 highway build-up enabling suburbia

Looking at the things out of Detroit's hands, I don't think we should lean on policy as much because policy can't nail the factories to the ground or prevent their closure. The economic trends simply appeared much more powerful than city policy.

The fate of the Detroit city limits auto cluster could have been sealed with the war end. Businesses often want to escape high costs if they can do so without giving up their operation or market share, and they were able to do just that with the MI suburbs and highways.

Policy might have been able to delay the collapse if, like you promote, the city managed to encourage building housing to relieve the rent and home price pressure. However this seems nigh impossible in practice (even in NYC?) because property owners are politically connected and generally do not like values to go down, a classic case of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs [2].

[1] https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2...

[2] https://1889institute.org/the-problem-of-diffuse-costs-and-c...

they way to “handle” this is to stop viewing housing as “investment” - especially short-term investment. once you do that, you are good. when you buy you will consider all the implications of that decision and then you can live with it when you need different housing

I'm familiar with the concept of crabs in a bucket, yes. That's why I left New York and abandoned my rent controlled apartment to do so.

The rich have in my view become increasingly (outwardly) selfish and craven, so it makes sense that they are now associating with the vibes of apocryphal Marie Antoinette quotes.

...bub Mamdani is a socialist and he will run into these problems.

What specific “modern social and economic problems” can be attributed to them? The 90s was a period of economic growth after their policies proved to be effective.

Given that Socialism has shown time and time again to lead to economical and societal disaster, anyone supporting it unironically should not be taken seriously.

Show me the proof of a working Socialist system [1] and I might change my mind. Otherwise you're just deflecting through misplaced ad-hominems.

[1] No, the Scandinavian countries are not socialist countries - I live in one of then. Neither is the Netherlands, nor France nor any other European country.

The government taxes every little thing that a poor person does, like earn and consume. The government hardly taxes anything that a rich person does, like rest and invest and watch the green number in the brokerage account go up.

Monetary velocity is notoriously high among the poor and low among the wealthy. If you have a dollar and want to generate maximum economic activity or maximum taxes, the answer is unambiguous that you should give it to the poor person.

How does the interest rate of margin loans generate taxes? Just curious since I'm not sure there's any provision explicitly taxing margin income for banks and brokerages. Especially since some brokers will give you the prime rate plus a few basis points, I can't see how there's enough margin in that to cover an explicit tax on it.

You can use the same "loop hole", it's called a securitized loan.

The real hack is being able to save money rather than "treat yourself" every single time you get more money.

Good attempt at manipulation. Why don't you link some studies here which say it will be better to leave the tax system as is than taxing the unrealized gains somehow.

Let me simplify it like i would for a 5 year old.

The loophole is that they never pay taxes on the unrealized gains bc they lived on the borrowed money their whole life. They will never sell their stocks, so there will be no taxable event. When they die they will leave their wealth to the children which effectively erases the unrealized gains. So no one pays taxes on that huge chunk of money. Google "buy,borrow,die".

Who will build those homes? Who will pay for them? If it were a lucrative business to build those homes I'd assume someone would be building them but that does not seem to be the case. Why is this?

I have no doubt his investments are well-diversified. He's not an idiot.

My point was simply that income and wealth are two different things, at least for tax purposes.

Few people think the ultra rich are illegally evading taxes. The issue is exactly that they’re paying all they’re obligated to, and it’s not very much, relatively.

You’re really strawmanning here. Instead of arguing as if we’re morons who don’t know that unrealized gains aren’t taxed and think Bezos is committing tax evasion, convince us of why it’s wrong to think that Bezos should be legally obligated yo pay more, maybe by taxing those unrealized gains.

It isn't that which is the issue. It is the fact greenwich village has been at the same height since even before Don Draper's time. You see, the suburban enclaves of long island and upstate and new jersey and the comparatively more built up areas of manhattan do have the exact same issue with regards to housing, and that is there is little room in the zoned capacity to legally add any more housing.

In 1961, NYC adopted a zoning plan that saw zoned capacity reduced by 80%. These sort of changes to zoning happened around the country in the 1960s and 70s in response to red lining being made illegal. If you can't prevent black people from living near you by law, maybe you could instead prevent anyone from living near you and guarantee a supply side crisis such that the wealthiest individuals in the economy are who can afford to be your neighbors, and in 1961 surely they won't be black. You should look up the median income differences between a white nycer and a black nycer today, it is shocking. Median household wealth for whites just within the scope of new york state, not even at city resolution, is nearly 15x higher (1).

Today, 80 years later, we have kept the racist-by-transitive-property laws on the books all over the country. And as such, cities remain highly segregated by both race and class. Civil right era in terms of housing was essentially a failure to achieve any change from this status quo.

1. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-racial-wealth-gap-in...

Do you live here? I do, and I’m astounded by the number of 1- to 3-story buildings and surface parking lots (!) dotted throughout Manhattan, especially outside of the skyscraper clusters in midtown and downtown.

There is an unbelievable shortage of housing that is solvable only by increasing supply and building upwards. It’s not even single-family homes; why are there any one-story buildings in the lower east side?

It has a huge amount of areas that are underdeveloped relative to demand. Many areas with height restrictions that block basically all new developments. For example West Village is one of the most in demand zip codes in the entire world caps new builds around 80 feet. East village caps housing @ mid rise so new grads who live there spend half their income on housing.

He is right.

You'll notice I specifically said 4 to 8 story buildings.

Wealth distribution is a false flag. Rain distribution across the globe is not equal, solar light distribution is not equal and they impact people's life more than wealth distribution. USA and the entire planet's population is at record high in living standards and wealth, but some people are still unhappy because not everything is perfectly equal and at zero entropy like the thermal death of the universe: this is more than illogical, it is just envy without limits.

If you have a second home in manhattan, you are not the middle class _and_ you can afford it.

If the idea of paying taxes affects your poor fragile mind so negatively then there is an easy solution where you can sell said extra home.

No one is being fucked hard by this other than people who are appalled at the thought that they need to contribute to society for the negative externalities they create, like accumulating excess shelter in regions with a dearth of housing capacity.

They pay payroll and consumption tax, which are quite steep compared to the 0% tax bracket for mega billionaires.

You could, theoretically, just keep upzoning the underlying parcel without any detriment to neighborhood character.

Bulldoze greenwich village.

Do you have the data for that? I was wondering about tax paid (as dollars not effective rate- I know effective tends to me lower for HNW individuals due to accountants and other financial professionals they can afford).

  - The top 1% of income earners pay 40.4% of the total U.S. Federal Income Tax receipts
  - Top 5% pays 61.0%
  - Top 10% pays 72.0%
  - Top 25% pays 87.2%
  - Top 50% pays 97.0%

The top 10% is not even upper middle class in high COL areas.

$155k is a top 10% income.

Bezos pays 40% too.

His assets are not income. Just like your assets are not taxed.

Ok, but he does that loan-against-assets hack!

Well the fact is that those loans eventually need to be paid, so at some point he will pay that 40% (unless he does the step-up basis hack when he dies)

Ok, but he should be paying annually like everyone else!

Well, technically he is, his assets, the company Amazon, pays a lot of taxes annually. The government views Amazon as a money printer, states get their sales taxes, and the federal government gets their income taxes. All of which originate with Amazon.

All of which is to say, that the uppe-middle/upper-class, the successful surgeon, is the one that needs to be paying more taxes to equilibriate society.

They still pay payroll taxes, among others, which disproportionately affect poor people.

> He pays income tax just like everyone else.

He only paid income taxes on $80k while at Amazon.

The wealthy often make their money as capital gains, which if they held for at least one year, are exempt from the income tax and taxed at no higher than 20%

Billionaires literally have their own set of tax brackets in this country: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc409

> Now do cars and food…

Food is obviously not comparable (you must consume it and only s*t is left over).

Cars depreciate quickly becase they wear out in the timespan of a couple decades. You can keep them going longer but it's a labor of love, not really economically worthwhile.

Housing is completely different. Absent some disaster (fire, earthquakes) it will last centuries with just basic routine maintenance. Given that inflation is a perpetual constant, something that lasts that long can't possibly not appreciate, it inevitably must.

the investment for a car is in the manufacturing facility, similarly with food. While there's a consumption component to both, it's the same as a house - it's an investment to build it, and it produces shelter (which would be the equivalent of the food from the investment in a farm).

You are missing the point. Of course people want to live in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. People also want a vacation home at the beach or in the mountains thats private and beautiful and easy to get to. Except if we built giant monstrosities and condos in the hamptons and make all ski homes tenement housing it will be much less desirable to go to them. No ones asking to make more apartments and housing in rust belt cities.

You're getting confused because you are failing to recognize that the owners wealth is being taxed when those other taxes are paid.

If the company had a magical exemption from all taxes, the owner would have a substantially high net worth. The gap between that hypothetical value, and the real value, is the tax being paid.

> >I'm sure we can count that as a given.

> It's very unlikely, he has pledged to give away most of his wealth in his lifetime,

The ultra rich give away donations in the form of stock, so they never sell it, just transfer it. So no tax to them and they get a tax deduction for the donation fair market value.

He can't give away the securities he has used as collateral for his loans.

The businesses that are laying off employees because of competition from Amazon were less efficient and this employed far more people than Amazon does, thus paying more in taxes.

It can easily not appreciate if more of it is built than is needed (glut of supply) or nobody wants to live in that places anymore (lack of demand).

There are multiple real examples of both, even in America.

I am a New Yorker, people want more housing but there is still NIMBYism because they want to preserve the charm, and I'm mostly only talking about manhattan. While people are not fans of the low density luxury skyscrapers popping up in places, I've not seen people who currently live in the place think we should add massive housing blocs carte blanche. Sure there few scattered places for a few projects but not like advocating to tear down to build bigger. That mentality comes from people who are definitely not new yorkers or live in fringes.

Would paving over all of Central Park to fill the area with residential skyscrapers be a good idea?

Even though it would hurt me, I feel like eliminating the distinction between capital gains, income, and payroll taxes would be a fairer solution.

Capital gains are taxed lower as an incentive to make long term investments, vs. short term speculation.

> its like at the top of the park where less people/tourists ever visit

Tourists don't vote or show up to community-board meetings. The top of the park is closer to Harlem. That is why it would be easier to bulldoze.

Focusing on a single tax is silly. We should look at all taxes paid across all levels of government. Federal income tax is one of the most progressive taxes out there, so of course that's what people focus on when they want to make the point that wealthy people are being sacrificed to the altar of taxation.

If you look at all taxes, the share paid is remarkably close to the share earned. According to https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/, in 2024, the top 1% earned 20.1% of income while paying 23.9% of taxes. The bottom 20% paid 1.5% of taxes while earning 2.6% of income.

And for reference, here's what kind of incomes those percentiles are:

Top 50%: $53k/year

Top 25%: $93k/year

Top 10%: $155k/year

Top 5%: $210k/year

Top 1%: $450k/year

Please delete this comment before it bankrupts half of click-bait driven media outlets.