Whenever economists claim inflation is low, they're almost always exclusively talking about traditional consumer goods (in which case it is low for the most part). They comically go out of their way to ignore the inflation in housing, healthcare, education and various asset classes.
Warren Buffett likes to regularly point out that the Fed's rates act like gravity on stock valuations. The lower the rates, the less gravity. The same is largely true of how housing is affected by the Fed's rates. If you want to absolutely crush housing prices, push Fed rates back up to where mortgage rates are at 15-20% again. What that all really means is, the lower the rates, the more asset valuation inflation occurs. It's just that for amusingly convenient reasons (ie to pretend inflation is lower than it is), most economists like to pretend that asset inflation doesn't count as real inflation in their models.
This is false. The CPI weights the basket of goods that comprise the index based on the types of goods that people actually consume, which includes housing (either in the form of rent or mortgage payments), energy, as well as food and consumer goods. It adjusts for consumption patterns monthly, and re-weights the entire index every 2 years.
The BLS surveys rental prices as well as calculating something called “owner equivalent rent” for owner-occupied housing.
> The OER and Rent indexes have the largest weights of the 211 item categories (item strata) that comprise the CPI market basket. As of December 2008 their shares of the total weight (their relative importances) in the CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), were 24.433 percent and 5.957 percent, respectively.
[1] - https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
I know what you're proposing will be very unpopular but I have an idea that will be even more unpopular: a federal property tax on land + buildings at (five percent of property valuation) per year. There will be absolutely no exceptions for anyone. Everyone must pay. This money will mostly go back to local governments, toward infrastructure and utilities (mass transit, water, electricity, fiber Internet, sewage, garbage collection, education, ... ideally automated as much as possible) and a portion will go to supplement VAT to pay for supplemental universal basic income (in addition to the freedom dividend) that more than covers the new property tax on a one bedroom somewhere in the continental United States (so not necessarily midtown Manhattan).
The key difference in what I propose is the lack of exceptions. Everyone must pay regardless of whether it is a strip club or a church. You don't pay, you get evicted within fifteen years or however long we decide. I recommend eviction should happen when unpaid taxes reaches 100% of property value.
My Hope is that this will absolutely crash the housing market and stop this irrational speculation in the housing market.
A severe tax on property would simply force property owners to raise rents. This in turn would price people out of the market. The housing stock would suffer as property owners would have no excess funds to make improvements and repairs to property. Building of new property would slow as the market for property deteriorates.
Beyond that...
VAT has had disastrous effects on European economies (go look at the price of goods in Europe. Significantly higher in real terms than in the US). Part of this lies in the way VAT obscures the tax portion of cost, allowing governments to surreptitiously raise taxes. This has happened in most developed countries where VAT is implemented.
You also mention government doing many wonderful things with its newfound revenue, but the reality is that government spending is usually wasted on bureaucratic bloat and other inefficient allocations.
I am not an economist but this implies property owners are leaving money on the table right now. I don't think that is the case. The market already charges as much as renters can afford to pay. There is not much room for rent to go up.
> You also mention government doing many wonderful things with its newfound revenue, but the reality is that government spending is usually wasted on bureaucratic bloat and other inefficient allocations.
I absolutely agree with you on this one. This is why I want as much automation as possible. However, having worked in the private sector, I can assure you bloat and inefficiency happens in both public and private sector. The main difference I think is that things are much more transparent in the public sector.
exactly. the property returns to the market to someone who is willing to pay the property tax.
It would also likely be a massive long-term boost to equity markets, though the transitional financial chaos would be a short-term drag.
I need to make it high enough to 1. make home ownership expensive enough that people who own "too much" pay their fair share 2. to pay for the supplemental basic income that covers this high tax for a modest one bedroom unit so I don't end up killing people who are willing to scale down.
I actually wanted it to be slightly higher than seven percent so you end up paying the sticker price of the house once every about ten years but that seemed a little too extreme.
This surfaces how little say individuals have in our public policy. I specifically added a clause that would more than offset this tax for a modest one bedroom unit for each individual over the age of eighteen. However, I suspect you are right. However, there will be massive lobbying to kill this proposal before it can even gain any traction. Huge data centers, ware houses, grocery chains, malls, sports stadiums and all these things don't actually pay that much in property taxes and claim that they operate on such razor thin margins that they simply can't exist without a zero percent property tax. These institutions threaten to pull out from our communities if we don't give them rebates on property taxes. Well I'd like to see where they move to when we have a federal property tax!
