They were trying to get Republican votes so that the law would be bipartisan. In the end it passed on a party line vote, so maybe the compromises were a mistake...
Location: Seattle (current) / Toronto (looking to move to)
Remote: Open to remote.
Willing to relocate: Yes, around the GTA.
Technologies: C++, Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, debugging, performance
Résumé/CV: http://aaron.maenpaa.ca/resume.pdf
Email: aaron@maenpaa.ca
I'm a software engineer with about 15 years of experience. I excel at working at the boundry of developing software and running it in production. For instance, identifying and fixing performance and correctness issues or adding telemetry to help understand what the software is doing when it's running.
Make no mistake, all companies are one leveraged buy-out away from full private equity ruthlessness. Even if the current owners are great – people get older, they'll want to retire... and we all die. Eventually the ownership can pass to someone who really wants to turn the screws.
The biggest tax benefit of living in an owner occupied home is that nobody pays income tax on the rent you would pay if you were living in a house someone else owned.
... but most places don't have the stones to tax imputed rent [1]:
Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland being exceptions.
If the choices are between implementing tax on imputed rent and killing all economists by boiling them all alive, I'll gladly start gathering firewood. I'm just joking. I am all for higher taxes on everyone.
I have one condition though. If I should pay tax on imputed rent, then Google and Facebook should pay taxes everytime someone clicks on a sponsored link that takes them to their own property. Every time I bring up this idea that companies must pay taxes on funny money they spend within the organization, people yell at me. Microsoft should pay taxes Windows licenses that they use internally. No, you can't give yourself a "discount" and say well we charged ourselves zero dollars so we owe no taxes. Pay taxes on the market rate. Either make it free of cost for everyone or pay taxes when you use things internally.
> No, you can't give yourself a "discount" and say well we charged ourselves zero dollars so we owe no taxes. Pay taxes on the market rate. Either make it free of cost for everyone or pay taxes when you use things internally.
Could they just say we "licensed/sold" it at a loss, and therefore take a tax deduction?
Why? Taxes should be the minimum required to provide for the core services of government. Big governments are dangerous. Also taxes have deadweight loss.
Taxing imputed rent? That’s ridiculous. Taxing income someone might have made? Some people and countries want the government to have far too much power. If someone decides not to work, should we tax the income they could have made?
1228 pesos in 1976 was worth about $4.50 in 1976 USD [1].
... and if he'd bought into the S&P 500 (Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust now the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in 1976 [2]), it would be worth about about $190 in today's USD. Which you could sell to buy about 2.99g of gold today (3 trillion times as much as reported).
While obvious you'd have to be extremely prescient to put your money in a completely different type of fund that had launched only just that year and at the time they would not have touched such small dollar investments.
... but today we now know that Bogle's idea was actually pretty good and you really can make such small dollar investments (eg. Fidelity's no-fee, large cap fund has no minimum to invest (FNILX), or you could buy a fractional share of a variety of large cap ETFs: SPY (SPDR), IVV (iShares), or VOO (Vanguard) from a variety of brokerages). Of course, a minor wouldn't be able to own shared directly... so, get your kids a UTMA account [4].
And how could he have done it, being in Argentina in 1976? Not even asking about Vanguard. Just accessing s&p500 or NASDAQ is not easy even today, don't think it was much easier then.
If the thesis of the thread was "Gee, it sure sucked to grow up in Argentina in the 70s with no access to high-quality financial products." that would be extremely relevant... but the thesis is much more expansive than that ("Prepare for a fantastic lesson about the power of inflation." / "Takeaway: may the sign of the exponential be ever in your favor. Positive, you own the world. Negative, you get diluted into nanoparticles.").
The folks getting spooked about inflation right now and reading this thread (it is written in English after all), almost certainly can invest even very small amounts in high quality investment products. There's no need to get fatalistic about saving ("you get diluted into nanoparticles."), it has never been easier for normal people to put their money to work productively.
> The folks [...] reading this thread almost certainly can invest even very small amounts in high quality investment products.
...and then the stock market gets stopped for a couple of weeks and exchange rate of international currencies becomes practically state-controlled.
> There's no need to get fatalistic about saving
There absolutely is a need, when the life just doesn't work like people here are pretending it does.
It's all just an extremely US-centric view, people there are just lucky to live in a fantastically economically stable environment, but this leads to them being unprepared to potential economic shocks, including not enough support for the discussions of ways to evade the consequences for regular citizens.
I felt that article is misleading. First off it used non inflation adjusted percentage change as an indication that Tokyo kept prices down. But in reality it was already very expensive. And then it claims they issued lots of building permits - but houses in Japan have very short lifecycles (like 30 years) and it is normal for a buyer to do a tear down and rebuild (which requires a permit).
Isn't that because normal people are heavily encouraged to put all their money into buying a house? Culturally ("rent is just throwing money away" / "the stock market is a casino"), with financial incentives (mortgage interest deduction, SALT deduction, Fannie/Freddy insured 30 year mortgages), and quality of life (school districting/social services or lack thereof), we get people to put every dollar they can into buying a house. Or more than one (apparently everyone aspires to be an amateur landlord). Consequently, you need to have a lot of money before you've bought enough house to move onto buying stocks.
If renting and investing were more normalized and encouraged, I'd expect a different ratio of real estate : financial asset ownership.
