Property wealth--equity in general, frankly--isn't taxable like income is (and neither is capital gains). If you hold property, you can use that equity to buy more property and accumulate more wealth, but since it isn't income, it isn't taxed by government the same way.
Yes, property taxes are a thing, and yes, we do tax capital gains, but not like we tax income or consumption. Allowing wealth and equity to snowball takes that money and marks it "off limits" to government. So government revenues drop and services decay.
I'd also add that our tax regime is incredibly unfair to labour, especially skilled labour. If you're a high-earning worker, you're taxed much more than someone who just lets their money accumulate through passive rent-seeking. If you wonder why Canada has a brain-drain issue, this is a good reason: it's more advantageous to be a landlord than it is to be a doctor, engineer or other highly-paid, highly skilled professional.
You just don't realize what the market has solved for. It didn't solve the problem of expensive healthcare, it solved the problem of how to maximize profits for the wealthy.
That's what people don't understand about "the market". What you think it's doing isn't what it's actually doing.
I don't think people realize how damaging having so much of our economy tied up in housing is causing:
It sucks up consumer demand. Can't buy goods if all your money goes to rent or a mortgage
It eats startup capital. Can't invest or run a business if you have no free income.
It incentivizes bad investment behaviour. This one gets me, the right-wing think tanks are always whinging about "productivity" but the biggest reason we're not productive is that our investment class is dumping money into real estate because it provides a quick return, instead of investing it in technology or people
The income from it is not available for taxation, starving government revenues and resulting in programs getting cut
And that's before you get to the social costs (people stuck in miserable marriages, stress, commuting requirements, loss of security, etc).
And here we are, throwing gasoline on the fire because our governments and their donors can't bear to make less money. Quite the opposite, really, to keep the Ponzi scheme going they're moving to strip-mining south Asian immigrants like they're the human equivalent of an open-pit quarry.
When the collapses, it'll be horrific. At best, I hope the recovery is more New Deal than Third Reich.
Tax the rich and build public housing and supporting infrastructure at scale. And by "build" I don't mean "give money to developers" I mean actually have the government employ people, buy equipment and run facilities.
The problem is now that you risk living in a tent in a park, or in your 50s with roommates in a sketchy rooming house. It's not just "poor" anymore, it's that divorce can mean homelessness.
I don't think people realize how badly out of control the housing market is. In much of the country, it's not a matter of not being able to buy a home, it's not even being able to rent one.
In the area where I live I can count four or five young couples and/or single parents who are raising kids in rooming houses. Other than one spectacular instance of substance abuse, they're not "bad people", and ten years ago they'd at least have been able to rent a space of their own to raise their kids, while thirty years ago they'd have been able to buy a starter home. Now? Now they're raising children in rooming houses.
That's not a good thing, but hey, at least landlords are doing well and Galen Weston's making more money this year than last.
I got divorced in the 2010s and it kicked me out of the housing market. I'd be five years from paying off my home now, but had to sell it as part of the separation. We bought it for $210K in 2009, sold for $225k in 2011. It flipped during the pandemic for $900k, as an "investment opportunity for GTA-area landlords looking for rental income"
That's hard to watch, not just the money, but also seeing the trees I planted with my then-young kids cut down because the landlord needed another parking spot.
Since then, I've watched house prices accelerate away from me, so much so that I decided to just give up and bank everything into education savings for my kids in hopes that I'll have a couch to sleep on in my old age. Even now that's looking unlikely.
My now-spouse had it worse: when she divorced, she got to keep half of her then-husband's previously-secret and significant debts, which more than wiped out any equity she had, putting her tens of thousands of dollars into the red. He, of course, got his debt halved.
I don't doubt for a second the stats that tout rising domestic abuse rates since people become house-locked. I got divorced when rent was at least reasonable where I live. Now? Now the choice is between "a miserable, if not right dangerous, marriage" and "sleeping in a tent in a public park".
The rich are scared that this could metastasize into anti-capitalism protests in general.
They know they've gone too far, pushed too much, been too greedy. They know their control is shaken for the first time in almost forty years and they're worried.
I wasn't aware that my standard of living was measured by the wealth I can produce for the nation, but I suppose that's how the right-wing views everyone not of the ruling class: as a resource to be strip-mined.
It's not Israel per se, it's that these protests could metastasize into general anti-establishment ones. Israel is just the flashpoint.
In case you're wondering why the authorities didn't really care about the Convoy is because, frankly, most of the authorities agreed with them. Right-wing protests are inherently pro-establishment, and often have the tacit, if not explicit, support of the police, whereas left-wing protests certainly don't. The tell, with the Convoy, is that no one was going to do anything until the Ambassador Bridge got blockaded: then it became about money. Otherwise, everyone was perfectly content to see rich, white suburbanites having a tantrum. Fascism, after all, can be good for business.
I'll put this back to you this way: is Likud also a terrorist organization? Is the IDF? Because they do a lot of the same stuff.
There are definitely terrorists associated with Hamas, and Hamas definitely carries water for them, but they're also the duly elected government in Gaza and if I were Israel I'd be asking why Gazans feel like they were so wronged that the only option seems to be a political movement that's sympathetic to terrorist tactics.
Saying "they're terrorists" without acknowledging how we got here is a lot like calling the ANC in South Africa "terrorist" in the 1980s. It's stupidly reductionist and ignores complexity for the sake of jingoism.
Property wealth--equity in general, frankly--isn't taxable like income is (and neither is capital gains). If you hold property, you can use that equity to buy more property and accumulate more wealth, but since it isn't income, it isn't taxed by government the same way.
Yes, property taxes are a thing, and yes, we do tax capital gains, but not like we tax income or consumption. Allowing wealth and equity to snowball takes that money and marks it "off limits" to government. So government revenues drop and services decay.
I'd also add that our tax regime is incredibly unfair to labour, especially skilled labour. If you're a high-earning worker, you're taxed much more than someone who just lets their money accumulate through passive rent-seeking. If you wonder why Canada has a brain-drain issue, this is a good reason: it's more advantageous to be a landlord than it is to be a doctor, engineer or other highly-paid, highly skilled professional.