International To Fight Rising Rents, Berlin Considers Expropriating All Landlords With More Than 3000 Apt. Units

Too late, trap was set and he stepped into it. Ninja edits do not effect notifications if its originally posted with a reply in it so his argument held no water.

Unless you edited-in the quote. That's possible and I've done it myself when I realized I quoted the wrong person.
 
No.

One is a "feeling" the other is known "reality".

The natural state of humanity is poverty. We started with NOTHING. Everything we have is/was CREATED or OBTAINED from nature which requires someone, to do SOMETHING. Either to hunt for the food, to raise the food, or to create the food....it doesnt just magically appear.

Leftists are uneducated and go on what they "feel" should be reality.

Now before you comment again. Go read up on the event below, I will give a link as a STARTER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

The above is EXACTLY what will happen if what YOU are espousing to happen only in FAR FAR greater numbers...and that article does not even go into how many MILLIONS died in the famine that followed these events because the farms taken from the Kulaks were given to fuckwit idiots that did not know how to farm(which is why they were POOR) and not enough food was produced for the population for over a DECADE...the famine only ended when the population plummeted to match the little amount of food they could produce.

Equality does NOT mean equal OUTCOME. Get that into your leftist head.
What i dont understand is how they dont see setting a cap on net worth/assets/income is a slippery slope. Like Americans even on minimum wage are super rich compared to the average world citizen. Who is to say that one needs to make more than minimum wage as long as there is poverty in the world?
 
Unless you edited-in the quote. That's possible and I've done it myself when I realized I quoted the wrong person.

Only the quote in my post doesnt even have his name in it...

I was bitch slapping him around, as were others, on him using the word "stance" wrong when I made that post and he used it as a deflect from having to defend himself.

Why would I use someone else as the "quote" in a reply to him? I dont troll like that when I troll. I hit hard, directly and allow people to make themselves look bad and I get him every time because people that talk out their ass like he does end up doing it to themselves all the time.
 
What i dont understand is how they dont see setting a cap on net worth/assets/income is a slippery slope. Like Americans even on minimum wage are super rich compared to the average world citizen. Who is to say that one needs to make more than minimum wage as long as there is poverty in the world?

Because they are socialists and dont understand basic economics.

Also, that was not my point on minimum wage. World poverty actually has nothing to do with it.
 
Not even a 91% tax rate in America in the 1940s-50s did anything because the people passing those taxes created ways for only the RICH to get around paying them. You are a useful moron...to the rich...that use people like you to get more shit passed that makes them get richer.

I bet you are so STUPID you think that minimum wage laws hurt the rich and help the poor.

Oh really?


ceo-compensation-ratio-2016.png


You also conveniently ignored my mention of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws.

By the way, just because you double and triple down on your idiocy doesn't mean you have good arguments.
 
Only the quote in my post doesnt even have his name in it...

I was bitch slapping him around, as were others, on him using the word "stance" wrong when I made that post and he used it as a deflect from having to defend himself.

Why would I use someone else as the "quote" in a reply to him? I dont troll like that when I troll. I hit hard, directly and allow people to make themselves look bad and I get him every time because people that talk out their ass like he does end up doing it to themselves all the time.

Don't know, have a blast doing you man. All I did was point out that editing in a quote won't notify the person quoted. Don't care beyond that. Enjoy your day.
 
What i dont understand is how they dont see setting a cap on net worth/assets/income is a slippery slope. Like Americans even on minimum wage are super rich compared to the average world citizen. Who is to say that one needs to make more than minimum wage as long as there is poverty in the world?
Everything is a slippery slope. The fallacy is when people use it to suggest an unreasonable eventuality.

Like arguing that restricting assets at the upper end of the economic scale will eventually lead to someone saying that no one needs to make more than minimum wage.
 
What i dont understand is how they dont see setting a cap on net worth/assets/income is a slippery slope. Like Americans even on minimum wage are super rich compared to the average world citizen. Who is to say that one needs to make more than minimum wage as long as there is poverty in the world?

There has to be a line drawn somewhere as with all things in law and society. This is basically the same retarded argument right-wingers make when someone suggest raising the MW a dollar and they respond: "WHY NOT RAISE IT A BILLION TRILLION DOLLARS!!!!11OMG!!!!" as if they are in elementary school.
 
Oh really?

You also conveniently ignored my mention of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws.

By the way, just because you double and triple down on your idiocy doesn't mean you have good arguments.

That does not refute what I said...a CEO is one position and a mostly new one. Good luck trying to find a company before 1955 that had one and good luck finding a major company without one by 1975.

Wait...are you actually trying to argue that before in 1995 and the increase of CEO pay, that wealth was more evenly distributed?!? lol...seriously...why did you bring up CEOs?!?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-wealth-of-history-a-history-of-wealth-11553177721

World poverty rates have been dropping since 1820 and have been dropping fastest over the last 30 years.
90


https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...obal-poverty-is-at-its-lowest-rate-in-history

You sound poor, and stupid.
 
Here's a somewhat related story.

A friend (bit of a stretch) moved to Germany around 2010, bought an apartment complex, left his wife and as a settlement gave her a monthly share of the profits and a unit. Fast forward 5 years to the migrant crisis and all his units ard rented through the government to newcomers. Now I don't know exactly how many units he has but would guess just shy of 100. Now the dude is globetrotting with his new piece of ass and has properties in Spain as well while his ex is getting all the migrant dick she wants. A win-win for everyone involved. Migrants get ass and shelter, ex wife gets a healthy income and all the fun she wants, he gets to enjoy the fruits of his (shady) labour and the German government has a place to house its guests.

Just thought the WR could use a feel good story for once. :)
 
World poverty rates have been dropping since 1820 and have been dropping fastest over the last 30 years.
90


https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...obal-poverty-is-at-its-lowest-rate-in-history

You sound poor, and stupid.

Yeah where the poverty line is arbitrarily set at less than 2 dollars a day by the World Bank, so that third worlders slaving all day long in a slum for a little more than 1 buck are considered a success story of capitalism, it's a joke. Hickel has wrote extensively about this (in fact he wrote a great book about it ''The Divide''):

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/20...-poverty-is-worse-than-ever-before-in-history

This statistical manipulation produces grotesque contradictions:

''Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty. But note that the UN’s FAO says that 815 million people do not have enough calories to sustain even “minimal” human activity. 1.5 billion are food insecure, and do not have enough calories to sustain normal human activity. And 2.1 billion suffer from malnutrition. How can there be fewer poor people than hungry and malnourished people? If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity then it’s too low – period. It’s time for you and Gates to stop using it. Lifting people above this line doesn’t mean lifting them out of poverty, “extreme” or otherwise.

In fact, even the World Bank has repeatedly stated that the line is too low to be used in any but the poorest countries, and should not be used to inform policy. In response to the Atkinson Report on Global Poverty, they created updated poverty lines for lower middle income ($3.20/day) and upper middle income ($5.50/day) countries. At those lines, some 2.4 billion people are in poverty today – more than three times higher than you would have people believe.


But even these figures are not good enough. The USDA states that about $6.7/day is necessary for achieving basic nutrition. Peter Edwards argues that people need about $7.40 if they are to achieve normal human life expectancy. The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary to reduce infant mortality by a meaningful margin.''

This excerpt is even more damning in showing how disingenous and shameless they are in their statistical manipulation:

''But what’s really at stake here for you, as your letter reveals, is the free-market narrative that you have constructed. Your argument is that neoliberal capitalism is responsible for driving the most substantial gains against poverty. This claim is intellectually dishonest, and unsupported by facts. Here’s why: The vast majority of gains against poverty have happened in one region: East Asia. As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have long pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation). They liberalized, to be sure – but they did so gradually and on their own terms.

Not so for the rest of the global South. Indeed, these policy options were systematically denied to them, and destroyed where they already existed. From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed brutal structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive public resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion. In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty (to use your preferred method) increased, from 62% to 68%.''

 
Yeah where the poverty line is arbitrarily set at less than 2 dollars a day by the World Bank

No matter where it is set, it is decreasing you half-witted public school educated nitwit. It means there are more people, with more money.

The quantity does not matter. During these so called horrible times evil inequality, everyone has MORE than they EVER had before these end of days...lol...lack of education is a bitch.
 
Here's a somewhat related story.

A friend (bit of a stretch) moved to Germany around 2010, bought an apartment complex, left his wife and as a settlement gave her a monthly share of the profits and a unit. Fast forward 5 years to the migrant crisis and all his units ard rented through the government to newcomers. Now I don't know exactly how many units he has but would guess just shy of 100. Now the dude is globetrotting with his new piece of ass and has properties in Spain as well while his ex is getting all the migrant dick she wants. A win-win for everyone involved. Migrants get ass and shelter, ex wife gets a healthy income and all the fun she wants, he gets to enjoy the fruits of his (shady) labour and the German government has a place to house its guests.

Just thought the WR could use a feel good story for once. :)

I always wonder how people get money to buy entire apartment complexes
 
Everything is a slippery slope. The fallacy is when people use it to suggest an unreasonable eventuality.

Like arguing that restricting assets at the upper end of the economic scale will eventually lead to someone saying that no one needs to make more than minimum wage.

If you do not see how setting a max cap on the tippey top 1%'s assets cannot be expanded to the top 5%, and then further, you have a lot more faith in government than me.

A minimum wage earner in America is in the top 15% of the entire world. Do you really need to be so much richer than the rest of the world?
 
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I always wonder how people get money to buy entire apartment complexes
There was a crazy building boom going on here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada that he took advantage of. He worked for builders and developers as a painting contractor and managed to acquire huge contracrs. Coupled with good business sense, buying properties at the right time and liquidating assets at the perfect time he made millions in a short time. Didn't hurt that he, like many successful business folks wasn't quite fair in his dealings and cut every corner possible. Then he bought his building in Germany just before the migrant crisis. Dude has an excellent head for business including a sense of who he could take advantage of at what time. I've known him for almost 30 years (fellow Hungarian immigrant to Canada) but never got involved in any business dealings with him.
 
Here's a somewhat related story.

A friend (bit of a stretch) moved to Germany around 2010, bought an apartment complex, left his wife and as a settlement gave her a monthly share of the profits and a unit. Fast forward 5 years to the migrant crisis and all his units ard rented through the government to newcomers. Now I don't know exactly how many units he has but would guess just shy of 100. Now the dude is globetrotting with his new piece of ass and has properties in Spain as well while his ex is getting all the migrant dick she wants. A win-win for everyone involved. Migrants get ass and shelter, ex wife gets a healthy income and all the fun she wants, he gets to enjoy the fruits of his (shady) labour and the German government has a place to house its guests.

Just thought the WR could use a feel good story for once. :)

Damn, that's 3 happy endings in a single story.

Haven't seen that kind of action since the college days!
 
In Berlin, Socialism Is Suddenly Hot Again
The city’s housing crisis is driving residents to consider left-wing solutions.
By Anna Sauerbrey | July 8, 2019

merlin_157520388_7ab8f7e4-daf8-470f-9f07-230988dc0370-superJumbo.jpg

BERLIN — Is this city, the former capital of communist East Germany, returning to socialism, this time in both parts of the once divided city? From the tenor of the increasingly anxious debate around Berlin’s housing crisis, it certainly seems so: On June 14, activists handed the Berlin Senate a petition with 77,000 signatures calling for the local government to take over the large companies that control a major portion of the city’s housing stock, the first step toward a public referendum on the proposal. A few days later, the Senate advanced a separate proposal that would put a complete halt to rent increases for five years.

Housing is a big problem in cities worldwide, but few cities in Europe have it quite as bad as Berlin. Every year the city adds between 40,000 to 50,000 people, on top of a population of 3.6 million. Housing construction can’t keep up; as a result, rents on new apartments have gone up 50 percent in the last five years.

The rising cost of living is not unique to Berlin. Many people across Germany pay the largest chunk of their income for housing. Add to that the fact that Germany is a nation of tenants. Almost 60 percent of households rent their homes. All of this makes the rising cost of living an existential problem for many, one that is driving many Germans to consider radical solutions.

I’ve experienced this rapid shift firsthand. When I moved to the city a decade ago as a newspaper trainee, I found an apartment in the trendy neighborhood of Kreuzberg. My apartment was a dream: Located in an old, spacious building, it was close to a park, shops and restaurants. It was small — about 65 square meters, or about 700 square feet — but it was cheap, about 560 euros, or $650. Even though I was not exactly rich, I felt at ease financially. I could afford to dine out and take vacations.

A few years later, when my husband and I knew we wanted a child, we decided we would like to rent or buy a house with a garden — but by then rents and home prices had risen so high, so quickly, that even though we were both working, we couldn’t afford conventional rent on a larger place in the central city, let alone afford to buy one. Instead we joined a building cooperative, a group of 30 families who had acquired a patch of land just outside central Berlin. We jointly financed the development of several townhouses and apartments around a courtyard.

We were lucky — not everyone can afford to join such a development (or find an amenable group of like-minded people to join with). Such cooperatives are appealing, though hardly a citywide solution. But for us, for a time, it felt as if we’d found a life raft.

Then last year, my husband and I split up, and I found myself back on the overheated Berlin housing market. I had a comfortable income by then, and yet, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure whether I could make ends meet, whether I could find a place that would satisfy my logistical needs (close to my work, close to our kindergarten, and so on) and my budget. I ended up with a one-bedroom apartment that met my needs, at almost the exactly same size as my first place, but double the price.

Still, I feel lucky — there are so few places in the city available at any price, and many people, even middle- or upper-middle-class people like me, end up moving far away and enduring long commutes. But because I’m renting, I also don’t feel secure: What will my rent be in a few years? And what will I do when my son needs a room of his own?

I can only dimly imagine what it must feel like for the many retirees, single parents, unskilled workers and lower-middle-class families who still make up the largest part of Berlin’s population and cannot resort to building cooperatives. The market has created fear, and fear has created anger.

So far, this anger has focused on the property owners, in particular on the company Deutsche Wohnen, which controls 160,000 apartments nationwide — 110,000 of them in Berlin alone. In 2018 it reported a net profit of 1.8 billion euros, or $2.3 billion. But Deutsche Wohnen isn’t alone; Berlin’s hot property market has attracted global investors. An investigation by my newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, recently revealed that a single British family bought thousands of apartments in the city, using a web of shell corporations, some located offshore, to minimize taxes.

Berlin, as well as the German federal government, has experimented with “rent brakes” — various regulatory devices to slow or halt rising rents — but with little success. Which is how we got to the radical yet widely popular idea of having the city government simply take over companies like Deutsche Wohnen.

There are many objections to this so-called expropriation initiative. It is uncertain whether it would survive judicial scrutiny, and even if it did, the city would have to compensate the owners, spending money it could otherwise use to build new housing. Yet around 40 percent of Berliners say they approve of the idea, according to one survey.

The Berlin Senate’s plan, the five-year cap on rent hikes, came in response to the expropriation petition, and it is almost as radical — however just it might seem, it would throw the market into chaos. Deutsche Wohnen is publicly traded, and its stock is considered so safe that some small investors hold shares to fund their retirement. After the Senate announced its plan, the company’s stock plummeted

What’s more, the cap would apply equally to big companies and individual building owners, thousands of whom make a small but reliable livelihood from rents. The same for state-owned companies and cooperatives, who collect rents but put their profits back into the community.

And there was one particularly perverse outcome: Associations that represent property owners encouraged their members to raise rents immediately, while they still could; some did, sending out notices to shocked tenants. Experts also warn that although the cap might ease market pressure on tenants momentarily, it would lead to owners taking apartments off the regular market, transforming them into furnished flats rented out for the short term, for example.

So what’s the right answer? Building new housing should be a priority. Because Berlin’s government is exceedingly complex (among other things, it is both a city and a federal state, with 12 largely autonomous boroughs), and it can’t be counted on to move quickly itself — so private initiative is necessary. Therefore, rather than stigmatizing big housing companies, the city should cut a deal that benefits both sides — for example, by requiring a significant portion of apartments at fixed and subsidized rates.

In fact, the chief executive of Deutsche Wohnen, Michael Zahn, recently offered a similar plan. On June 22, he published a paper that reads like a truce: It includes a proposal to raise rents on a sliding scale based on tenants’ income, along with quotas for low-income families in new apartments. Mr. Zahn explained his plan as a voluntary commitment by the company — which would not be enough. The market does need regulation. Still, it could be a way of restarting the conversation in a debate that has turned to unrealistic, socialist ideas, and it could be a lesson on how radical ideas can fundamentally change a political debate.

The day the Berlin Senate announced the cap plan, I called Rouzbeh Taheri, the activist behind the expropriation initiative. I asked how he felt about his proposal being upstaged by the Senate. A professional campaigner with a long history of activism, he sounded quite content. Though the cap would be insufficient in the long run, he said, he viewed his effort as a success: “Without our initiative, it wouldn’t have come this quickly and neither this radically. We wanted to shift the discourse — and we have reached that goal.”

He is probably right. The expropriation initiative created an extreme but real policy option. As a consequence, the Berlin Senate felt forced to move toward a more radical solution, too. And not long after, one of the largest housing companies in Germany felt it had to come up with its own compromise in response.

Cities, like capitalist societies, are living organisms. They grow and change — that’s what’s so fantastic and so horrific about them. To citizens, as well as consumers, cities and capitalism are inspiring and exhausting at the same time.

That’s why this most recent episode in Berlin’s housing saga is so nerve-racking, and so exciting. The crisis is untenable, but so is the idea of capping rents across the board, or having the state take over a large swath of the housing market. Berlin knows firsthand that socialism does not work. But maybe this time, by forcing all the stakeholders to pay attention, socialism will end up saving Berlin after all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/opinion/berlin-socialism-housing.html
 
You are too successful, fuck you


Places that playcate to special interest groups, lose their brains to other countries that aren’t retarded
Or they don't want a highly stratified society where a tiny % own everything. Germans, like the Japanese, strike me as putting long term national and societal interest over short term gains. As far as Western economies go, America is a country where the highest ideal is for individual wealth accrument, with societal welfare being secondary. Our corperations are always thinking about quarterly statements , so you get mass outsourcing.

One of the attractions Trump had in 2016 was his criticism of outsourcing, and how it has been bad for America. Trump supporters are in favor of economic nationalism, which runs counter to Corperations' interests. If the grass roots right liked Trump's economic nationalism and criticism of outsourcing , because it has hurt working and middle class Americans, then why would anyone on the Right be critical of this idea by the German government? They both seek to strength society by putting curbs on just how far the super wealthy can go to make money.
 
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