alt Hacker News> Legal protection and structural advantages for landlord interests over tenant interests.
Rent control is not in the landlord's business. In Seattle, the other legislation against landlords is pushing them out of business.
> Pushing the tax burden for upkeeping society off people who own more shit than any of us ever will onto people who have to work for a living.
1% pay 40% of the federal income tax.
Google [percent of federal government spending spent on wealth redistribution] says: "A significant portion of U.S. federal spending, around 60-70%, goes to social insurance and safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Income Security, which function as wealth redistribution by supporting retirees, the needy, and vulnerable populations, though the exact "wealth redistribution" percentage varies by definition but centers on these large mandatory spending categories. In FY 2024, Social Security and Medicare alone were 36% of the budget, with Income Security adding another ~9-10%."
> Legal protection and structural advantages for employer interests over employee interests vis a vis wage theft, worker safety, worker injuries, etc.
The legal advantage again is for the employee. For example, wage theft is illegal and is aggressively prosecuted.
> Rent control is not in the landlord's business... Seattle... Landlords going out of business...
And you immediately demonstrate why having a conversation with you on this subject is pointless.
There's a million different dimensions in which the problem that I've pointed at manifests. But what you do is you cherry-pick one particular dimension of it in one particular municipality in one particular time period[1], claim that that dimension is (allegedly) biased in the other direction, and thus you reach the universal conclusion that clearly landlords are the real victims[2], and you can just sweep the entire issue off the table.
I don't have enough words to describe how incurious and chock-full-of-fallacies this kind of thinking is.
You already know everything that you feel you need to, and there's nothing more that needs to be said. It's like you have found the number 2, and conclude that therefore, most numbers are even primes.
---
[1] Actually, you don't do even that. You just vaguely wave your hands in its direction.
[2] Kind of weird that the market values their real estate to be worth twice what it was a decade ago if they are getting such a raw deal. I'm sure PE is snapping up rental properties because they are money-losing investments, too. After all, serious people who have done the math and are putting billions of dollars into this (and are reaping profits on their investments hand-over-fist) must all be too stupid to understand just how awful renting out property is.