Why is housing so expensive? Is it because of immigrants? Is it because of zoning laws? Or is it because of… Social Security and Medicare?
In this essay, I will advocate for a Bolshevik-style suspension of democracy in favor of Neo-Liberal Stalinism. Although 12,000 deranged Boomers may die in the ensuing riots, I will explain why this is morally justified using colorful graphs.
what does Social Security have to do with housing?
The number of completed homes on the market is right around the historical average of 100,000. The number of homes under construction is actually at the highest level since 2008. So what gives? Why is the price of housing so expensive?
Is it immigration? Immigration is increasing, and so are housing prices.
But take a look specifically at this data from Ireland. Between 2019 and 2020, 400,000 immigrants came in, but housing prices stayed the same. By contrast, between 2020 and 2021, immigration was slashed (due to COVID), but housing prices went up.
The idea that immigration (i.e. population growth) is responsible for the growth in housing prices is… frankly retarded. The American population is growing at a slower rate today than it was 10, 20, or 50 years ago — if housing prices were pegged to population growth, we should expect the lowest housing prices of all time!
Housing prices don’t care whether a person is white or Hispanic — all housing prices care about is demand. Hispanics have a larger household size than whites, so the average Hispanic actually places a smaller demand on housing (per capita) than the average white person — the Great Replacement should be crashing the housing market!1
Contrary to popular belief, over the long run, housing prices have little to do with population or immigration. Bangladesh or Rwanda, for example, don’t have higher home prices than Australia or Canada, despite having much denser populations. The long-term price of homes has nothing to do with population.2 Because the average Mexican immigrant is much more likely to work in construction than the average white American, we should expect the immigration of Mexicans to drive the cost of construction down, not up — that is, over the long run.
Over the short-run, however, mass immigration can increase housing prices, so long as the increase in population outstrips the speed at which new housing can be constructed. The immigration of Ukrainians to Poland since 2022 helps explain why Poland has seen the largest increase in housing prices in the EU.
But the countries most associated with mass immigration (France, Germany, Sweden) actually have seen a decrease in housing prices. This is because the market doesn’t care whether the demand is coming from Africans or Ukrainians — all the market sees is demand.3
Here in America, we are, in fact, already building a lot of housing. It might not be enough to meet demand, but it’s still at the highest level in 17 years.4
But maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t build enough, but that greedy landlords are hording all the housing for themselves? No true: vacancy rates are at all time lows.
Let’s go back to the example of Ireland. Ireland is experiencing mass immigration, and housing prices are also going up.
Here’s an Irish graph that also has a line going up:
It’s a graph of pensions. Why would increasing pensions contribute to increased housing prices?
While you think about that question for a second, here is a graph which might just make you a Neo-Liberal Stalinist:
As Moses Sternstein reports, “the olds have stolen our homes.” Or, in more technical terms, inventory has been artificially throttled, because
sellers had neither the need nor the inclination to realize the diminished value of their homes.
Boomers refuse to downsize when their kids move out, because Social Security and Medicare keep them afloat.
If old people were forced to pay their own way, then they would be forced to downsize after age 65. More Boomers would sell off their 3 or 4 bedroom McMansion to live in a 2-bedroom apartment. This would increase the supply of housing and drive down costs.
Neo-Liberal Stalinism
As everyone knows, I am an anti-elderly extremist. I hate the elderly for the wrinkles of the skin. However, I will attempt to suppress my blind bigoty and make a reasonable moderate centrist proposal:
Create a federal housing tax. It doesn’t need to be big, could be 0.1% of total home value. This is needed to establish home values at a federal level.
Adjust Social Security and Medicare (SSM) on the basis of home value.
By home value adjustment, I mean the following:
Home owners receive more SSM coverage if their homes are < $100,000.
Home owners with homes > $200,000 receive 0% SSM coverage.
Let’s say you are 66, and you need to go to the doctor. Assume that Medicare covers $500 for your visit or procedures. Under this new Neo-Stalinist regime, if you own a home worth $190,000, the coverage would be reduced to 10%, or $50.
By tying SSM to home values, elderly people would make a mass exodus from the housing market, leaving their McMansions behind for smaller apartments. Middle-class elderly people would need to flee the overpriced strip of I-95 and seek shelter in the plains of Kansas. This would massively decrease the price of single-family housing in the suburbs.
No genuinely poor people would be hurt by Neo-liberal Stalinism. Silent Generation rednecks out in the sticks live in trailers on an acre of land, and their home values are under $100k. Poor old people who live in trailer parks would benefit under this plan, because they would actually receive more than 100% of their current SS payments — up to 200% of what they currently receive.
A mobile home on a quarter acre in Kansas has a value of $50,000. If such a home owner receives SS checks totaling $21k per year, under my plan, that would increase to $32k per year.
I don’t want to punish poor elderly people. But 30% of Boomers are millionaires. Millionaires shouldn’t be receiving welfare from the government.
“It’s not free money! I paid for it!”
Every year, we pay taxes. I pay taxes; you pay taxes; we all pay taxes. The only people who doesn’t pay taxes are the poor.
Despite the fact that we pay taxes, we don’t get anything back directly for these taxes. Indirectly, we get many things: schools, police, firefighters, EMS, roads, hospitals, and scientific research.
But what if schools suck? What if police cower in fear while schools get shot up, because they are too busy arresting Asian prostitutes? What if female firefighters can’t carry your body out of the building and leave you to get roasted? What if hospitals suck because up to 58% of medical students cheat on their exams?5 What if the roads are full of potholes? What if the scientific research is for transgender shrimp running on treadmills?
The government is inefficient. It fails to deliver back to taxpayers the value of what it taxed. Government takes money with the promise of providing goods and services, but it never succeeds, either through incompetence or malevolence.
We all understand this. But when it comes to Social Security, people start giving me this bizarre argument: “but Social Security is earmarked for me, specifically, particular, especially! I paid in an exact amount, and I expect to get that exact amount back!”
Well, that’s not how Social Security works. No one has ever “received back the exact amount they paid in.” That has never happened. People receive back more if they live longer than average (>75), and less if they live shorter than average (<75). Social Security is not a pot of gold. It’s just another tax, like income tax, property tax, and sales tax.
Anyone who claims that Social Security is a “retirement account” is gullible and and easily scammed. I’m sorry if you got scammed by FDR 90 years ago, but such rubes do not deserve to be listened to when it comes to debating policy, because they are dumb.6
I don’t care about “fairness.”
Whenever you drive down the highway, there’s sometimes roadwork going on, and a bunch of orange cones on the road. Someone is paid, specifically, to put out those orange cones.
I knew that guy. He put out the orange cones, and got paid $20 an hour. After putting out the orange cones, he would sit in a truck for 8 hours, hanging out. If they needed to change the positioning of the cones, he would get out of the truck and spend a few minutes moving the cones around. He was paid $160 a day for maybe half an hour of labor. But it wasn’t the government paying him directly — no, it was a private construction company, contracted by the government. The government paid a bill that was probably much higher than $160 for the daily movement of those cones.
We, the taxpayers, all pay for that. We pay $160 for a guy to move some cones. Outrageous! I only want to pay $20! I want my money back!
No one cares.
The reason why no one cares is because highway construction is important, and the amount of money we spend on infrastructure is relatively small compared to Medicare and Social Security. If you think that government is bad and you want to shrink the size of government, you have to start with those programs. Those who claim that “it’s my money, and I want what I paid in!” don’t understand what taxes are. I have no sympathy for those emoting their own selfish desires rather than advocating for the interests of the country.
Old people are, in fact, destroying the country.
But what if old people riot?
Imagine what would happen if we canceled Social Security. Imagine if there were riots, worse than BLM.
Social Security costs $1.2 trillion per year. In comparison, the BLM riots caused $2 billion in damages. If we assume the majority of the damage took place over 10 days,7 that’s $200 million in damages per day. If there was non-stop rioting causing $200 million in damages per day for 365 days, that would still only come out to $73 billion — much less than the cost of Social Security.
In order to even come close to the yearly cost of Social Security, we would need riots 16.4x bigger than BLM to occur every single day for an entire year. On the worst day of BLM riots, there were 10,000 people protesting in DC, and 500,000 people around the country. 16.4x worse than peak-BLM would require 164,000 people protesting in DC, and 8.2 million around the country, every day all year long.
In reality, this isn’t really how riots work at a psychological level.
Riots follow a bell-curve of activity, with a quick build up, a peak, and then a sharp decline. The majority of BLM can be confined to 10 days — even though it seemed to drag on for months, this is when most of the damage was done.
Other riots are even shorter, as in the case of the January 6th riots, which took place over 5 hours, from 12:53pm to 5:40pm. One of the worst riots of all time, Direct Action Day, occurred from August 16th to August 22nd, 1946.
In general, riots do not last for months at a time, but generally fall apart after a few weeks (or result in a revolution which takes over the government). If Social Security rioters were to cause $1.2 trillion in damage, then those rioters would need to accomplish those damages in the span of 20 days or so.
Given these constraints, Social Security riots would need to be 600x more deadly than the BLM riots. This either means that rioters would need to employ 600x as much terrorism and intensity, or that they would require the involvement of 300 million Americans, at the same time.
Given that there are only 258 million adults in America, this kind of rioting is mathematically impossible. In order for Social Security riots to actually be worse than the cost of Social Security itself, it would require a full-blown Civil War. Assuming a death ratio of 10 people per billion in damages, such a conflict would result in the deaths of 12,000 people.
What if Boomers blow stuff up?
At most, 26 million people participated in the BLM riots, 7.6% of the population. Smaller estimates clock the total number at 15 million, closer to 4.4% of the population. But the number of rioters is less important than the type of rioters.
If 20,000 police officers in New York City rioted, meaning that they surrounded City Hall and began to shoot and throw Molotov cocktails at it, this would be equivalent to a full-blown Civil War. The quality of rioters matters.
BLM was largely made up of two types:
Selfish, unemployed, disorganized, individualistic looters, burning cars and stealing TVs;
Young, idealistic, college-educated leftists who wanted to show their support and yell at cops, without doing much else.
Boomer riots would be split into two types as well:
Harmless retirees who would hold up signs while sitting in mobility scooters;
Enraged Gen X psychopaths with guns who would go full Luigi Mangione in defense of their free money.
This is why some degree of Stalinism is necessary. Not because I want to create a command economy or a cult of personality or prepare for a war against Germany. But because potential Mangione vigilantes would need to be dealt with by declaring martial law and making an example out of them.
Peaceful protest is one thing, but anyone threatening to go 1776 or January 6th to defend their pensions deserves the Waco, Ruby Ridge, or Ashley Babbitt treatment. Only with that level of resolve can the parasites be stamped out.
Conclusion.
I do not want to hear about “immigrants stealing our jobs” or “greedy billionaires” or “sluts” or “incels.” I want to hear about what you’re going to do about Social Security and Medicare.
SSM allows older people to live in houses that are large and fancy. They live in these houses only because SSM enables them to.
Imagine a 66 year old retiree couple. They had four kids. One is a doctor, one is a lawyer, the other works at Starbucks, and the fourth is in and out of rehab. None of the kids live at home.
The house that they live in has six bedrooms. Six! It is worth $1 million. They don’t need it. But why sell, when the market only seems to go higher? It’s an investment, they say.
The housing market is stuck in a giant liquidity trap where the assets are not functioning as real goods, but as financial instruments of speculation.
We need neo-liberal Stalinism. We need to get these old people out of these houses.
It’s very simple: we kill the Batman take away their free money.
We all pay taxes, and the government steals our money and gives us subpar returns on “investment.” There is nothing special about Social Security, other than the fact that it is helping Boomers maintain the agist caste system.
The people who deserve free money are intelligent young people. Giving free money to intelligent young people (ages 25-45) has the greatest innovative return for society as a whole. Old people don’t create things. They consume. They Netflix and chill. They reminisce. They “go on cruises,” which means sitting on the deck of a large boat which floats between various sightseeing locations. They look. They observe. They take it all in. And they lecture young people, with their very wise brains, on how they deserve to do a 365-BLM-Holocaust on the federal budget. It’s very selfish.
Neo-liberal Stalinism is the only solution. The Social Security caste system is more corrupt and degenerate than anything that aristocrats in top hats and monocles have ever cooked up.
I’m no Luigi Mangione. Quite the opposite, actually. Hence the term “neo-liberal.”
Babies demand less housing than adults, and the average age of whites is older.
I mean the total population of the country, not urban density. Urban areas have higher prices because they are more desirable.
Another reason why Polish markets are booming is because they are receiving cash infusions from the EU.
I wanted to attempt to calculate exactly how many houses we should be building. However I’m not satisfied with the accuracy of my calculations so I’m sliding this part over the the footnotes. Maybe you guys can help give me some feedback on what improvements I could make to these estimates:
3.6 million babies are born in the USA every year. While child birth does create some pressure on the housing market (growing families need bigger houses) it would be a mistake to think that 3.6 million babies require the construction of 3.6 million new houses. Assuming that a house can fit 2.5 people, and we count a baby as 0.5 people (sorry pro-lifers), then for every five babies born, we need to construct an additional house. That means 3.6 million babies might result in the demand for 724,535 new housing units. (We could also calculate the number of people turning 38 every year, which is the average age of first time home buyers. This is 11.36 million; 54% live in single-family owner-occupied units (6.1 million); dividing by 2.5 gives us 2.45 million needed units.) However, this assumes that all mothers are living in small houses and need to move to new houses after giving birth: in reality, many mothers already live in large enough houses to accommodate children.
For the remaining 1.4 million, those are immigrants, some of whom are children who don’t need houses of their own. Assuming that immigrants have similar demographic profiles to the average American: This is not a perfectly accurate assumption, but I’m just trying to get some rough estimates here.) 78.3% of Americans are adults; 54% of people live in single-family owner-occupied homes; and household sizes are 2.5. This means that of the 1.4 million immigrants, 1.1 million are adults; 592,000 live in owner-occupied single family homes; and given a household size of 2.5, they need 237,000 new homes.
It would be discriminatory against shy wittle smol beans to require oral examinations.
Some percentage of taxation goes toward beneficial things, and some percentage goes toward waste, fraud, and welfare for bureaucrats. Optimistically, taxation has an efficiency rate of 50%, meaning that 50% of the value of the tax is ever received by the taxpayer.
For example, let’s say there is a pothole, and the government comes to patch it up. How much do you think it costs to pour asphalt into a pothole? How much do you think that the government paid to have that hole filled in?
BLM lasted from May to September, 4 months. But the riotous activity lasted less than 28 days. There’s an argument to be made that it only lasted 15 days. I’m overestimating the cost of riots here by suggesting that damage only took place over 10 days.
If we assume damages took place over 20 days, then the BLM riots only caused $100 million of damage per day, which would make Social Security 32x worse per day. If they took place over 40 days, then that’s $50 million per day, making Social Security 64x worse. I’m underselling the destruction of Social Security by playing up BLM here.
One simple policy that could solve many issues would be to turn old people into biodiesel. Add obese people to that roster (more fat = more fuel) and you could run a more efficient society. The energy produced would be a bonus to the benefit of eliminating groups that are largely drains of resources.
I am old and rich, and I am sympathetic with your arguments. We did downsize after our four children grew up and left home, so I've already complied with one of your requests. As I have said in the past, if I should reach a point where I would need extraordinary and expensive medical care to prolong my life, I would refuse it because I think such a practice places an unfair burden on younger people. I have always thought that Social Security was similar to a Ponzi scheme run by the government, and I would be happy to give up my monthly check if SS were dismantled.
Yes, I would give up my SS check, despite the fact that the government promised me retirement checks after paying SS tax over my entire working lifetime. I understand and agree that SS is not a savings account and that I should not expect to get back what I paid in taxes. My SS taxes were not sitting in an account earning interest; they were immediately used to pay people who were already retired, behold the Ponzi-like structure of Social Security. But I did have a a legal contract with the government, albeit one that was imposed upon me. I had no choice about paying SS taxes; failure to pay them would have meant fines and going to jail.
Even if the government defaulted on their promise to give me retirement checks, I would still be willing to give up my checks if the government would remove the unfair SS tax on everyone. "The government is inefficient. It fails to deliver back to taxpayers the value of what it taxed. Government takes money with the promise of providing goods and services, but it never succeeds, either through incompetence or malevolence." At best, the government might serve a useful protective function in the form of things like keeping hostile foreign powers at bay and enforcing laws that protect us from fraud, theft, aggression, unsafe work environments, pollution, and contaminated foods. In other words, I favor a libertarian-like approach to government although I quite the Libertarian Party after they invited Trump to their convention.