Zahlmeister

It all depends on your contract. Some contracts may put limits on rent increases in. Yes, in Germany there effectively is rent control that prevents a doubling of the rent within a year, but generally rents don't double within a year.

If those rent controls were good enough to satisfy the affected people, why are there protests and demands for additional laws for even more rent control in places like Berlin? Why is living in Munich so hard to afford? At what point does rent control start to "work"?

Rents don't go up proportionally, simply because the demand isn't there. During the US housing bubble, rents didn't go up either, while property prices went through the roof.

> Do you know nobody living cheaply with an old contract that they would never get today, and that their landlord can't increase to market rate? Cause I know loads such people and this would not happen in a place without rent controls.

That's because most contracts specify that increasing the rent follows the standard procedure: Over three years, rent can rise by up to 20% (15% in Berlin), if the comparable rents in the area have risen as well (which is influenced by market rate). Ultimately, this limits the pace at which rents rise, but not the extent. In Berlin, only very few areas could sustain such growth, whereas in places like Munich where people earn way more, rents have risen much higher.

This is also not the rent control specific to Berlin (which is what you originally referred to), these are federal regulations.

> Either way 15% in 3 years is still rent control.

...which affects very few people.

There are some places that suddenly became "hip", where rent increases drove out lots of low-income people, which caused political backlash. These people really just had to move to less popular places.

Rents in Berlin are a joke compared to London. You can actually get cheap and plentyful housing just outside the city, but then you'll need a car as well.

Not as cost-effective as simply picking the cherries from other countries. Plus, the risk is lower. That's my point. If you appeal to economics (or utility, whatever), follow through.

> Then don't..who is asking for that?

If we don't educate them or don't give them the means to do so, they have zero opportunity here, as opposed to slightly above zero.

> U.S. is a good example of shooting itself in the foot. Unles some special circumstances are allowed, no foreign software engineer can get hired in the US until Oct. 2018...

Which is exactly not my point. That is Trump's protectionism at work, not the idea that you pick the cherries from other countries (instead of letting them just flow in).

> "We should use force to not allow other people to move so I can have higher wages" -> how is this not oppression to you?

We're talking about people at the very bottom of pay, how much lower are their wages supposed to drop? I suppose that you believe in the magic of an idealized market, but in the real world there's real people there defending their interests. The same kind of people that will gladly elect populists, by the way. If you want to call that oppression, fine. What difference does it make?

> That you find a beggar unsightly is a problem to you, not the beggars problem,and you are welcome to try to fix it by donating.

The beggars problem is going to become the mob of people that will ask for them to be locked up and deported, in case they become too much of a nuisance.

Again, you're arguing too much like an idealist, which isn't really useful.

You'd end up paying 25$ for a coffee just so that the barista can afford their overpriced housing.

If you're just raising the cost of living, but not the standard, you're not gaining anything for anyone.

> The case for germany to still provide financial support is that is a huge long term benefit that is tax beneficial, especially for a country with demographic issues. My understanding is that there are reports that justify the tax investment.

If you want to make an utilitarian argument, then so can I: We could just let people apply through a visa process, and decide who to take in. Why should we spend the extra effort to educate all these people when we could just take those already educated in other countries? You know, just like the US does it. Also, there are lots of lower-income EU countries whose citizens have the right to be here. They're performing a lot of the work that they could lose to even cheaper immigrants from even poorer countries, if the laws allowed it. The pressure for unskilled labor is higher than ever.

> With free passage, you would not even know how many peope pass, and it would have a marginal cost to the state (and a much higher benefit!)

People aren't gonna pass forever, they're gonna settle. Right now, they're settling here. If we didn't pay them, they'd be forced to beg on the streets once they run out of travel money.

Obamacare is basically the worst of both worlds.

We effectively have "free" movement of people from Africa to Europe. Once they're ashore, we can't readily send them back. We also used to have movement from Iraq and Syria through Turkey, but that was curbed.

We took in about a million refugees and we did not manage to integrate well over 90%+ into any form of employment. We don't have jobs for these people. It has cost us about 20 billion in 2016, about 3% of taxes earned total, to support these people. We've managed to "oppress" the flow of refugees with unpopular measures. If we didn't, how many more people are we supposed to take in?

Sorry, but that's complete nonsense. The crime rate among immigrants (and their descendants) is much higher than among "ethnic" Germans. That means the typical German is less likely to engage in crime.

In absolute numbers of course, there are much more Germans than immigrants, so Germans commit more crimes total, as you would expect.

This topic is sensitive, so people just fling around with percentages and relative numbers until it appears to fit whatever narrative they would like to be true. It's not really helping convince anybody, everybody just keeps believing what they already believe.

Of course, the idea that Germany is now "riddled with crime" is just another Trumpism. Considering that we have a million refugees, the increase in crime is rather low and all the alarmism isn't justified.

If you look at crimes without a profit motive, things tend to even out or turn around. You'll rarely see an immigrant responsible for arson or property damage, for example. In absolute terms, most crimes (that are persecuted) are of course profit-driven and the most crimes occur in poor areas.