mactrey

Did rents in Palms go up because they built housing or because it's a great location in a city with increasing rent almost everywhere?

Or in other words, is there any econometric evidence that building housing increased rents in Palms, or could we be confusing correlation with causation?

Do you have an example?

Another factor is smaller households. People are staying single longer and waiting longer to move in with partners, creating more demand for housing even without population growth.

What are some of the many other, stronger criticisms of the abundance agenda? Maybe Thompson has replied to some of those, too.

> the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen

Do you have a source for this? Anecdotes along the lines of "they don't make 'em like they used to" are incredibly common but often fail to stand up to scrutiny.

And zoning restrictions are part of the reason why housing prices "always go up." Constrained supply is exactly and precisely what makes housing a profitable investment.

Usually I would agree, but the amount of distortion depends on what portion of DOGE savings are one-off (eliminating grants and contracts) and what portion are recurring annually (workforce reductions).

If DOGE savings are one-off then it would be fair to present alternatives according to their lifetime debt impact, since the presented DOGE numbers would already be "lifetime."

And TFA states "Please note: only grants and contracts posted on the doge.gov website with receipts are counted towards the total saving value. For this reason, the total savings value on the doge.gov website may appear larger, however due to the lack of supporting receipts, this value is unverifiable." So it looks like DOGE's recurring savings are (mostly?) not included here since they are undocumented.

Building housing lowers the cost of housing. Requiring some accounting of $ saved on brickwork -> $ spent on homelessness is just another bureaucratic hurdle, which is ironically exactly what TFA is complaining about.

Conflating free parking with a childhood core memory, a lake trip with your immigrant father, feels a little disingenuous to me. But I think you understand the core idea: by making something cheap or free, we incentivize the activity but we spend communal resources (tax dollars, or some rival good like space downtown, or space on a lake) to do so. But we as a society get to choose what to incentivize. Cars have externalities (traffic, the space they take up, pollution, their being required is expensive for working families) that other forms of transport don’t, so people are rethinking the various ways we incentivize driving.

It does wrap automatically if you keep typing. I agree the user experience is not great with that, the word you're typing should always be directly over the guide text.

As you note, no two dense neighborhoods are the same. Those experiences would be rare in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur. I would say that cultural norms dominate density when it comes to explaining late-night partying.

A car driver could easily eat the same amount of food as a walker, the extra calories would be stored as fat. This also ignores upfront CO2 output from assembling and delivering the car and increased CO2 output from maintaining car infrastructure vs. pedestrian infrastructure. Not to mention numerous other externalities.

They aren't comparable metrics. Revenue doesn't represent value added. I can sell a $20 bill for $20, my revenue is $20 but there is no impact on GDP (nothing has been created, no value has been added). Do that enough times and you too can have revenue equaling that of a small country.

Then yes, I’ll agree with that. Both can be difficult but valuing just the underlying land is harder.

No, you are wrong. The two cases are analogous. Under a LVT, if their tax goes up, it's because their land became more valuable. So when they sell they get more money. And under a LVT, if they spend money to build or improve a house, then they also get a benefit when they sell for a corresponding higher price. It's just that those improvements would not be reflected in a higher tax bill.