Thursday, Jun 10, 2010
My favourite term "Homeownerist" is becoming ever more widely used...
Spiked Online: Letters To The Editor
"The reason why we cannot seem to build the infrastructure which the UK needs is because it would be political suicide. The unemployed and low-paid workers who would benefit from the prospects offered by more development are outnumbered at the ballot box (especially in marginal constituencies) by NIMBY ‘homeownerists’ hell-bent on keeping the prices of their own houses high, no matter how much damage this does to the country as a whole. Both Thatcher and Blair pandered to the homeownerists at the expense of the real economy. Any political strategy to solve Britain’s bad infrastructure will have to break the power of the homeownerists – any suggestions? George Carty, UK" (and yes, I have plenty of suggestions).
Posted by mark wadsworth @ 10:34 AM (1013 views) Add Comment
18 Comments
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1. i remember the 90`s said...
I`m a home owner and high house prices are the last thing i want ,after all i intend to live in it till i perish so what good does high valve make to me ,i want my next generation and their generation to be able to afford a house end of.
2. powerofnow said...
I agree, but it's not just unaffordability of housing caused by high house (land) prices... it impacts on increased business rates and rents, consumer prices, bus fairs for everyone.
3. mark wadsworth said...
@ IRT90S, that's why I personally spell it "Home-Owner-Ist" with the extra capital letters, to make it clear that they are quite distinct from normal "homeowners".
Everybody has to live somewhere, and wanting to 'own' your own home is perfectly natural - whether a landlord 'owns' it and rents it to you, or whether you 'own' it and rent it to yourself is a minor issue.
4. mark wadsworth said...
@ PON, Business Rates are just about the least-bad tax that we have in the UK, being very similar to Land Value Tax.
The other least-bad tax is fuel duties, which is like LVT for roads (the road user pays for VALUE of roads he uses, which far exceeds the COST of building, repairing and policing them, hey presto, everybody wins, if we cut fuel duties, then roads would be full of traffic jams and other Bad Taxes would have to go up to compensate).
5. powerofnow said...
MW: Business Rates are just about the least-bad tax that we have in the UK, being very similar to Land Value Tax.
I agree but where land prices are overvalued significantly due to second home hotspots, 'normal' independent businesses struggle to function due to crippling levels of what I agree is an otherwise reasonable tax.
[dawn curfews]
6. the number cruncher said...
MW @ 4
You have fallen into a common trap of the winging car owner, there are a lot more externalities to road traffic than the ones you mention and I doubt Fuel duty covers them all, you populist you!
But I agree with you sentiments that Business rates and Fuel Duty are the models of how tax should work in addition to LVT.
7. george monsoon said...
oh my god is this site still runnning?
8. mark wadsworth said...
@ TNC, what makes you think I am a "whingeing car owner"? Sure, there are externalities - THE BULK OF WHICH are borne by motorists, lorry drivers, bus passengers (i.e. traffic jams and delays). The IPCC report thingy said that the pollution cost externality is about 8 pence per litre (as against fuel duty plus VAT per litre of 60 pence, or whatever it currently is).
Total fuel duties + VAT on top, vehicle licence etc well in excess of £40 billion per annum. Cost of maintaing roads about £10 billion. That leaves £30 billion state surplus = £500 per person, or a third of the NHS budget, or £10,000,000 per road fatality per year (the vast bulk of which are self-inflicted, i.e. where a drink driver crashes into a tree).
Like I said, fuel duties are a least-bad tax.
9. powerofnow said...
nothing to add but capcha = outlet transportation
spooky
10. tenant super said...
IRT90s@1
My father says the same thing about house prices. He doesn't want his house to be worth silly sum; he wants prices to drop so he can get rid of the 2 kidults at home. A survey in 2008 showed more people wanted house prices to fall (28%) than wanted them to rise (22%) with half either indifferent or wanting them to remain static.
Is the home-owner-ist movement really the power of a little over a fifth of the population? Or is that people lie and say they want prices to fall because they know this is the intelligent thing to say? Or maybe, people do want prices to fall but not theirs.
11. mark wadsworth said...
TS, the HO movement is a coalition of people with second and third homes (most MPs); people slipping into nequity; bankers and mortgage brokers and other sharks; NIMBYs; leveraged BTL landlords; upmarket estate agents; people at most newspapers (honourably exception, The Grauniad) who love writing about property because it gets the advertising revenues in (The Graun live off public sector advertising, which is just as bad, but hey); etc etc.
Apart from the NIMBYs, these make up less than ten per cent of the population, but once you add in NIMBYs, all of a sudden you've got a handsome majority. And the NIMBYs always say "we're not doing this to drive up prices, we're doing it to preserve the character of the area and/or for food security".
12. the number cruncher said...
MW @ 8
the externalities of road traffic are colossal and far more than your cherry picked stats, but I recognise entirely that the taxes we pay are not going into mitigating for the externalities.
The effect of society through noise and Children not being able to play in the street - that's more than £500 per person per year straight off, if you wanted to mitigate the effect
On average it cost nearly 1.7 million to deal with each fatality, 190,000 to deal with each serious accident and 23,000 to deal with slight causalities. A total of 2,341 fatal accidents, 23,121 serious accidents and 145,129 slight accidents were reported in 2008. So that 7.75 billion just for personal injury and fatality. 2008 figures
Then we have pollution, IPPC is just one aspect of pollution, what about the effect of pollution on wildlife, agriculture and human health - and not just the pollution in the UK but all of the pollution associated with extraction and transport - that vast bulk is never recognised or mitigated against as we are seeing currently. How much would it cost to mitigate for every oil spill for to restore marine wildlife back to its original condition?
Then we would need a Land Value tax for all the roads and public space roads take up to mitigate that.
Then there is the geopolitical externalities, such as war and resource monopolisation, I would hate to try and account for its cost. How much to fix Iraq? How much have we inflicted on the countries with oil.
Do not get me wrong, motor vehicles are great for society, but we are not paying the proper cost for their use, and the shortfall in externalities is going straight into the pockets of the monopolists who control oil production and distribution and the Government to offset other taxes which should be levied.
13. rumble said...
George Monsoon, lol. Your annual check up?
Number Cruncher, I feel I must have missed something - £1.7 mil to deal with a fatal car accident?! How on earth?
"spaniard shaking"
14. mark wadsworth said...
TNC: "So that 7.75 billion just for personal injury and fatality."
OK, that's a quarter of the surplus from fuel duties used up.
But I don't cherry pick, I do facts and logic. Sure, emissions from traffic can have an adverse affect on health, but the fact that we are allowed to use lorries, cars and buses makes a massive contribution to our overall wealth, and that wealth enable us to pay for better healthcare, so I am sure that the winners outweigh the losers.
As to 'kids playing in the street', that's why we need bigger back gardens and more importantly, more public parks.
For every single 'external cost' you can throw at me, I can name an equal and opposite benefit to society: As a thought experiment, let's imagine we banned cars and lorries and buses. Do you think that overall we would be wealthier, healthier and happier?
15. the number cruncher said...
Sorry to have a go MW, but as you can tell the externalities of fossil fuel use is one of my sore points.
I like your logic Mark, in fact a lot of it is brilliant, but you fall down in your analysis as you are a bit too much of a reductionist and that does not always give a good basis for policy making. "Truth is seldom plain and never simple." You also committed the statistical sin of giving alternative to the whole of the sum of the possible externalities instead of listing them as additional items.
When you start adding up all the externalities the fuel duty is not an unjust tax at all. I personally think it should be at least doubled if not trippled .
I fully recognise the enormous benefits transport brings to societies, that's not the point. What is the point is that we have a responsibility to use the earth's finite resources carefully, we are after all spending the capital of the earth and robbing our descendants of that wealth. Also the pollution we cause has huge and far reaching intergenerational effects that are far beyond our ability at present to quantify them.
16. the number cruncher said...
rumble at 13 - google it - the stats are widely discussed and available, with very detailed breakdowns etc. This is due to the interest of the insurance industry and government policy making.
17. Gcarty said...
As the original author of that comment on Spiked, I'm now wondering if greed isn't the main motivation for NIMBYism?
Is residential development at too low a density (in the UK this is mainly due to Design Bulletin 32) also to blame, by using land inefficiently and increasing concerns about "concreting over the countryside"?
18. Gcarty said...
And when I wrote of "breaking the power of the Home-Owner-Ists", what I meant was "if the government introduces LVT (or any other anti-Home-Owner-Ist policy), how do we make sure the Home-Owner-Ists can't just get their revenge at the next election?"