Linkage

In 2023, 27,408 dwellings (1.5% of all homes) were left totally empty over the year, and a further 70,453 (3.7% of all homes) were barely used.

[…]

Empty homes are widely dispersed across the city, but the fastest growth has been in the City of Melbourne, where 10,000 homes are now vacant – equivalent to half the new builds in this area over the last five years.

That many renters cannot afford to outbid the convenience value of an empty property speaks of deep inequality, the root cause of unaffordable housing.

But vacant homes also illustrate how housing supply is at the mercy of speculative incentives. Low interest rates and taxes that favour capital gains over rental income make it rational for some owners to choose the flexibility of an empty home over the cash it could yield.

In Australia, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the cost of tax breaks for the owners of multiple properties – including in particular negative gearing and capital gains tax rebates – will be more than $165 billion over the next decade. That’s almost half a million dollars for each of the 377,000 new dwellings the NSW government aims to build in the state under the National Housing Accord – deployable as a subsidy or used to build mass public housing outright with no net cost.

Ending these wealth-entrenching tax breaks would have other immense benefits as well. In particular, it would disincentivise housing-as-investment, thereby cooling the market and making purchase more possible for the young. At the same time, it would redirect massive investment funds towards industries that actually create goods.

Further, by reducing the incentive to land-bank, it would likely decrease vacancy rates. Of Australia’s roughly 10 million homes, 10 per cent were empty on the last census night. Prosper Australia estimates almost half of these vacant homes were “speculative vacancies”, deliberately kept empty or derelict.

Won't somebody think about the children? Well, in the face of certain poverty, at least all these kids won't be exposed to the vanishingly small risk of eventually regretting trans health care. F***ing hypocrites.

The Labour leadership has told you who it is, over and over again: it is time to believe it. Keir Starmer has suspended seven Labour MPs because they voted to overturn a Tory policy which imposes poverty on children. Sure, another tale will be spun: that by voting for the Scottish National party’s amendment to abolish the two-child benefit cap, the seven undermined the unity of the parliamentary Labour party and were duly disciplined. But that is nonsense.

[…]

It is hard to imagine Starmer is unaware of the fact that Osborne devised the policy to stoke public hostility towards and create a Victorian caricature of the undeserving, overbreeding poor. No decent society punishes children for choices they have not made and parents should not be punished for having more children. In Britain in 2024, kids turn up to schools with bowed legs and heart murmurs because of malnourishment, but a vast cost is also imposed on society as the scarring effect of poverty produces lasting lower productivity and employment levels.

Starmer knew this when he told the BBC almost exactly a year ago that he would retain this wicked Tory policy. He made the commitment to sound tough. Contrast with how he genuflects before powerful interests such as the Murdoch empire. By endorsing the two-child benefit cap, Starmer decided to gain partisan advantage, rather than fix an injustice afflicting his country. Party first, country second. Or rather, to be specific: playing politics with the lives of our most vulnerable children.

BIS statistics, compiled in cooperation with central banks and other national authorities, are designed to inform the analysis of international financial stability, monetary spillovers and global liquidity.

The BIS Data Portal is your entry point to global statistics. You can access a variety of tools and curated, statistical content for guided data and metadata exploration, quick data insights and efficient data export into multiple formats.

1. The Internet isn't complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internet's three virtues:
   1. No one owns it
   2. Everyone can use it
   3. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. 

[…] 

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. 

The Special Rapporteur recommends that:

• New initiatives be developed in order to bridge the worlds of corporate and government finance, housing, planning and human rights;
• Strategies be developed to achieve target 11.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda include a full range of taxation, regulatory and planning measures;
• Trade and investment treaties recognize the paramountcy of human rights, including the right to housing;
• Business and human rights guidelines, on a priority basis, be developed specifically for financial actors operating in the housing system;
• States review all laws and policies related to foreclosure, indebtedness and housing, to ensure consistency with the right to adequate housing;
• States ensure that courts, tribunals and human rights institutions recognize and apply the paramountcy of human rights; and
• International, regional and national human rights bodies devote more attention to the issue of financialization, and clarify it for States.
   

Since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last January, GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill have quietly added a wave of amendments to "must-pass" government funding bills that would ban federal money from being used for gender transition procedures such as hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery.

These riders vary widely in their scope and effect. Some target government health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Others would revoke insurance coverage for transgender government employees. Still others would bar federal funding for any institution that "promotes transgenderism".

Taken together, though, they would drastically curtail trans people’s access to medical care that advocates routinely describe as critical to their flourishing – much as the 1977 Hyde Amendment restricted abortion access in the wake of Roe v Wade.

A multibillion-dollar slate of moderate climate-mitigation measures in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has been met so far with general public approval. But a broader reaction to the historic federal action underlies the discourse: What took you so long?

A survey-based study published on Tuesday suggests that a shared delusion among nearly all Americans could contribute to the long delay in significant federal climate policy. Despite polls showing widespread concern about climate change and majority support for policies to mitigate it, the new study shows that Americans almost universally underestimate the extent of climate concern among their compatriots. They also underestimate the extent of public support—at the state and national level alike—for policy measures to address the climate emergency.

Distorted beliefs about support for climate policy, and about concerns over climate change in general, are so commonly held among the more than 6,000 American adults in the researchers’ nationally representative sample that the study’s authors call these misperceptions a “false social reality.” Recent polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 66 to 80 percent of people in the U.S. support major climate mitigation policies. But participants in the new study estimated that only between 37 and 43 percent do so. A range of 80 to 90 percent of those polled by the researchers underestimated the U.S. population’s climate concern and support for major climate mitigation policies.

Planet Money has obtained a secret government report outlining what once looked like a potential crisis: The possibility that the U.S. government might pay off its entire debt.

It sounds ridiculous today. But not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system.

[…]

The report is called "Life After Debt". It was written in the year 2000, when the U.S. was running a budget surplus, taking in more than it was spending every year. Economists were projecting that the entire national debt could be paid off by 2012.

This was seen in many ways as good thing. But it also posed risks. If the U.S. paid off its debt there would be no more U.S. Treasury bonds in the world.

"It was a huge issue ... for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy," says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration.