Linkage

Using super for housing would make homes more expensive, hinder the home ownership aspirations of young Australians, reduce retirement incomes, and lead to a significant long-term cost to the Budget, a Corinna Economic Advisory report authored by Saul Eslake has found.  

In an independent report, commissioned by the Super Members Council, Mr Eslake charts how a long list of demand-side Australian housing policies over several decades have simply made homes more expensive.  

He warns super for a house would be the worst of all.  

“We have 60 years of history, which unambiguously tells us, anything that allows Australians to pay more for housing than they otherwise could leads to more expensive housing and not more homeowners,” he said.

“Of all the demand-fuelling housing policies, the Coalition’s super for housing policy would be the biggest – it can only lead to higher prices.”  

“If super for house was introduced, it would be one of the worst public policy decisions in the last six decades.”

Mr Eslake said the decline in home ownership rates could undermine a key assumption in Australia’s retirement system – that most retirees will own their own home – and noted the need to expand housing supply.  

However, the Coalition’s ‘Super Home Buyer Scheme’ under which people would be allowed to withdraw up to 40% of their superannuation savings up to a maximum of $50,000, would likely hinder home ownership aspirations for younger Australians.

Full report here.

Today New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota senator Tina Smith have introduced new national legislation that, if passed and funded, would go a long way toward making real the social housing revolution.

The Homes Act of 2024 would create a Housing Development Authority (HDA) for the entire country. Housed under the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency but operating autonomously, the HDA’s sole mission would be to build, buy, renovate, and operate social housing, which it defines as housing with public, nonprofit, or resident ownership; permanent protections and affordability; community control; and deep sustainability and accessibility. It would be governed by a board that includes not only expert appointees in housing and the environment but also its residents and members of the unions that build and support it.

The HDA would be a flexible vehicle, modeled after a 2020 Urban Democracy Lab report entitled “The SHDA — A Proposal.” It could build social housing itself; it could buy anti-social housing and convert it into social housing, then operate it itself or pass it on to tenant, labor, or community groups; it could finance social housing projects operated by state and municipal housing agencies or Public Housing Authorities; or it could finance social housing projects initiated by tenant, labor, and community organizations or by Community Land Trusts.

ACOSS (the Australian Council of Social Service) has partnered with UNSW Sydney to undertake a research and impact collaboration to sharpen the national focus on poverty and inequality in Australia. The partnership monitors trends in poverty and inequality over time, explores drivers, and develops solutions to sharpen the focus and stimulate action to tackle these policy challenges.

What do housing, transit and lifestyle statistics have to do with loneliness and unhappiness, you might ask. Well, I don’t think it’s a reach to suggest that separating people physically also leads to emotional and psychological separation. Moreover, the implements that make sprawl-induced physical separation work on a societal level — cars to contract long distances and digital media to ameliorate the effects of social isolation — deepen loneliness and unhappiness on the personal level. These implements also make people sedentary, directly relating to the fact that 73% of the total American population is overweight and 42% is obese, per the CDC.

One of the biggest issues is population density. At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s a lot harder to socially isolate when there are people around you.

Andrew Dunlop runs cattle on his property in southern New South Wales and has spent his career working in the red meat industry, including 15 years in Japan.

Last month, he returned to Japan to find Australian cubed beef for sale at $18.35 a kilogram, around $2 to $4 a kilo cheaper than in major Australian supermarkets.

[…]

Mr Dunlop says it's another sign of concentrated supermarket power and increased profit margins from supermarkets.

"The Japanese retail industry is not concentrated like it is here," he said.

"Any individual retailer in Japan probably has at most a 10 per cent share of the market, although there will be some regional differences."

John Gunthorpe, chair of the Australian Cattle Industry Council, said Australian meat was well trimmed and presented without much fat or sinew.

"The prices and the quality of presentation of the meat are far better than anything that we get here in Australia," he said.

Pressed on whether it was a fair comparison to the beef in Australian supermarkets, Mr Gunthorpe said it was.

"It's beef off the same farms," he said.

"The real concern is the level of profit that Coles and Woolies are making in the domestic market relative to the profit that's being made by the Japanese in Tokyo."

Using a nationwide online survey (N = 534), we investigate how individual-level characteristics and past actions are related to support of affordable housing at the neighborhood level. Several demographic characteristics, past actions, federal government trust, personal exposure, racism (symbolic racism scale), and affect (emotional connotation) are found to be significant predictors of support. We provide evidence for racism and affect being mediating factors acting in series to shape support of affordable housing. In addition to racism, individuals’ affect can potentially help explain the shift from support of hypothetical scenarios to opposition of real affordable housing development proposals and warrants continued study.

The World Income Inequality Database (WIID) presents information on income inequality for most countries and historical entities. It provides the most comprehensive set of income inequality statistics available and can be downloaded for free. ​

This page hosts the latest version of WIID, but also the WIID Companion datasets which report standardized WIID data to create more comparable country level inequality series, inequality indices, and complete country and global income distributions for the longest periods possible. The WIID Companion datasets are directly accessible in real time through our WIID Explorer, a powerful tool for accessing and analysing the most comprehensive collection of comparable income inequality statistics in the world.

The World Inequality Database (WID) aims to provide open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries.

Rabbi Danya is fast becoming one of my favourite believers, and this story is just bonkers but also ultimately very, very serious:

Some of you may remember that back in Leviticus, we talked about how you had to be in a special kind of– oh, energetic/ spiritual state (?) – when you went to the Temple. Various things– like contracting certain diseases, emitting semen, menstruating, experiencing pregnancy endings, coming in contact with a corpse, etc. – put you in the "everyday state" (that is, made you tameh). Depending on what it was that made you tameh, different things might need to happen to get you back into that Temple-ready "elevated state," (make you tahor). Some of these required waiting a certain amount of time (eg, waiting a week after the onset of menses), some required washing in water at the end of a prescribed time, some necessitated getting sign-off from a priest, and then there's this:

"God spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: This is the ritual law that God has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid...." (Numbers 19:1-2)

[…]

So for the people who want to rebuild the Third Temple, this becomes an issue. 

You can't very well restart animal sacrifice in God's House if you're tameh, dig?

Needless to say, this issue is far from theoretical. 

There are various extremist Jewish and Christian (and Jewish and Christian, together) groups working to rebuild the Third Temple, each for their own aims; an unholy alliance between extremist far-right members of the Israeli government and those with powerful American political sway.

On the Christian side, well, here's how Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, sometimes called sometimes the father of contemporary Christian Zionism, once put it:

“I am one of those who believe that the next event on God’s calendar is the rapture of the Church—the coming of Christ to take the Church to itself. I believe there will be a seven-year tribulation period. It is during that time that the new Temple will be built. And I believe that, at the end of the seven years of tribulation, the battle of Armageddon will transpire and the establishment of the one-thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth will begin.”

[…]

In September, 2022, five unblemished Red Heifers were shipped (First Class!) from Texas to, ultimately, the West Bank Israeli settlement of Shiloh.

This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report finds that the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” blew $522 billion over the past five years on stock buybacks. Nearly half of these companies spent more on this once-illegal financial maneuver than they spent on capital investment vital to long-term competitiveness.

Why the fixation on buybacks? This is a CEO pay-inflating financial scam, pure and simple. When companies repurchase their own shares, they artificially boost share prices and the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80 percent of CEO pay. An SEC investigation confirmed that CEOs regularly time the sale of their personal stock holdings to cash in on the price surge that typically follows a buyback announcement.