Monday 3 February 2014

Fun Online Poll: The People Have Spoken

I'm shutting the Poll after a week, results as follows:

For a given size of an economy, which would you choose:

High house prices, low wages - 4% (24 votes)
High wages, low house prices - 96% (553 votes)


So now we know.

It's just a question of explaining that this is easily achieved by turning back the clock fifty years or so to the last time we had low stable house prices, and before the share of wages after tax and rent/mortgage payments started their long and slow decline.

It's not difficult - the UK government used to have a four-pronged attack:
- plenty of new construction, for private sale as well as relatively easily available council housing,
- rent controls and high taxes on private landlords,
- sensible regulation of building societies, strict lending multiples, and
- last but not least, instead of VAT on the productive economy there was Domestic Rates and Schedule A taxation on housing.

No comments:

Post a Comment