The Bernie Plan

This morning, I picked up the Bernie Sanders plan on housing.

The basic idea?  $2.5 trillion would be spent along two paths.  One path would be around $400 billion....which would involve two-million mixed-income social housing units.  He doesn't say the time period, but it's probably over ten years.

The second path?  $1.5-trillion (yes, with a T), over ten years, to build 7.4 million houses that he says in some way....will eliminate the gap in affordable housing for low-income folks.

So then he said the magic words....that Americans ought to have the fundamental right to "safe, decent, accessible, and affordable homes".

How this would be paid?  A new tax.....called the 'wealth tax'.  After looking at it....it'd likely only affect billionaires in the US....aiming at the top one-tenth of one-percent of folks. 

The problems with this idea?  I admit....it is a noble idea, and would appeal to low-wage people in a big way.  But lets be honest to ourselves in analyzing this.

First, this fundamental right for housing doesn't exist.  If you deem that it does exist, then why doesn't a fundamental right for affordable, safe, and nice cars exist?  Or how about a fundamental right to cheap and well-packaged cable TV?  Or how about a fundamental right for reasonably priced groceries?  Some druggies would say that meth ought to be a fundamental right, and it should be priced cheaper. 

Second, state by state, the landscape differs on low-wage people and their housing issues.  If you live in a highly urbanized area like Dallas or Portland, it's likely that you'd have these 'Bernie-units' built.  If you lived in Pulaski, Tennessee?  You probably don't have a need for the units.  So this would be a urban plan for the most part, and miss around 70-percent of the rest of the nation.

Third, if you built all of these, and within five years....then you had drug or crime elements in these Bernie-neighborhoods, so they were unsafe.....would you dump them and go build more elsewhere?  It's not really explained how you would make them 'safe'. 

Fourth, would some cities put up a fight and demand certain characteristics of the Bernie-housing, inflating the price by 30-to-50 percent?  This might be a federal program pushed 'downward', but one could see states and counties making rules which push the unit price upward in the end.

Fifth, on this wealth tax.....what if Congress 'accidentally' created little ripple-credits which brought some billionaires chances to save $20 million here and there, and suddenly it wasn't the ultra-wealthy paying for this, but the secondary group which weren't originally affected?  How would they react, and would they go to Congress and arrange tax rules to be altered for them as well?  It's been done in the past.....so there's no reason to think it wouldn't be done now.

Sixth....why the round number cited by Bernie in the speech of $2.5 trillion total?  It would be curious how he arrived at the numbers, and if it relates to something. 

Seventh and final....if you lived in Omaha, Nebraska and word came out that forty acres next to your house was going to be a Bernie-neighborhood.....would your attitude be positive or negative?  Would you assume it was a potential slum-neighborhood? 

I could see something like this working on a much smaller scale, and relating more to tax credits for low-income earners.  It does bother me that some people are designing their lives that at age eighteen....they are flipping burgers and making minimum wage.....while at age thirty, they are still in the burger flipping business, and around age forty-eight, they are still flipping burgers.  This attitude now is something that didn't exist in the 1960s and 1970s.....that you could be minimum wage for your entire life, and never progress beyond that point. 

Maybe Bernie ought to be packaging up one year of free community college, and jump-start people to improve their lives and avoid the low-income route for the bulk of their lives.