Vice President Kamala Harris has rolled out several initiatives as part of her housing plan. She wants to incentivize builders to create 3 million units of affordable housing and develop a $25,000 housing credit for first-time homebuyers. Harris’s housing goals have been widely dissected by the media, showing that the nationwide housing problem is top of mind for many people.
Harris believes that former president Trump has it all wrong when it comes to solving the housing crunch. In her Aug. 16,2024, political rally, she stated, “If his Project 2025 agenda is put into effect, it will add around $1,200 a year to the typical American mortgage. He’s got it backward. We should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home, not less.”
Privatizing anything will lead to higher prices.
The claim (which I think we should be comfortable calling a “lie” at this point) is that services provided by the government are almost inherently wasteful. Conservatives (it’s always conservatives) believe that civil servants (our neighbors) are overpaid and lazy. They believe that top level bureaucrats don’t have incentives for innovation and cost/waste minimization, and that top level executives in a for profit corporation do.
And the additional claim (“lie”) is that commercial profit incentives de facto lead to improved customer (citizen) outcomes.
However, I’ve never seen any long term data that supports ANY transition from public to private leading to either better innovation OR internal performance OR customer outcomes. I’ve also never seen data supporting the reverse (converse? inverse?) contention that nationalizing something corporate leads to worse innovation, performance, or outcomes.
Just for clarity I’m not looking for “data” from kleptocracies, oligarchies, military juntas, or other non free, non democratic, arguably non market based countries.
So basically only NATO, maybe EU, North America, Australia, Japan, South Korea… And I bet such data doesn’t exist (or exposes the lie).
South Korea and Japan shouldn’t be on that list. Corporate oligarchy in systems like the chaebols