Author here. I'm definitely not advocating going without health insurance. Just running simple numbers to get some perspective.
I'd like to see health insurance act like insurance again though. Right now it covers absolutely everything, meaning it's more like pre-payment for routine care + insurance.
Insurance isn't for routine, predictable, or low-cost expenses. But we've mandated that our health insurance cover all of those things.
The comparison to car insurance is overused, but it's a good one. Catastrophic coverage + dedicated savings with lower premiums looks more attractive to a lot more people.
Here's the one that worries me: Interest payments on the debt are projected to grow to 6.7 percent of GDP in thirty years (right now they're 1.9 percent and Social Security outlays are 4.9 percent).
Deficits are projected to be 10 percent of GDP then, meaning 2/3rds of our borrowing will be done to pay off existing borrowing. That's not good.
It’s not like the latter division is an obviously stable way to analyze the issue.
If we just ran a larger deficit, say 27% of GDP, that ratio would be (temporarily) much lower at only 25% of new borrowing. But that wouldn’t be obviously “better”.
1) The text box for answers should already be clicked and ready to type in. So when you submit your answer, you don't need to click again to get the next question.
2) To move things along, the correct / incorrect response should pop up on the next page with the next question, text box ready to start typing.
3) Choosing difficulty would be helpful. Multiplication thrown in with addition would be discouraging for a kid who only knows addition.
4) If you'd like to stop, clicking Home at the top should pause the timer. I completed a few questions then wanted to go to home and click around. But the timer kept going, which if I didn't notice would run out and then subtract a kid's progress.
5) In the about section, it'd probably be helpful to explain to non-tech savvy parents that this browser keeps track of your progress with cookies. As long as you're signed in on the same web browser on the same account/computer, your progress will be saved.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback and encouragement. I love your points. I will make the suggested improvements. Top of mind is to solve for difficult level (and of course the auto-advance without having to click next and keeping focus on text input).
"The Housing: San Francisco has deeply conservative tendencies for such a liberal city. Its housing supply isn't growing fast enough to keep up with rising demand."
Restrictive housing is more of a liberal phenomenon than a conservative one, wouldn't you say?
The author gives a shoutout to Palladium mag, whose EIC has some "heterodox" opinions on certain ethnic groups[1], as a cool SF philanthropy project. If the author is a liberal, strange bedfellows indeed.
"Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." - Robert Conquest, apocryphal.
I would guess that the overwhelming majority of SF homeowners would self-identify as liberal / Democrat voters. But on the topic of local housing policy, they would like to conserve the status quo.
Yes, and from what I can see, the desire to conserve the status quo has little to do with political conservatism and everything to do with ordinary self-interest.
I don’t think you can really personally blame someone for wanting maintain the character of their neighborhood (and inflate the value of their home). It’s perfectly rational behavior. The problem is that the preferences of this relatively small cohort are overriding the social and economic health of the city as a whole. Ideally, a democratic majority would overrule these narrowly self-interested concerns and force more development, more homeless shelters, etc., but for whatever reason this doesn’t seem to be happening in SF.
I don't think of this as a matter of politics in the traditional "left vs. right" sense. Merely that a lot of homeowners in SF have an "I got mine, screw you" attitude that extends into policy decisions in order to protect and increase the value of their property. It's conservative only in the literal meaning of the term, that they're resistant to any change that they fear could cause their home values to decrease. I expect this phenomenon is quite bipartisan in general, but yes, obviously there are more people on the left than right in SF, so likely many "liberal" people are "conservative on housing".
I think the author is using conservative in the more direct sense: the people are fighting to keep things the way they are in terms of housing. This is at odds with the way the city is normally thought of in terms of being "liberal" (more accepting of change).
I don't think it's a statement on whether or not left or right wing policies contribute more to the issue.
If you go back far enough, it's where the term comes from, but it doesn't make sense today. That would nominally make it an oxymoron for a "conservative" party to ever propose any kind of change, but clearly they do.
It's a fairly common outcome for political words to get stuck to changing movements rather than identifying unique positions and policies over the course of decades and centuries.
Restrictive housing is literally people trying to keep things the same. That seems like a definition of "conservative" if I have ever seen one.
You can argue that "Conservatives" (note the capital letter, denoting that his means an actual group) would be against rules on housing, but if you actually look at the rules in Republican leaning highly urban areas I bet you will find similar rules.
People dislike dealing with the effects of large scale changes. That really is not a Liberal or Conservative thing (note the capital letters).
Yes, the 0.7% of "rent controlled" units of NYC's available inventory that's shrinking by 2.5%/yr is totally stifling new supply.
Feel free to tell us about how the rent stabilized units, which do compromise 1/3 of the inventory but in 3/4 of cases are within spitting distance (10%, and see 4% rent increases every 2 years) of market rate are keeping down supply though. Tell us about about how luxury condos in places like East New York, Edenwald, Brownsville, Morrisania & Crotona, and Hunts Point are going to increase affordable housing in NYC. I am very interested in learning about this.
Or instead, how about I tell you about my time working for a real estate tax certiorari firm in NYC and how landlords with multiple properties will deliberately underutilize their buildings for tax advantages.
Occupancy maximums of 90% and one or multiple buildings deliberately at 0% occupancy (usually the primary residence of the landlords' extended family members for undeclared income) is the norm.
>"Or instead, how about I tell you about my time working for a real estate tax certiorari firm in NYC and how landlords with multiple properties will deliberately underutilize their buildings for tax advantages."
When in the 1980s? Was Ed Koch the mayor?
Market rate on a modest(500 sq foot plus) apartment is worth close to $3K a month or 36K a year. Please provide a citation this tax break which is worth more than 36K a year in 2018 for leaving a unit unoccupied?
Nice cherry picked data. That's a HUD report. Try checking the NYC Rent Guidelines Report for accurate data:
Manhattan 2.57 and Queens 2.11 [1]
That's from page 2. It also shows a -25% and -35% change for vacancy rates from 3 years prior for those two boroughs.
And you can't seem to produce any citation for your assertion about a piece of the tax code that allows landlords to make more money from empty apartments than renting them at market rate.
DPC is terrific if you have an option near you! Paired with catastrophic insurance, it's a great bet for relatively healthy people.
The DPC Alliance map is well worth a visit: https://mapper.dpcfrontier.com/
And I wrote about DPC a while back: https://church.substack.com/p/direct-primary-care