Kamala Harris is proposing $25K to first time homebuyers.

When my wife & I bought our first home we scrapped together every penny for years! And now Harris just wants to give people $25K? Seriously?

Well, all I can say is that I am 100% on board! This isn't complicated folks. Let's stop making people needlessly suffer. Let's meaningfully invest in working people. And let's elevate the American dream.

@QasimRashid I kind of feel that all this will do is make all the homes $25k more expensive and further enrich those already holding that asset.
@tsrams She's also proposing a federal housing plan to build 3M more homes, which will more meaningfully alleviate the housing shortage and keep prices more manageable. None of these are silver bullets but each do help combat the current economic injustices.
@QasimRashid 3M is a lot; I agree that this needs multiple solutions.
@QasimRashid @tsrams the 25k will make things worse By a factor of 10.
Make corporations sell their rentals.
@QasimRashid @tsrams yes, that's an integral part of the real estate hustle--pretending it's a supply crisis that you can build your way out of. No. There's plenty of housing. They just won't let people who need it, have it. That's the only issue.
@QasimRashid @tsrams How do you get them into the hands of real people and not landlords or corporations, though?
@garpu @QasimRashid @tsrams
You can't. The best you can do is tax it back as fast as they accumulate it.

@tsrams @QasimRashid Almost certainly.

If you don’t want to think about economics, you can just look empirically at places where it’s been tried. In the UK, the previous government tried several variations of this and each one was later measured to have increased house prices and reduce home ownership by young people. They made property developers a lot of money though, which is why the Conservatives were so enthusiastic about the policies: they could pay government money to companies that they invested in while pretending it was a thing to help poor people.

If you have a basic understanding of market economics, you’d conclude that increasing access to funds for buyers will drive up demand and, when demand goes up so does price. Without understanding anything special about the economics of the housing market, this is the obvious outcome.

If you understand a bit more about the housing market, you realise that most people own one home and sell their existing one to buy a new one. Their purchasing power is affected by the sale price. If you’re selling a starter home and now buyers of starter homes have more money, you can sell for more and then spend more, so the house-price inflation effects propagate up through the market. They also get a small multiplier so the biggest winners are people who own expensive houses. Big real-estate investment firms will see the value of their portfolio increase, which increases the amount that they can borrow and will let them buy more, which further drives up cost for buyers (though may make more rental property available). Disclaimer: I invest in a few funds backed by US real estate and would expect this to make me money if it passes, I just wouldn’t expect it to help the people it’s supposed to help.

If you understand how fractional reserve banking works, you realise that the money supply is increased when people take out loans to fund houses because it adjusts to match the value of assets that people have borrowed against. This means that it is likely to be inflationary across the entire economy, not just limited to housing.

There’s a reason economists warned our government that it was a bad idea when they proposed similar ideas. If you know anything about economics, it’s a bad idea, the more you know the worse it seems.

@tsrams @QasimRashid unfortunately that's precisely what will happen. Plenty of precedent from countries like Australia. I will always applaud initiatives to make housing purchases more attainable for people, but just throwing money at the problem rarely brings the desired result.