> pretty sure a government won’t bail me out if I invested in a stock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspan_put

More pointedly, you're not in a position to block equity capital markets reforms in the way homeowners are in respect of housing reform.

Yeah everyone involved in that should have been shot. That's part of what led to the situation we have today.

Short term thinking dominates economics these days. Managing the current downturn is most important, when people ask about longterm implications do a bunch of hand wavy stuff about it being temporary and then kick the can to the next guys who do the same thing.

> Short term thinking dominates economics these days.

Especially among people criticizing the response to 2008/2020.

Failing to mitigate sickness in capital markets and the economy in the short term would have inflicted far more damage in the long term.

Yeah the lost decade in growth followed by another insane bubble totally wasn't a long term problem.

They should have been publicly shot. I hope if it happens again people have the courage to do it this time.

You are assuming that there was any good way of dealing with a year where nobody went to work because of a global pandemic.

The economic pain of inflation was far preferable to the economic pain of active economic destruction, as short-term disruption to business would have resulted in long-term destruction of real value. It was far less painful long-term to print money and have the economy on pause for a year, with bills still getting paid, than it would have been to have the economy collapse over that year.

If it weren't for those mitigations, we'd all still be sitting around a tire fire, trading bottle caps for ammunition.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree here.

Homeowners shouldn't be either. Locals should have less of a say in zoning decisions since they've demonstrated they won't act in their community's interest.

Also, making the public hold the bag in a bubble is perhaps the most sinister form of theft imaginable.

people call buying a house to live in an investment but that's because they don't know the technical term is a "hedge"

so you know: most localities do treat the house you live in very differently from a tax perspective than they do any additional properties you might have, because everyone is born short housing, until they own 1 place to live.

so yes, the proposed bailouts up thread would be for people who bought a house because they didn't want to be short housing; a hedge, not an investment.

also if the house has hedges then your hedges are a hedge. I'll see myself out

Buying a house is more than an "investment" though: It's achieving the American dream. And while this dream might have been a farce, it's like everything else in that you hear it enough combined with not understanding the economics and policies underlying home ownership and the lie is reality.

And let's not even get to your point about hedges. I don't know many people that can define it let alone consider housing as a hedge.

Basically everyone considers housing as a hedge - homes are expected to grow steadily in value or at the very least not depreciate.

This is not a good policy goal, but the fact is that the wealth of the American middle class is mostly stored in property, and tanking property values would be a disaster for a broad swath of society which otherwise only has long-term retirement accounts to rely on.

They will vote to protect their interests, no matter how badly it screws their kids or contributes to homelessness.

If the house price goes down you don't lose the house. You just end up paying more for it than you could have if the price was lower when you bought it. You are just keeping your promise to pay your mortgage. This whole "unrealized gains need to be compensated" thing is insane. Responsible policymakers would ignore such greedy, self-centered, anti-community sentiments.

Many people have places to live without owning a house. Me for example!

Ah a counter example to a probablistic argument. Whodathunkit

Buying a house is investment. Living in a house you own is consumption.

These are two distinct things that are coupled through life choices. It's a real pity that tax regulations are different just because you make individual life choices.

It isn't, though. Housing is a basic human need; investing in the stock market is not.