That’s why I draw big black vertical bars on the sides of my bills before I deposit them. Mathematically, that makes them deposit the absolute value instead of the negative asset.

Look at night time satellite imagery. South Korea looks like an island; the northern half of the peninsula is almost entirely dark.

The street lamps along their route to Ukraine will be enough to give them culture shock.

even then you don’t need this recurring manual registration mess.

There is no recurring manual registration. You only need to register once in your lifetime.

If you move, you have to update your ID within 60 days, and every time you update your ID, they update your voter registration automatically. (unless you decline).

That has been federal law since 1993, and is pretty much equivalent to European standards.

You really have to go out of your way to not be registered to vote.

They aren’t going to want those 3000 troops coming back and talking about their time in the west.

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People keep making more people

Eventually, people stop needing housing, or their housing needs can be met by a ceramic pot on a shelf. The house they used to need becomes available for someone else.

Land Contract (sometimes called “contract for deed”) provides all of those same benefits, from the same people, to the same people, as renting. It is a bit of a misnomer in that it applies to any real property, and not just “land”.

The difference from renting is that with the land contract:

• 1. The monthly price is fixed for the life of the contract;
• 2. After three years (in my state), the occupant begins gaining equity.

Grad students, visa holders, travel nurses, etc. might not necessarily want to purchase the property they are staying in, but they might also find themselves living in that area for longer than they expect. A land contract gives them the security of fixed housing costs and the flexibility of being able to walk away at any time and for any reason. They also allow the occupant to begin earning equity while still living in “temporary” housing, allowing them to save more for the future.

But, in our current market, renting is more lucrative to the landlord.

So how do we drive landlords to offer land contracts instead of rental agreements? We provide property tax exemptions to owner-occupants. We increase the nominal property tax rate: run it sky high. But, the owner-occupant exemption means the effective tax rate for homeowners (including land contract buyers) doesn’t actually increase. Only investors - people who own housing they don’t live in - will be paying that punitively-high tax rate.

With that sky-high tax on investment properties, today’s landlords will be incentivized to become private lenders. They will be taking the exact same financial risk on the exact same people, but now those people will be called “buyers” instead of “tenants”.

The only “renting” that will still remain is from landlords who live in one unit of a 2-4 unit property, or a roommate agreement, or short-term use like hotels and motels.

Home ownership is the single best predictor of financial prosperity in the US. Every housing contract should include some sort of provision for equity.

Just for another angle on the problem: baseload generation (nuclear) is most efficient at its highest possible output, but it has to maintain that output 24/7. It can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the demand curve, and it can’t be ramped up above the minimum overnight demand.

To increase its efficiency, utilities push large scale consumers like steel mills and aluminum smelters to overnight shifts. This artificially increases the overnight demand, allowing the baseload generators to ramp up their relatively efficient production. This reduces the need for less-efficient peaker plants during the day.

That overnight demand can’t be met with solar, and wind generation tends to fall overnight as well.

What nuclear can do is help level out seasonal variation, between the short days of winter and long days of summer. If you want to contemplate a truly pie-in-the-sky scenario, there are provisions for tying large ships, (like aircraft carriers and hospital ships) to shore power, and backfeeding the local grid to support disaster relief efforts.

Imagine a fleet of nuclear generation ships, sailing to northern-hemisphere ports from November to April, and to southern-hemisphere ports from May to October.

Pumped storage is also essential, but extraordinarily limited. We can probably run essential overnight loads on pumped storage, but it does not make sense to keep an overnight load on pumped-storage that can be shifted to solar/wind directly.

We need to take a look at demand shaping rather than supply shaping. We need to shift load to times we can produce, rather than shift production to times of demand.

Owner occupant credit/exemption. If you live in the home, you pay a much lower property tax than if you don’t live in the home.

This is used in Ohio as a “homestead exemption”. Elderly and disabled Ohioans pay a lower tax rate on their primary residence.

It is used in New York as the “STAR Credit”, to push part of the burden of school taxes from families to investors and businesses.

This is used in Montana as a Property Tax Rebate, where taxpayers can get some of their property taxes back on their primary residence. Montana has also been talking about implementing a “second home tax” which would increase the tax burden on properties that aren’t claimed as a primary residence.

A substantially similar program is used in Oakland as the Vacant Property Tax, which punishes landlords who hold property primarily for financial speculation rather than actual use.

These programs all operate in the same way I am describing. The only difference is that I would phase in a radical increase the effective tax on investors/landlords. I would increase the tax on investors and landlords of residential property so much that they find it more lucrative to switch their investment strategy to “lending” rather than “landlording”. Basically, the only rental arrangements that will continue to exist are 2-4 unit residences (where the landlord-owner lives in one of the units) and roommate agreements.

A “land contract” (sometimes called “contract for deed”) is a sort of “rent to own” agreement that is recorded with the county like a deed. For purposes of the tax exemption I am talking about, the occupant is considered an owner rather than a tenant.

A Land Contract is a type of seller-financing that is available to anyone, including the tenant on whom the landlord is already taking a financial risk. That former landlord is now collecting interest on a loan, rather than rent on a property.

But it’s very difficult for a lot of people.

It is, indeed, but the proper solution here is to lift them up to the bar, not lower the bar down to them.

Lack of ID prevents you from getting and keeping a job, attending school, accessing the banking system, getting a PO box, getting licenses. Being unable to vote is the least of your problems.

The proper solution is not to figure out how to make voting accessible to those without an ID. The proper solution is to get them an ID.

Yes, there are people who can’t obtain an ID card, for whatever reason. A European citizen who couldn’t obtain an ID card would have the exact same problems voting that an American citizen does. I don’t have a systemic solution for that. This would seem to be something that would need to be handled on a case-by-case basis, possibly involving the judicial system and a court order. It also doesn’t seem to be a particularly common problem. I’d bet all the money in my pockets that OP does, indeed, have some sort of ID card.

We have a remedy for this: Provisional ballots. Cast your vote now, and resolve any clusterfuck with registration later.

That’s called privilege. You literally don’t realize what a burden it is for some people to comply with voter registration requirements, because your life is such that it’s easy for you.

The “privilege” you are talking about is the exact same privilege the parent comment assumed:

I just have to show up with my ID, doesn’t matter if it’s for the EU parliament or the local city senate.

The “privilege” you are talking about is “having an ID card”. Every time you obtain, renew, replace, update, or otherwise contact the state bureau handling ID cards (usually, the DMV), they are required, under federal law, to update your voter registration unless you specifically decline.

The European standard is “get an ID card, show up and vote”. We implemented the European standard back in 1993.

What I’m describing has been federal law for over 30 years. The European criticism about ID cards is nonsensical. Every time you obtain, renew, or amend your drivers license or ID, you update your voter registration.

Remember the context of my comment: I am replying to European criticism of registration. The European approach is for everyone to obtain a government issued ID card and present it at the polling station. The NVRA already does this. We have already adopted the European solution to this problem.

It’s overblown. It’s mostly propaganda.

I just have to show up with my ID

My ID is good for 5 years, and I am required to update it within 60 days of changing residences. Every time I’ve renewed or updated it, they have asked me if I wanted to register or update my voter registration. My registration is updated every time I vote, and I don’t get de-registered unless I skip voting for about a decade straight, without re-registering when I renew my ID card.

ALL of the problems with voter registration are about people who either can’t or won’t get or renew their ID card. Every time you read about voter registration issues in the US, you should imagine going to your polling station without a current ID card.

being hit with a tax that basically kills any chance of renting out something.

That is exactly what should happen. It should be practically impossible for an owner to “rent” a property for enough to justify doing it. Landlords should be heavily pressured to convert tenants to buyers.

“Renting” should be confined to commercial activities, not residences. You want to rent out space for a shop, warehouse, office, factory, no problem. This is only for residential property that you are not living in. It should not be economically feasible to rent out such property as an investor, because that practice strips tenants of equity and is the leading factor driving people into poverty.

Go ahead and use your property to generate an income, but do it by charging interest on a loan, not rent.

The entire concept of rent needs to die in a fire. It is inherently exploitative. There is no way to redeem it.

Rent needs to be replaced with “private mortgages” or other approaches that return equity to the occupant.

Individuals that need the flexibility of temporary, short-term housing can use “land contracts” rather than exploitive rental agreements. Land Contracts have fixed payments for the life of the agreement: no annual rent hikes. The occupant is considered an “owner” rather than a “tenant”, but only begins gaining equity after three years. The occupant is free to walk away before three years, or renegotiate after.

How do we eliminate renting? We make it less lucrative than other investment options. We increase the tax rate on residential properties to be extremely high. But, we also create a tax exemption for owner-occupants, so your effective tax rate is actually lower on your own home. Landlords are forced to choose between a small return on a rental, or a larger return on a private mortgage or land contract.

With that simple change, landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to convert “tenants” into “buyers”, so they don’t have to pay the excess taxes.

Beyond renting, with this change, lenders are motivated to work with borrowers rather than resort to foreclosure. As soon as the bank initiates foreclosure proceedings, they are on the hook for the increased tax rate.

Shouldn’t be an amendment, but we should impose a “securities” tax to achieve something like the $1 million limit on personal wealth.

An annual, 1% tax on stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other financial instruments, payable in shares of that security. (Which will then be slowly liquidated on the open market, such that the liquidated shares never comprise more than 1% of traded volume in any given time period)

The first $10 million directly held by a natural person are exempt from this tax.

Wealth isn’t problematic in and of itself. The issue is when wealth is used primarily to purchase wealth-generating assets, rather than the products and services that generate wealth for workers.

This, but unironically.

Tell him to change his name to “Without Prejudice Bob Smith”.

Tax discounts to lower rent prices only incentivize the worst, most negligent slumlords, in a race to the bottom for housing quality. Rent controls and discounts on taxes for below-market rents exacerbate the major problems with renting.

Jacking up taxes jacks up rental prices.

It does. But, if nobody will be renting; nobody will be paying those jacked up prices. Read my comment again: I am trying to eliminate the concept of renting, and replace it with a much more equitable approach.

I want to replace “renting” with “land contract”.

A land contract is a type of purchase agreement that starts off similar to a rental. They aren’t used very often because they are somewhat complex, and they put a lot of power in the hands of the buyer/tenant rather than the seller/landlord. Land Contracts have a fixed monthly price: there is no year-to-year price hike.

Most importantly, they gain equity for their tenant/buyer.