Let me give you an overly simplified example. You are in a property market where rental yield is 3% (happens in some cities)

You could put a million dollar into buying a house and save $30k in rent every year

or

You could rent a million dollar house for $30k, and invest your million dollar in the market at 7%, returning $70k per year

Obviously this gets more complicated with mortgages, taxes, maintenance, interest rates, etc. but the gist of it is that owning your home always comes with an opportunity cost, every dollar of house equity is a dollar that isn’t invested somewhere else. Depending on circumstances, renting might be the most economical choice.

What you forget is the cost of opportunity: the money that is stuck in a house is money that would yield income if it was invested somewhere else. Long term stock markets typically return 7%+, while rental return (or the rent you save by buying) can be anywhere from 3 to 7% depending on market, minus maintenance and other holding costs.

So there’s no fast and hard guarantee that owning or renting is best - you need to run a proper simulation with the right parametres taking everything into account. In markets with low rental returns, renting is typically optimal.

Maintenance cost and property taxes too though.

What happened to the French speaking African countries?

She actively plotted and traveled to get revenge and clearly didn’t act in self defense. While it’s easy to be sympathetic to her story, her guilt seems difficult to deny.

They aren’t really, they are just upgrading it to a full set top box and rebranding it.

Nah they are “illegal migrants”. There are places you can go and some you can’t and that applies to everyone. There’s a wide gap between “compassion” and “free for all anything goes”.

Intel has also made a similar blunder by trying GPUs and abandoning them (they got there early with the i740, then Larrabee). Saving a few dollars by gutting emerging products line has cost them billions

Oh please explain to me how marginal rates work… 🙄

If your marginal tax rate is already 30% and you decide to earn an extra $1, that $1 will be taxed at 30% and you get $0.70 in your pocket. That’s what “marginal” means.

“Taxing at 100% also brings no tax revenue” is already a stupid statement, and is Tautologically contradictory

It’s not. If you work 40h per week and can do overtime but that overtime is taxed at 100% (because yes, that’s what marginal rate means, it’s the rate the extra income will be taxed), virtually nobody will bother doing that overtime. The handful who do will probably not clock-in because anyway, there’s no point since it will bring no income after taxation.

You can’t because the French Constitution and Human Rights guarantee the right to private property and a fair and proportional taxation. And that’s likely similar all over the western world.

If your wealth is from owning a portfolio of apartment buildings, good luck taking those with you.

Sell it to a holding company incorporated abroad. Own shares of that holding company instead.

And only the US actually collects on it, because they are so at the heart of the financial world they can strongarm banks to report on their US clients.

Exit taxes are “one shot”. You pay them when you move out and then enjoy a lower taxation level for the rest of your life. Not much of a deterrent, at best a last ditch attempt at grabbing a few more dollars as your highest tax payers leave.

It’s not. If you accept that :

• Taxing at 0% brings no tax revenue
• Taxing at 100% also brings no tax revenue

Then you accept that between those two extremes there’s a tax optimum that for a given rate gives the most tax revenue. This is the Laffer curve.

The good thing about a calorie deficit is that it always works. Unless your body somehow escapes the laws of physics or you developed the power of photosynthesis, you WILL lose weight if you eat less than your caloric needs.

That was only on earned income and with a starting point so high that at some point only one person ever reached it.

I think so, but with ads just like the free tier of Spotify.

And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.

I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.

But worse for those looking for a rental.

Rent control is a bandaid on a real problem that makes things worse long term. What California needs is build more, which means end the NIMBY and unfreeze property taxes so those seating on underutilized land are forced to develop it or sell.