If you conflate home ownership with wealth, more people will view themselves as targeted by policies that target the rich - even if that is not the reality. Useful for getting voters to oppose taxing the rich.
Ding ding ding.
This is why the rich try to muddy the waters.
They try and make it appear as if the homes and retirement funds of the middle class are somehow equivalent to the hundreds of billions owned by the rich.
Fun fact: if we would tax the rich and lower taxes on the middle class, we would get something closer to socialism. Under pure socialism, where everyone owns an equal share of the total wealth, the average household would actually be worth $1.6M.
Any household with less wealth than that is actually doing worse under the current system compared to full equality.
I disagree. Homeowners of multi-million-dollar properties have something others really want — property — but they also usually don’t actually OWN the property; they have mortgages.
And if they sold their property, some of them would be wealthy, but they’d also be homeless. And as soon as they attempted to buy another property (or even rent), they’d be back to having very limited disposable income.
So yeah; they’re still middle class. Someone else is holding the purse strings; the purse is just bigger.
Wealth is not money, can’t buy bread with a staircase.
Yes and no. Wealth can be used as a proxy, usually via debt, to acquire more wealth. If this wasn’t the case, Elon Musk would not have been able to buy Twitter.
This is why renters are absolutely screwed: not only are they spending the same as someone with a mortgage in many cases, but they can’t leverage equity at all. Need a car repair done? Send a kid to school? Retire? Invest? If you rent, you’re screwed.
We’re not talking about Musk here. Most home owners can’t leverage their equity to buy some bread.
Yes, they can.
Many (many!) have leveraged their equity into buying more houses to rent out for income, and/or into all sorts of HELOC-related silliness.
I don’t think peolle realize how stark the divide is between people with homes and people without, especially for anyone who bought before 2020. We’ve created, almost overnight, a massive and likely permanent underclass, and we have no intention of putting the kinds of supports in place to deal with the problems that will create over the next few decades as renters are broken by retirement and AI.
We’ve substituted paying fair wages and having real retirement plans with house value, and now we’re on the verge of slamming the door on a huge portion of our society by locking them out of home equity at the same time we’re diluting their earnings.
Yes, Musk et al are an extreme example, but the equity gap is real.
Do you even read?
You can’t buy bread with stocks either but Elon is still rich.
The difference is that you can’t earn a living by owning your primary residence, so you’re still working class.
That’s my point. Owning a home doesn’t make anyone rich. Owning multiple homes which generate income is a different thing, but people here assume is that if you bough a house in London 20 years ago for pennies, then today you are a fucking Bezos swimming in money. That’s not the case.
Yeah you can, you can leverage your equity to buy basically anything. Another house for instance…
If you leverage your equity to buy bread, you’ll be homeless very soon.
Not if your equity is always increasing
It doesn’t increase out of thin air.
In Canada it does lol
You’re confusing house price with equity.
