Getting a mortgage alone

For the briefest moment, I thought that you were taking the mick....

It's a throw-away comment made to add a modicum of humour to what is otherwise a fairly grim discussion. In other words, it doesn't mean anything.

I see Minister McGrath says the Help to Buy scheme will not be extended to second hand properties. He claims the reason is it's purpose is to incentivise new building. The real reason of course is that he knows second hand housing stock has been inflated by Irish governments using 200 billion euro, which they borrowed since 2008.

Solving the housing crisis is simple. Just tax existing owners of existing properties (the beneficiaries of the 200 billion) and exempt new builds and first time buyers from the tax. This would not only cause house prices to become affordable, it would create a building boom as existing owners sell up to buy new houses to escape the tax.

I was not advocating extending the Help to Buy scheme to second hand properties, I was highlighting the fact that existing housing stock has been deliberately inflated by governments since 2008. Before 2008, people bought houses. Not new houses necessarily. Just houses. Government interference in the housing market has caused this anomaly where the young are confined to new builds. Most houses already exist. The problem is existing properties have been inflated with 200 billion euro of borrowed money, to enrich the people who went mad in the naughties and to price young people out of the market.

You mentioned capacity constraints. Well that's what you get when you do what Irish governments have done since 2008. This by the way was pointed out to Enda Kenny's FG back in 08. But they just didn't care. They were only concerned with with the next election.

Of course new builds offer more value. That is because they have not been inflated with 200 billion euro of borrowed money since 2008 like existing housing stock has.

Another advantage to taxing existing owners of existing properties is it would force them to sell in order to buy new builds and this would make existing housing stock affordable to first time buyers and raise 200 billion to return the national debt to 2008 levels, before the great manipulation.

I have no idea how any of this is practical in any way.

Tax property owners so they sell and become buyers of non-existent properties.

Current buyers buy the second-hand houses that they don't want... and presumably get taxed too?

Government profits?

Your name doesn't live up to its claim.

You were told to take your nonsense crayon economics off this forum before. Nothing has changed.