Cory Booker Announces Plan to Drive Rent Into Stratosphere

Excellent news. Once Cory Booker is elected, all renters can live in a nicer place! The difference between the cost of rent and what people can afford will be picked up by everyone else.

The core of Mr. Booker’s proposal is a new refundable tax credit for tenants. “Anyone paying more than 30 percent of their before-tax income would be eligible for the credit,” he writes, “which would cover the difference between 30 percent of a beneficiary’s income and their rent (capped at the neighborhood fair market rent).”

Tax credits are how the IRS serves as a branch of the welfare state. Large sectors of the Democrat base pay negative taxes. Rather than pay the IRS, they are paid by the IRS with other people’s money.

Unfortunately, socialist schemes like Booker’s have their downsides. For example, rent will skyrocket when it is subsidized. Look what happened to college tuition.

Among the many perverse incentives Booker’s plan would create, renters and landlords would be rewarded for upgrading extravagantly, without regard for cost–benefit considerations.

Many would move to neighborhoods they could not afford on their own income. This would result in a downgrade of all neighborhoods à la Sedgwick Gardens (where tenants are also expected to pay 30% of their income with the rest of the rent subsidized).

The effect would be to socialize housing. For illustrations of what socialist housing ends up looking like, refer to the crumbling tower blocks of the old Soviet Union or the current New York City Housing Authority.

Booker’s plan could also reduce the incentive to work. Imagine a waitress earning $25,000. The tax credit would cover any rent above the 30% threshold of $7,500 a year. If she toiled to increase her earnings to $26,000, the threshold would rise to $7,800—eliminating $300 of the tax credit and much of the net gain from her higher income.

Fewer hours worked means less tax revenue to subsidize other people’s housing. But it’s not as if we have the money to pay for this anyway; the federal government is already in debt $22,373,771,000,000.00 and counting faster than I can type the numbers at the $100,000 level.

Unless “Cory’s Plan to Provide Safe, Affordable Housing for All Americans” is cynical, insincere pandering like Joke Biden’s promise to cure cancer if elected, Booker must plan to just print the money. That strategy worked fine in Zimbabwe and Venezuela, why wouldn’t it work here?

On a tip from Varla.

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