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 @373e5fdf how are we, as a country, so stupid? 
 @87705a52 @373e5fdf

You mean population collapse crisis? Immigrants now get here, cant afford to live here either, and are packing up to go back to where they came from where they had a higher standard of living. Incidentally, fixing cost of living and making it easier to care for children would male more people have more kids, too.

I have nothing against immigrants, maybe a bit less than half my friends I met with them as international students. But this poll makes a lot of sense.

We have no business tricking people into coming here on lies of a better life if they can't have a decent life here because nobody can because of rockbottom wages and skyhigh cost of living and a housing supply shortage because of decades of not building enough even for the population we had. Wartorn refugees? Sure. Fine. But anyone who comes here should know theyre coming to a land of insolvency where most people cannot afford the cost of living. Conning immigrants is unethical, and adding weights to everyone who is already struggling to tread water here to do it is just adding insult to injury.

What we need is wages indexed to cost of living (triple the rent of active local listings for a 2 bedroom for minimum wage would be a good ballpark - this means you'd need municipal minimum wage btw, but near that in a UBI would work too, again, scaled municipally), and also, 30 million new units of social housing - 75% of the population - priced at 1/3 of where they want minimum wage to be for a 2 bedroom. "How will we pay for it?" The government budget determines the funds put into circulation via modern economic theory. If they implement it, it literally pays for itself.

But our corporate overlords and their politician spokespeople aren't going to offer that unless everyone demands it. 
 @91351ecb @373e5fdf agreed re: housing solutions, wages, etc.  What we really need to do, too, is just end speculative land ownership.  We have a massive surplus of empty housing versus our demand for homes. 
 @87705a52 @373e5fdf 

The US has a massive surplus. That I've seen people post evidence of.

But from what I've read, we don't. There are more homeless in Vancouver than empty rental bedrooms for instance. We didn't have enough housing even before airbnb and speculative investors made it worse. We didnt build fast enough to keep up with population growth going back to sone time in the 70s, and this is the consequence of 50 years of "Its not profitable enough to build lots of new housing so we won't build much".

(By all means correct me if with sources though if I'm wrong).