White flight — to the city (Atlanta: sales, high income, sales tax)

[cwlawrence]

Originally Posted by muxBuppie

You win. Most people in third world countries have great salaries and great middle class standard of living.

Because that's what I said...

[JPD]

Originally Posted by cityrover

am i using any broader of a brush than the people that say "white people moving back into the city"?

doubt it.

it is implied that a statement is not universally applicable and you cannot possibly identify trends without generalizations. and isnt this what this thread is about? the trend of gentrification by a group of people. should we take it to mean that this entire group meets a totally scientific and rigid criteria? impossible to do because no such thing exists.

When you make a (mostly false) statement, and then finish up by saying "Think about it. You Know I'm dead right" that doesn't leave you a lot of wiggle-room to come back and say "I was just generalizing."

[JSBinATL]

Originally Posted by K-SawDude

I don't think anyone here is arguing that future spending isn't a concern. But I think you're conflating the debt issue with future spending, when it's more properly understood as making up for past expenditures.

In other words, I'm not saying that we need to increase revenues via taxes in order to bolster the possibility of future spending (whether on wars or something else). Rather, I'm saying that we need to raise revenues in order to pay our national credit card on money that's already been spent.

You can also pay down debt by bringing CURRENT spending below current revenues. Your refusal to see that current spending is a huge problem is a significant blind spot. Raising taxes won't even put a dent in our debt/deficit problem. The problem with the debt ceiling deal that was passed is that most of the spending cuts didn't even kick in until 2014.

You talk about eliminating "deductions". What are you talking about specifically? Most "deductions" are phased out above a certain income level already.

[K-SawDude]

Originally Posted by JSBinATL

You can also pay down debt by bringing CURRENT spending below current revenues. Your refusal to see that current spending is a huge problem is a significant blind spot. Raising taxes won't even put a dent in our debt/deficit problem. The problem with the debt ceiling deal that was passed is that most of the spending cuts didn't even kick in until 2014.

You talk about eliminating "deductions". What are you talking about specifically? Most "deductions" are phased out above a certain income level already.

Of course increased taxes will impact revenues. It's silly to claim otherwise. It's also silly to claim that I or anyone else is suggesting that only raising taxes is the solution. I've said, at least two previous times in this thread alone, that if we're seriously targeting debt reduction, we have to work on spending cuts AND tax increases. But there is a serious contingent of folks, especially those in the House of Representatives, who refuse to consider any sort of revenue increase. Such an attitude is fundamentally unserious about the debt, IMO, and is instead concerned with shrinking the size of government, strictly for the purpose of satisfying an anti-government ideology.

There are some caps on current deductions, but they're rather weak. The mortgage interest deduction, for example, strongly favors those with massive mortgages on expensive homes (i.e., the wealthy). And that deduction allows folks to itemize, which then allows those with larger incomes to additionally deduct their property taxes, state income taxes, charity deductions, etc. Renters and low mortgage owners don't usually have enough (or any) interest to deduct, so they are capped at the standard deduction.

It would make more sense to cap the deduction so that it doesn't give such a huge bonus to the wealthy. For example, don't allow the deduction on second or vacation homes. Only allow it on interest up to $300,000 of a mortgage. Only allow a 15% credit for all (rather than rewarding people in higher income brackets with a bigger percentage deduction.) These are just some possibilities to make the deduction more equitable and raise revenues at the same time. More context here: Mortgage Interest Deduction Could Be a Casualty of Nebulous Budget Plan | Mortgage Rates & Trends: Mortgage Blog

Other loopholes are the ways in which income at the very top, for hedge fund managers for example, is treated at a 15% rate, whereas everyone else in the top bracket pays as much as 35% income tax. It's really unfair, but it's allowed because such income is treated as "capital gains" rather than income in the current tax code. More context here: Crime & Federalism: Hedge Fund Managers Pay Only A 15% Income Tax

Making a series of these sorts of modifications won't reduce the entire debt, of course. But added to spending cuts, it obviously helps to reduce deficits more than cuts alone. (It may also allow those cuts to be less severe if implemented soon.)

(And being totally honest here, I think what we really need is TWO major steps. (1) We need to stimulate demand in the short term via a targeted middle class tax cut and infrastructure spending. Some of the increased deficits could be softened with a small tax increase on the wealthiest. (2) Once GDP starts a more consistent upward trajectory, that's when we should institute the majority of the spending cuts. With the economy tanking at present, spending cuts are only going to make GDP and the jobs outlook worse. The debt is a medium-term problem, while unemployment is a near-term and honestly much more pressing problem right now. The thing people don't realize is that "spending cuts" almost always mean "job cuts." And I'm not persuaded that increased unemployment is the best approach right now.)

[cityrover]

Originally Posted by JPD

When you make a (mostly false) statement, and then finish up by saying "Think about it. You Know I'm dead right" that doesn't leave you a lot of wiggle-room to come back and say "I was just generalizing."

Do you really not understand when people are mocking your irrational desire to grasp at straws as long as they validate your already formed view? You were the one trying to argue that unless something is 100% matching, it is invalid.

I just told you there is no such thing as 100% compliant/certain etc.

And then you came back with "see it was a false statement because it isnt 100%..."

i know you are just baiting but i explained it to you anyway.

cliffs: your opinion is that its mostly false. my opinion it that its mostly true. And yes, what i said in the original post about smugness and appeal has crossed the minds of all, even yours. Am i wrong about that? No.

[JPD]

Originally Posted by cityrover

Do you really not understand when people are mocking your irrational desire to grasp at straws as long as they validate your already formed view? You were the one trying to argue that unless something is 100% matching, it is invalid.

I just told you there is no such thing as 100% compliant/certain etc.

And then you came back with "see it was a false statement because it isnt 100%..."

i know you are just baiting but i explained it to you anyway.

cliffs: your opinion is that its mostly false. my opinion it that its mostly true. And yes, what i said in the original post about smugness and appeal has crossed the minds of all, even yours. Am i wrong about that? No.

What you were describing was hipsters. Hipsters have always lived in the city in large numbers. Therefore, their presence in the city will not result in a statistical growth in numbers of whites moving into the city.

If you can't grasp that simple concept, I'm sorry for you.

BTW, when you tell me you're mocking me, and you call me "irrational" you look foolish if you then say that I am baiting YOU.

[son-house]

Originally Posted by aries4118

Blacks have the highest population of any group, but they are no longer the majority.

To have the majority of something means having 50% of the whole plus one more unit.

This is no longer the case with black folk in DC.

You're right. The proper term for what I was referring to is "Plurality" and not "Majority".

Good call.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by FlyingFox

Paris is a very old city. For this to happen in the US, we're talking about a shift that would take at least a generation, but more like 100 years.

The quickest scenario I can envision is a catastrophic rise in gas prices and/or depletion. Then the middle class would want to be in the city for everything from work, access to markets, and proximity to services (hospitals, police, schools, etc). The upper class could still live in the countryside if they wanted to since they have money to contract their own services (private doctor, security guards, servants, etc). But the lower class may indeed be "priced out" of the city cores and would either be in crowded slums or living in the countryside in the agricultural industry (serfdom).

Try San Diego and Minneapolis/St. Paul for a model. Both are ahead in gentrifying. I remember noticing over 20 years ago how the upper middle class and wealthy were in the center city and the poor were in the suburbs. Neighborhoods can change very rapidly in both directions.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by JPD

More good points. The garden apartment/young folks moving to the suburbs thing was probably just a short lived trend. I don't know, that wasn't my era. Stories abound though, from way back in history, about young folks wanting to get out of the rural areas and go to the city. It's practicaly it's own genre of novel writing. Before WW2, the choices were much more limited, and most people were either from the city/street car suburbs or the farm.

I'm not sure it was ever a trend. I think its purely fiction by those trying to put down the suburbs.

Of course it all depends on how you define the suburbs. Young people in my time (a long time ago) didn't move into the ghetto. But they did move into nice housing relatively close in. That type of housing has probably moved closer to the center of the city in recent years. But young people were always tending to move as close as they could in reasonable housing they could afford.

I think what has changed is that older declining neighborhoods with elderly populations have tended to be populated by upper middle class families with children who previously would have all gone out to the suburbs.

[bu2]

I'm not sure the trend of upper middle class moving in isn't simply the natural aging and decline of the inner suburbs. Then to get to the new suburbs is a lot bigger commute and city living becomes more attractive.