OK here's the solution to speeding up the housing market:
a/ Government forms a housing bank b/ Sellers sell their house to the housing bank, and rent it back until they have bought their new house c/ Buyers buy from the housing bank
Thus chains are eliminated, the goverment has the opportunity to tax the buyer and the seller, and have a vested interest in keeping the housing market bouyant.
It would have the added advantage that having sold to the government you could sue them (as a tenant) to make all the repairs demanded by their stupid new rules and regulations, and the buyers could be REALLY picky about completion certificates for work done in 1846
I'd agree to it on condition that all cabinet ministers were personal guarantors to the extent of their personal wealth followed by civil servants above a certain rank.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? I'd also make it law that MPs etc couldn't have better conditions of service than the poorest in the land. Including tax concessions and pensions. Pro rata, of course.
For most MPs their remuneration while in office is less than they could make in the market.
There are two ways that they can overcome that, apart from operating outside conflict of interest rules. Both involve their reaching reasonably high office. Of course that is seldom based on ability - more typically backing the right horse at the right time.
The result can then be a remuneration while in office that may sometimes equal open market levels but the opportunities afterwards in terms of after dinner speaking, directorates and all of those things.
But most people want to own their houses (now known as 'homes' but I refuse to say it, I don't want to live in a home) so wouldn't like your suggestion. They'd think that they were losing out ... "give us back our (however many) days ... "
Not bad as a possibility. *BUT* unless it was compulsory, those who could sell their houses privately would do so, those that couldn't would sell to the State Housing Bank.
If the S.H.B. has houses in it's portfolio it can't sell it will lose money, eother in interest on the money it has taken to buy the houses or in the loss it makes when, as it inevitably will, it has to sell off houses at a loss.
Where will this money come from? (Rhetorical question BTW).
If it is compulsory to sell your house to the S.H.B. who decides the price ?
If all sales go through the S.H.B. by law, would there not be bound to be an issue with the efficiency/effectiveness of such an organisation?
If selling to and buying from the S.H.B. is compulsory there will be no market, let alone a buoyant one. The S.H.B. would end up like a Kafkaesque Estate Agent Chain on barbiturates, and it would be so easy to add more and more new taxes to moving/changing houses.
Just had a Kafkaesque run around at IKEA.. Wanted to buy £1k's worth of bedroom furniture. Speak to assistant in bedroom dept who listens to my requirements and prints off a list of 20 different locations in the warehouse for me to get my bits. One pack is missing. Speak to customer collections in the warehouse, they say go to home deliveries, but home deliveries is outside the checkouts, I can see it but can't get there because SWMBO is carrying 6 dishcloths @ 19p each and there is a queue of 15 waiting to pay. Dump the dishcloths and go through checkouts empty handed, get to home deliveries queue for 10 minutes and hand him list printed by bedroom dept. He says you have to pay for them first and come back to him & he will find the mising packs, go back through and join queue at checkouts. Checkout operator says she can't process our payment because the bedroom dept printed it on the wrong form, it has to be on a home delivery form or she can't enter it at the till (no items to scan), and we have to go back to bedroom dept. and queue again to get the correct form of printout.
Run out of time - give up.
1 week later try again. Get the pick list printed on the correct form this time - comes in 2 parts, one part for us to pick and one part for home deliveries to pick. The same box is still missing and the other boxes are way too heavy to lift, queue at the checkouts to pay, checkout operator says we must pick the items on our own pick list ourselves but customer collections will help us with the heavy and missing items - so back into the store to get hold of a customer collections assistant
After 2 hours in store ( 3 hours 20 minutes in total) - Success.
Notice on my way out that people are queueing to get on the site, queueing to get up the ramps in the car park, are queueing for parking spaces and queueing to get out, in order to receive this level of service.
Oh, and the furniture appears to be made of Weetabix. 8-((
You're obviously a glutton for punishment :-) Did you factor in 3 hours of your time? I slept for 8 hours last night, which must have cost me a small fortune.
Their stuff always reminded me of what I imagine a Swedish prison to be like, - stark, quirky, spartan, only pretending to be functional, but the younger elements of the family are taken in by it hook, line, and sinker.
Oh, and I don't believe all those names are real words either in any language known to man. I reckon they are generated "Ernie style" with a list of random numbers choosing strings of random length from a randomly ordered alphabet.
the 3 days it took to put together in a bedroom with insufficient room to assemble a double wardrobe whose carcase was not stable (It wanted to go lozenge shaped) until the back of 4mm particle board (In
2 pieces joined with paper tape) was nailed in (40 nails).
For maybe 300 quid more we could have had a set of fitted units of equal storage capacity from a German company, delivered and installed in the house. IKEA charged 45 quid to deliver 3. 5 miles. :-(
Not quite: More like 'this is the better regime than a Victorian dungeon'
Remember this was in the days of over crowded prisons, crumbling infrastructure, rising crime rates and governments treading a tightrope between 'law and order' and humanitarian lobbies concerned that someone in for a couple of spliffs was sharing a dungeon with a mass murderer.
I n Norway, at least you can in fact stay overnight in an IKEA, and sleep on the beds in the bedroom showroom. They work 24/24 with forklifts so you can rely on being entertained throughout your visit, and the big plus is, your overnight lodging fee includes the cost of
*you* taking away your used bed linen yourself. :-))
Actually it reminded me of a hotel of my aquaintance in Holland.
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mention of "a view on the old 'De Bilt fortress' a surcharge of ? 5,00 per night is involved." arises from a mis-translation. There is nothing to see. It is of only archeological/historical significance, it was just a defensive position, like a WW1 trench maybe ?
With IKEA at home who needs jails ?
Tell me ... "Death, where is thy sting ?"
Is he the fat, lardy arsed biker type bloke with the tattoos like a Hell's Angel, with bad English, who appeared on one or two TV commercials for them?
I don't think that Ingvar is fat. He goes around on push bikes and is about 80 years old.
He's the 4th richest person in the world but as tight as a duck's arse on water. Needless to say this is all wrapped up in Dutch corporations and Swiss banking arrangements.
Because of the decline in the dollar over the last year, he could be the world's richest man at this point.
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