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Comment by greyw | Hacker News Reader

France has sky high taxes and yet they run a 5% deficit. Cant cut social programs that are way too generous (in relation to income) so higher taxes it is.

Dont see that working in the long run

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Most of that money is getting sucked up by landlords. If they reduced rent they could reduce pensions by the same amount but it seems like high rent is a sacred cow to them.

Is there some structural reason that they can't reduce rent by developing a lot more housing? Is it purely artificial government rules preventing the construction of new housing — or are there actual constraints in terms of capital, labor, or materials?

old people will be upset that their house prices will go down for some reason democracies only care about boomers and ignore everyone else suffering.

EU regulations prevent a lot of housing to be built, especially if you want to also gave a relevant food industry.

Time to build apartments over top of canals and rivers.

As far as I understand, it is mostly about the hydrogen emissions rather than space.

Apartments don't emit much hydrogen. Were you thinking of another gas?

How are those two things related, and why don't they just ignore EU regulations if EU regulations are harming their country? The EU has no enforcement mechanism, it's all voluntary like the UN.

There's already rent control in the biggest areas. There's capital gains tax on rental property sold is almost 50% if held less than 20 years. Non-resident landlord tax is similarly high. French landlords still owe 30-45% on income, plus a 17% social charge.

It's not a surprise that if you tax something, the price usually goes up.

I assume that most homes are owned by companies and ownership of the companies frequently changes hands.

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