On 19/08/22 20:45, J. J. Lodder wrote:
> But inflation is gradually killing the usage, since it is no longer
> a great amount of money, (it won't buy you a house, for example)
>
> Revived though in Dutch, but not in Belgian, in the 'jubelton'. [1]
>
> [1] A fiscal measure to be abolished soon: Parents are allowed to
> give their children 100 000 euros tax free, for the purpose of
> buying a house. Heavily criticised: it mainly serves to drive up
> housing prices, and it discriminates against those not having
> moneyed parents.
The cost of housing, including rentals, has been a major political issue
here for some time. It is obvious to every man and his dog that house
prices are going up faster than wages, making housing unaffordable.
Various remedies have been tried. One, introduced by the previous
government, was to encourage sub-prime mortgages by making it possible
to get a housing loan with a small deposit. With rising interest rates,
it was always clear that this would result in low-income people buying a
house and then losing the house and their savings. So why would anyone
promote it? Because it drives up prices.
Most other proposed measures have the same problem. But of course they
would. If you look at who is doing the proposals, they have just two goals:
(a) to drive up the profits of property developers;
(b) to drive up the investment gains of those who
buy houses as investments.
Point (b) was especially important to the previous government, because
most of their members of parliament were owners of two or more
investment properties. That meant that most laws that affected housing
were voted in by people who failed to declare a conflict of interest.