Memo To The GOP: Work From Home Is Pro-Worker, Pro-Working Mom, Pro-Family
And Other Anti-Mob Measures
Well, looky here: Tim Apple is learning real fast that his employees don’t want to be back in the office with many threatening to quit before they return to the office. Who knew that we’d live in such a pro-worker time that knowledge workers don’t even have to show up to the office! Take that, Marx! How lucky are we that cubicles are now considered hostile work environments!
How can these super pro-environmental companies justify all that commuting in traffic? Maybe they should have to buy all their employees electric cars! I kid, I kid.
Let me tell you something you should know by now.
No one is ever going back to the office. It’s for losers.
Introvert engineers like staying home. Extrovert sales people like being on the road. Adjust accordingly. Even the bankers are getting it. (The obvious solution, of course, would be to genetically sequence your work force and help find a work style that can accommodate them but I digress (and obsess).
Some of this era’s most important professions — data scientist chief among them — are deeply appealing to introverts and we got a lot more data during the coronavirus.
You get a sense of this from the behavior of Congress where proxy voting has become more and more common. I think the evidence is clear.
If members stay home, they’ll get to know their constituents much more and the lobbyists a whole lot less. There’s even compelling evidence that proxy voting is making Congress more inclusive.
That’s all to the good. (Though Rep. Elise Stefanik’s move of fundraising while claiming to be recovering from covid is a touch unseemly.)
Naturally Kevin McCarthy doesn’t like proxy voting because it means that the lobbyists have less face time with the members and so they are less inclined to donate to him. Poor McCarthy’s in trouble. The Supreme Court declined to hear McCarthy’s proxy voting argument. As Congress goes, so goes the nation.
There’s quite compelling evidence that work from home is making us more efficient, not less. It might even be making us safer, especially if we get a gun too.
A GOP that was interested in winning the suburbs again would cater to these people who became first time gun owners. It would, for example, work on funding the police and on increasing the police’s use of technology. Law and order isn't cheap but it should be efficient.
But instead the Trump tax bill accelerated many social maladies by essentially forcing the professional classes to move from high tax states to low tax ones.
Republican partisans decry these new voters who risk turning Texas or Arizona into blue states but for Trump’s donors — the real estate industry — these economic migrants are easy to screw with higher rents.
Recall that Texas funds its government through increased property taxes so there’s a double effect here.
Of course Trump, who is himself a real estate mogul dependent on Chinese cash, helped out other real estate moguls also dependent on Chinese cash. Congress itself is also heavily invested in real estate. Chiefs of Staff Mark Meadows and Mick Mulvaney were both property developers.
Add to that, that the tax bill gave governors the power to pick and choose where to place opportunity zones — a recipe for corruption if ever there were one. Many have already availed themselves of the deal. Even moderate GOP governors like Chris Sununu couldn’t help but enrich himself through the opportunity zones he gave his family’s ski park.
Those pro-China policies wound up pushing up housing prices in major American cities — a feat which ultimately exacerbates the housing crisis and increases homelessness. That, and the Chinese drugs.
The locals noticed and we got the anti-Asian hate campaigns befalling Asians in general and blacks in particular in our major cities. This is, of course, crass to say but do we really care if some property developers property burns to the ground when he’s taken millions of dollars from the Chinese?
We could restrict foreign purchases of housing — which most OECD countries are doing — and limit the amount of money laundering but we dare not do that.
We don’t build new housing nor do we do much to decrease illegal or legal immigration. Nor do we do much about all the foreigners buying homes. (We should stop that, as Canada does.)
Those people all have to live somewhere, don’t they? So why then don’t we build houses?
Instead Americans took the opportunity of the pandemic and moved further from one another if the rents are any indication.
Whilst Mark Zuckerberg spend the pandemic addicting your aunt to Q Anon, Amazon’s Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos built a good distribution networks to make that work more feasible. You can buy all of your consumer goods—low cost— nearly anywhere in the U.S. Not bad, not bad at all.
There are problems, to be sure. Zoom is thoroughly Chinese and compromised. (I prefer Microsoft Teams.) And I have come to believe that always low prices might come at the expense of social harmony. Cheap goods make cheap men.
We might ask who are the winners and losers from working from home. Here’s a helpful chart. Most of those big cities seem awfully blue. If everyone is in traffic they aren’t contributing to anything other than wasted time and increased carbon dioxide.
Why hasn’t some politician proscribed that the jobs that can be done from home should be done from home? And why isn’t there some sort of tax advantage conferred upon the business?
If we are going to keep back work from home let’s also bring back the home office deduction.
Until then it’s truly a sight to behold all the people working from home.
Night owls are usually smarter. You should hire them. I sure do.
But what shall we do with all that commercial real estate? Maybe we could have cities that house people instead?
There's a lot to be said about the major cities and the lack of affordable housing. Looking back on this, and after reading Casey Michel's book, American Kleptocracy, why aren't we seizing and repurposing properties owned by criminals? This New York Times article from 7 years ago, look at the names!
"What is more, ownership of shell companies can be shifted at any time, with no indication in property records."
A helpful Redditor wrote back in 2015:
Selling property is a cumbersome and difficult process while selling an LLC is trivial. If you own a property as an investment then you may want to liquidate some or all of that property at a given time to cover other costs. Not really very easy to do if you have to go through a title process. Contrast that with selling someone half interest in an LLC which owns the property. That is easy to do, requires only a notary, and voila you've got cash. I'm all for having direct ownership on your primary residence but for vacation homes, or investment properties, using an LLC is just a whole lot smarter from a money management perspective.
Or perhaps homes shouldn’t be an investment at all. Maybe homes are for living and working not investing!