Cliffs in policies will always lead to players working around the cliffs.
E.g. in NYC there is an additional 1% sales tax on home sales above 1 million dollars.
So nobody in the market would ever sell a home between 1m and 1.01m as the tax increase is greater than the sales price.
These are failed policy implementations (in the above example the tax should be marginal, not thresholded)
Any policy which does not account for individual actors optimizing financially is a badly designed policy.
There are numerous similar examples re: CRE when requiring subsidized housing units for certain sizes of development. Often it's more lucrative to build smaller and get around subsidized unit requirements.
You can call them "asshats", but I'd rather live and discuss policy in reality.
Many of these new, clearly strictly punitively intended, taxes aimed at the wealthy will have the same logical outcome.
Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result
Ah, you're one of those.
See, this clever little aphorism of yours is the constantly reached for salve of the "wiseguy". "Everyone would do it if they were in my position; so I'm not going to bother myself about it. Let's work around it."
Problem is, in reality, that isn't the case. Most people will sit there, look at the regulation, realize the development is likely going to attract families or soon-to-be-families, and would realize, yeah. Okay. Need to accommodate that. They approach it in good faith. Then you come along and start acting in bad faith. Your bad faith implementation for maximized extraction creates knock on problems, that create knock on problems, that now are everyone else's problem to solve. Eventually, with a high enough concentration or frequency of such agents, we enter game theory territory, and escalation tends to happen quickly from there.
Historically, this comes with a brand of solutions for people like that. It'd stew to a point, then generally involved an entire community not seeing a damn thing while someone came to physical harm in a tragic accident. Or just straight up Wildcat demonstrations.
Communities/ planners don't want that. So they make regulations that are a good faith attempt at curtailing spirals of reasonably foreseeable problems. A wiseguy comes along and creates reasonably forseen problems through non-compliance.
Are you noticing a pattern yet? You being a bad faith asshat isn't the policy's fault.
That's your fault for being a garbage human being, and maybe just a bit our collective fault for making the world such a comfortable and safe place for humans with garbage mindsets drawn to bad faith in all things business. Nevertheless, the gradient is clear. Do good faith business. Everyone wins. Do bad faith, and you win til it's worth someone's time to ensure you lose.
Too damn smart to learn the virtue of self-restraint, too damn stupid to recognize the threat too many of you pose to everyone else. Or how quickly things go bad once people start catching onto the games you seem to delight in playing.
