Jake Schmidt

Is New York full? No! Most of Manhattan is visibly underbuilt. Let's make it legal to build these missing homes! #YIMBY

Does a pied-a-terre tax have enough juice to drive NYC property tax reform? I bet not, but we should try anyway.

@sethmpk Jason Wang was bullied by the marketplace into allowing people to order his food less-spicy, or getting the noodles to go and eating them 20 minutes later, but he just can't believe they're actually doing it. His life's work is to undo these mistakes.

Xi’an Famous Foods now periodically stops their background music for recorded messages telling customers that we should order their dishes spicy unless we’re totally unable to handle it.

Ctrl+A, delete, no nuance required, full repeal

@PEWilliams_ @harryh @bfurnas I hope that's true, because Goodhart's Law is watching us like a hawk right now. A repetitive maintenance task that takes a small, discrete amount of time and is easily counted, but whose need can be reduced by other projects - dangerous territory!

@harryh @bfurnas My understanding is that the planning has improved and allowed more efficiency. In the past, work orders were filled throughout the week. The weekend "blitzes" attempt to close work orders quickly when traffic/disruptions are much lower.

We now have an answer to the question of "is NYC just doing good social media posts about service delivery, or is service delivery actually changing?"

@caesararum They also passed a "zoning resolution" in 1961 that restricts homebuilding and never adjusted it for growth, so now $2.6M doesn't buy you a mansion either.

new york passed a "mansion tax" in 1989 that charges 1% tax for properties that cost over $1m and then never adjusted it for inflation so now it's just a "house tax"

Your local planning department doesn't need "capacity". They need Ctrl-F+Delete and a paper shredder. All the best neighborhoods were built before zoning--before the regulatory tools of postwar planning to microregulate the private realm & mandate car use were constitutional

@CartoonsHateHer The fact that she remarried relatively soon after JFK's assassination was widely commented on at the time, but not the sort of thing that remained in popular consciousness into the next generation. I only learned that in my 30s.

@CartoonsHateHer It is sort of odd that her most-used nickname (Jackie O) is from her least famous marriage by a long shot.

Given that it's St. Patrick's Day I have to confess I thought that Jackie Kennedy's maiden name was O'Nassis up until....maybe like a week ago

(I'm sure someone's going to pop in and tell me that London only had a lot of empty houses in 1989 because of the worst-designed law I've ever heard of in my life)

The wonders of adequate housing stock: as the drummer for My Bloody Valentine, you can be homeless while recording Loveless and yet sleep in a house every night.

@aarmlovi @kuza55 @michaeldomps That isn't not an investment just because it was analyzed using Excel in an office on Park Avenue - it's no different than someone researching and deciding to buy GOOG in the evening after work, or a farmer buying up an adjacent empty field for cultivation, etc.

@aarmlovi @kuza55 @michaeldomps More seriously: Investment professionals are also paid salaries; those are taxed as ordinary income. Their carried interest is their share of the profits - some fraction of which is the profits from the partnership making a long-term investment and holding it until it paid off.

I worry about Abundance-Populism fights The irony is Abundance funders want compromise, but factional thought leaders & grassroots LOVE to fight. (Analytic & tribal differences + "Politics as vacation") Maybe unifying ideas like carried interest loophole could come back? And Niskanen's Captured Economy project should be in natural dialogue with anyone opposed to rent-seeking

@kuza55 @michaeldomps @aarmlovi I also don't want to let it go unsaid that those two are both good tax principles. And they interact in a way that makes sense, is easy to understand when you dive in, and produces a good result (investment, through broad and deep capital markets).

@kuza55 @michaeldomps @aarmlovi If a legislator wrote those two provisions and then was surprised that partners in investment firms were paying the capital gains tax rate on their capital gains, I would think that was a pretty bad legislator. Or, more likely, that they're engaging in some left-wing populism.

@michaeldomps @aarmlovi Not really - a "loophole" has to be unintended or at least surprising, it can't just describe an intentional choice made in writing the tax code. More to the point, though, it sounds like the "loophole" you're talking about is the long-term capital gains tax rate?

@TheJakeSchmidt @aarmlovi Legislation that reduces income tax on types of income is commonly called a loophole Stating it’s not a loophole is wrong It’s legal but it’s a legislated giveaway Agree?

Like, the problem of high-income households struggling to make ends meet is 100% a problem of high housing costs. Making it about taxation or groceries or whatever else is just obviously wrong and we're going to end up in the same place pursuing the same brain-dead policies in a few years if we don't solve this.

@AlanMCole Sure, but I didn't assume you meant "the virus has been eradicated", but that the society-disrupting novel pandemic phase was done. But it seems even milder than that - you meant that the actions we needed to take in response to the pandemic were ~done, which seems accurate.

@TheJakeSchmidt Lots of people genuinely got it and died after that day. I think it was worth having vaccinated people immediately return to full normal life in spite of that, but COVID wasn't actually done.

I asked Grok to catalog my worst-aged tweets and it came up with this: 1. Optimism on COVID Being "Basically Done" (May 25, 2021) 2. Call to Lift COVID Restrictions on Private Establishments (May 20, 2021) 3. Inflation as a Short-Term Transitional Issue (May 12, 2021) 4. Harris as a 35-65 Underdog with Winnable Odds (July 23, 2024) I can live with these. Obviously (3) is a big L, no doubt about it. (1) pretty bad as well. I'd defend (2) now, though in light of (1) it's clear that not all of my parameters were will calibrated when forming my view on (2). (4) is not that bad; Grok thinks her odds should've been knowable as worse even ex ante, much less ex post. I suspect a human could come around and get me with worse-aged tweets, not that I want to invite that.