Yep, you don't support me either, DH. I'm positively geared too, paying phenomenal amounts of income and property taxes, provide housing for a good number of households, and by day running a business that supports roughly 22 households that incidentally throws off vast amounts of money into government and related-business coffers. I somehow seriously doubt you'd in any way be supporting me, sorry.
But my point in saying in effect "we property investors will no doubt end up funding your retirement with our taxes" was a virtually empirical observation that you (or, at least, your like) will likely retire with a paid-off PPOR (woohoo!) if you're lucky, a shakey super fund most likely, and almost certainly a very substantial if not total dependence on a government pension, precisely because of your ideologically hostility to one of the most effective means of avoiding this, property (or, indeed, other) investing.
Really: Are YOU doing every last thing YOU can to retire without ultimately feeding at the trough of the welfare state? We (at least, we detractors to your assault on property investing) do wonder here - and with great societal concern too, I assure you! - given that if you're even on this forum you're likely as common as mud and weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth (as opposed to a silver skate
).
Let me put it simply: You, DH, have the alacrity to roundly criticise property investors for utilising negative gearing
as if they created it. Get real! It exists precisely to motivate investors (of all classes, as has been correctly highlighted) to become self-funding retirees, and so to be of NO burden to anyone else in society (and most probably significant benefactors, in the end).
Your problem isn't with property investors, DH, it's with reality. The reality you can't accept is that people work hardest, in the end, for themselves.
I know this is a terribly disappointing revelation: I, like you, desperately wish it were otherwise, but every historical attempt to subvert human nature and twist it to such 'good ends' as to make people work like slaves for others has failed, and most horribly. Liberal Democracy is the most expensive possible societal structure in history, precisely because it's a great 'realistic' compromise: Between liberalism (or personal economic freedom to accumulate wealth) on the one hand, and democracy (or mass redistribution of wealth to assist the less effective in that process) on the other. As Winston Churchill said, it's the worst of all possible forms of government, except any that has ever been tried!
So don't come in here with your piety, DH. It's not clever or insightful: At its best it's appallingly uninformed, and at its worst it's the most conceited idealism of all, totalitarian. (Which
is 'sic'!)
