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by bombcar 729 days ago
Really? Really? So if you bought a shack in Vancouver twenty years ago for a song and now it's worth the entire symphony orchestra you can sell it with no taxes?

No wonder prices up there have gone bonkers even by US standards.
1 comments
cmrdporcupine 729 days ago
Yeah 0. None other than land transfer tax which is very little. And if anybody suggested putting in a sane G7 standard tax policy around this, the baby boomers would come rip their head off and parade it around on a pitchfork.

Non-primary residence of course gets fully taxed.

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bombcar 729 days ago
It's ... actually a reasonable policy, in some way. It can be quite annoying in the USA when you (if single) have more capital gains than you get "for free" ($250k which sounds like a lot, but if you bought in CA 20 years ago and are now moving, that can get eaten up quickly - a $300k house in 2004 would be almost $500k today from inflation alone) you pay tax.

Then if the house you bought with the proceeds drops in value and you have to sell, you can't claim a deduction for the capital loss.

Of course all capital gains taxes whatsoever have the hidden inflation problem, where you get taxed on the inflation caused by ...

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cmrdporcupine 729 days ago
In my opinion all these policies which encourage housing inflation are just the result of western neo-liberal economies trying to cover over their abdication of reasonable retirement/pension policies.

Trudeau was on record a couple weeks ago basically saying "we can't let housing prices fall. if housing prices fall, people won't be able to retire" which is a fucked up admission that there's no way to "retire" without passing debt onto the next generation.

It's not going to end well. It either falls apart in crisis / housing bubble pop, or we end up with some kind of neo-feudalist future slowly developing over the next 100-200 years.

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