Help to Buy should be dubbed Help to Vote. George Osborne today promised his

游客2025-01-12 3

问题 Help to Buy should be dubbed Help to Vote. George Osborne today promised his party to deliver half a million "hard-working" electors from the dungeons of housing debt to the sunny uplands of Help to Buy. He would shower them with ￡l2 billion of other people’s money. He could summon the spirits of Toryism past, but will they come? With house prices heading back to their 2009 peak, throwing subsidies at the soft underbelly of housing demand looks crazy. The IMF, the Commons Treasury committee, and every economic commentator thinks the policy is mad. Business investment is still a third below its pre-recession level. Why spend billions on the sector that seems not to need it?
To be fair to Osborne, he dreamed up this scheme two years ago in a search to "kick-start" demand. House-building is an economic talisman that had all but stalled. The first round of Help to Buy last year appeared to work, with new building up by 10%. Nor is there a sign of a house price surge outside the south-east. This year’s rise is 3. 3%, and that is driven partly by a tidal wave of foreign funk money pouring into inner London.
Osborne’s officials are also doing their best to discipline the offer. The subsidized 15% deposit on a mortgage is relatively expensive, and is just for seven years. Banks are being told to subject applicants to tough means and credit tests. For an average house, the scheme is unlikely to be affordable to those with incomes below ￡30,000 a year.
The Treasury is also charging banks a fee to administer the loans, making it a relatively safe deal for the taxpayer. In other words, this is no Fannie Mae. It is not about dousing the incautious poor with houses, rather helping our old friends the middling rich. Of the half million people whose dreams David Cameron promises to "make come true", Savills estate agency group reckons a third will be existing home-owners trading up. In other words, if Osborne must stand on the street corner handing money to people, I would certainly rather it went to a few hard-pressed households ready to channel it into the real economy, and it went to them than to the other favourite recipients of his billions.
For all that, the Help to Buy scheme vividly demonstrates the madcap world of British housing finance. The privately owned home has sat at the heart of political argument since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She considered home ownership a right. "Getting on the ladder" was a ritual of growing up. Rent, paid by most Europeans for somewhere to live, was "money down the drain". Thatcher subsidized ownership to the hilt with mortgage tax relief, ignoring the fact that most mortgage-holders were in effect renting their homes from building societies. The accrued value usually lay inert until retirement, or until it passed to lucky offspring. Housing subsidies are either pension subsidies or a colossal child benefit for the next generation rich.
Britons have come to expect politicians to help them step on to the ladder in their late 20s and early 30s. Germans, French and Japanese wait into their 40s, letting their savings fructify in the industrial economy. This is reflected in the figures. Home ownership comprises 43% of households in Germany and 70% in Britain. Just 17% of Britons rent privately, against 48% of Germans. This is some "Englishman’s castle", merely the direct result of half a century of political bribery.
As the economist Adam Posen has pointed out: subsidizing home ownership is not just "a bias towards inflation and housing bubbles", it leaves less money to help those in real housing need. It distorts the nation’s capital accumulation towards bricks and mortar. It increases the divide between house inheritors and the poor. Because home ownership is the icon of the centre ground, Labour panders to it as much as the Tories. Thus the recession began with a house price bubble that hit overcrowded Britain as it did under-crowded America. It was nothing like as bad in overcrowded Germany or Japan. In each case what drove the bubble, or restrained it, was not supply, but reckless lending.
Likewise the much-quoted figure of 250,000 extra houses "needed" in England each year is taken as implying that they must be built afresh. But new-build will be a pin-prick against the awesome stock of existing properties, and those empty and under-used. Any voyage through post-industrial Britain is one of despair at the failure of housing and planning policies to use land efficiently, to regenerate cities and infill suburbs.
The coalition has made some strides. It is right to make it easier to change buildings to residential use, and allow a degree of "garden grabbing". For the first time a government has tried to tackle the misallocation and under-occupancy of social housing, albeit hamfistedly with a bedroom "tax". Housing subsidies should go to the poor. Labour did nothing on this score. The truth is that Britain’s housing finance is a mess. Housing is like crime, a realm of policy that is gripped not by reason but by political psychology. Osborne may indeed summon his spirits from the dungeons, but will they come? [br] The author uses "Help to Vote" to replace the Help to Buy scheme because______.

选项 A、it aims to help the middling rich to buy houses
B、it would use ￡l2 billion of other people’s money to help the middle class
C、it reveals the purpose of the parties to win more voters in their political struggle
D、it shows the political ambition of half a million "hard-working" British electors

答案 C

解析

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