00:00The debate for L.A. mayor between challenger Nithya Raman and incumbent Karen Bass
00:04was mostly negative, but it had several interesting exchanges. And one of the most
00:09interesting came when moderators asked Raman to explain why she had supported Measure ULA,
00:14which voters passed in 2022, but later said it needed to be reformed. Measure ULA is known as
00:20the mansion tax, and it was sold to voters as a way to tax high-end real estate and use
00:25the proceeds
00:26to fund affordable housing. But in practice, Measure ULA doesn't just apply to big houses.
00:31It also applies to commercial buildings and to apartment buildings. It has discouraged
00:36developers from building new apartments, which means that Measure ULA is actually holding back
00:40the growth of housing in L.A. and not helping it. Raman therefore called for reforms, but when the
00:46moderators asked her why she didn't know that Measure ULA would do that in the first place,
00:50she said that she always follows the data and that the data had predicted that the tax would be
00:55successful. That's not entirely true. In fact, if you go back to 2022, there were many people
01:00arguing that Measure ULA would have exactly the effect that it has had. And you didn't even need
01:05data to do it. You just needed to look at hundreds of years of economic history. The fact is that
01:10socialism does not work. It has never worked. It has failed everywhere it has been tried. And when
01:16you tax something, you get less of it. It hurts in L.A. not just because luxury real estate is
01:21a big
01:21business here. But it also hurts because you need people to be able to invest in housing if other
01:28people are going to be able to find housing. This is important because Raman is a socialist and
01:34her ideology does play a role in the decisions voters are going to have to make when they go to
01:40the polls. Do they trust the pragmatic version of Raman that changed her mind after the tax failed?
01:45Or do they have to worry about the Raman who is a socialist, who trusts the ideology and votes
01:51for something even though the whole of history and basic economics tells you it's not going to work?
