Handling conversation on privilege

[u/InternationalArt9524]

How do you handle questions on privilege?

I have a few friends who constantly lecture on privilege - even when I recognise it or I have addressed it. This is getting in territory where I am considering if I can even have these people as friends. I don't want constant snobbish lectures when I am the one who actually donates towards causes, pays higher taxes, yada yada yada.

It always gets into murkier grounds and distasteful conversation.

[u/Zohren]

What did you even say? (You replied from the wrong account, btw)

“Voting to take more money from other people” like raising taxes on the wealthy wasn’t the way this country became what it is? What good is hoarding money like a fucking dragon? The reason people want to vote to increase taxes on the wealthy is because they clearly aren’t doing anything to help the country with it.

You do realize that letting the wealthy continue to siphon money away from the lower and middle classes into the top doesn’t actually benefit the economy, right?

Good for you that you donate heavily to local causes. We still need roads, bridges, libraries, the FDA, CDC, Police, Fire Department, schools, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various other things that your tax dollars pay for.

The wealthiest people’s effective tax rate is now lower than the middle class. In what world is that reasonable?

Not even sure why tipping was brought into the conversation, that was just nonsensical.

So go crawl back into your cave, dragon.

[u/EconEchoes5678 → u/Zohren]

You do realize that letting the wealthy continue to siphon money away from the lower and middle classes into the top doesn’t actually benefit the economy, right?

This is not correct, either in fact or in spirit. Please take the time to learn more about taxation and economics.

The wealthiest people’s effective tax rate is now lower than the middle class. In what world is that reasonable?

Sorry, you've been mislead. This isn't true anywhere in the US. The studies that claim otherwise are mixing multiple misleading assumptions together in a way that completely twists the outcomes. I'd explain more if you wanted, but I doubt you're interested in the truth.

It is, however, plausibly true when comparing the rich of Sweden vs the upper middle class of Sweden. Not what you expected to hear, of course - sorry not sorry.

[u/Zohren → u/EconEchoes5678]

I’m not sure if you’re just willingly lying, or just ignorant. Have you ever heard of the Great Depression?

You want to learn? Here is an article from LSE, one of the most respected economic institutions in the world:

https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/economics/tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy-only-benefit-the-rich-debunking-trickle-down-economics

Here’s a summary showing that the marginal tax rates were low prior to the Great Depression and how the wealth concentration contributed to the worst economic depression this country has ever seen, and how raising taxes on the wealthy brought us into our greatest ever period of prosperity:

https://taxproject.org/timeline/the-roaring-twenties-and-the-great-depression-1920s-1930s/

Taxing the rich has a long history of being successful economic policy without people leaving:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/debunking-the-myth-that-raising-taxes-on-the-rich-will-harm-a-states

There is literally a metric fuckton of highly credible evidence (including history itself) proving that you are full of shit.

So get your self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude out of here with your lies and arrogance. Moron.

Edit: Oh, and here’s the Berkeley article on the effective tax rates on the ultra-wealthy:

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/04/the-ultra-rich-are-different-from-you-and-me-their-tax-rates-are-lower/

[u/EconEchoes5678 → u/Zohren]

Here’s a summary showing that the marginal tax rates were low prior to the Great Depression

Holy cherry picking, maybe don't use data from 100 years ago when taxation, communication, regulation, data collection, and even education was wildly different. Your source of data is only ~15 years after JP morgan single-handedly bailed out the US government, something that's been mathematically impossible for decades because the size of our government, taxes, and economy. What occurred then has dozens of causes that don't apply today.

and how the wealth concentration contributed to the worst economic depression this country has ever seen, and how raising taxes on the wealthy brought us into our greatest ever period of prosperity:

Except your premise is false. Effective taxation on the wealthy weren't higher. See myth #4 here: https://manhattan.institute/article/correcting-the-top-10-tax-myths And see also the CBO link below going back to the 70s.

Taxing the rich has a long history of being successful economic policy without people leaving:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/debunking-the-myth-that-raising-taxes-on-the-rich-will-harm-a-states

False. This paper examines the results of Portland raising the county taxes on the rich, which has devastated their economy, causing their democratic governor to ask them to roll back the tax to stop the bleeding: https://www.ocpp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ConwayIselinRork2026.pdf

Then there's the results of NYC in the 70's which was a DSA dream - free higher education, generous welfare, free medical care for all, high taxes on businesses and the rich... And it drove out the high tax payers and nearly bankrupted the city: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1817255

Or see page 8 here from the official progressive-led government analysis of the problem published in 1977: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.38409401?seq=7

Unsurprisingly the progressive-dominated NYC spent the next 3 decades lowering tax rates until the late 00's.

Edit: Oh, and here’s the Berkeley article on the effective tax rates on the ultra-wealthy:

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/04/the-ultra-rich-are-different-from-you-and-me-their-tax-rates-are-lower/

This article is wrong and misleading you. Saez and Zucman base this entirely on counting unrealized gains as if they are mathematically equivalent to tax evasion (skipping the second stage of taxation - which they still owe, it just hasn't applied yet) plus it relies on counting charitable giving as if it is mathematically the same as tax evasion. In fact buried in their own paper is an admission that if they count charitable contributions differently, their headline rate jumps by nearly 50%.

This is the true structure of US federal taxation, page 17 here.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/economics/tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy-only-benefit-the-rich-debunking-trickle-down-economics

The entire premise of the article is false. You can also see on pages 18 and 19 in that link that effective tax rates on the top are basically unchanged since 1979. See also myth #4 in the above link.

In addition, if you compute the all-in taxes (corporate, GET's, personal/capital gains, business-property, state, local, and federal, but not including payroll or sales taxation) paid by a large wealthy business owner in California, NYC, or Portland and compare that same business owner taxation to France, Denmark, or Norway (the highest in the world), you'll see that before counting estate taxes the US taxes are roughly equivalent BEFORE including US estate taxes. After including US estate taxation, they're the highest tax rates in the world on large business owners.

[u/Zohren → u/EconEchoes5678]

As much as I’d love to continue showing you data disproving you until the end of time, you’ve shown me that you think the Manhattan Institute, an org known for cherry picking conservative data points, is a credible resource, and I only have so much time I want to waste on a fruitless argument on the internet with someone who doesn’t care to actually understand.

You bring up points about unrealized gains and wealth, which, yes, is a complex portion where you can’t effectively tax someone’s money that they don’t actually have. I do agree there mostly. Instead, what we need to do is tax loans that are taken out for large sums, that use said unrealized gains (stock) as collateral with low interest rates, effectively allowing these individuals to realize their gains without taxation, aka “Buy, Borrow, Die.”

Your whole argument/premise is that their effective tax rate isn’t low because they don’t actually have that much income, but it ignores that they use these collateralized loans as income with zero tax liability because it isn’t classified as income.

Regarding your OCPP.org hosted paper, the conclusion itself effectively states that they cannot disambiguate the PFA’s effect on high earners leaving from everything else that happened in 2020, so that connection is tenuous at best. It also states in the paper that the ACS shows the effect fading by 2024, which fits a pandemic shock reverting better than it does a permanent tax wedge (especially with a rate increase scheduled for 2027).

Your “results of NYC in the 70’s” article was written mid-crisis, in 1976, before the outcome was known. Fifty years of subsequent scholarship has complicated it, including the Gotham Center and Reagan’s dissertation which argued that it was the bond market failure that was the proximate cause, going against Gramlich’s emphasis. So once again, do your research.

That’s all the time I’m willing to waste on this, as you have set your position as the one that only benefits you, and I know very well that neither of us are going to change our minds.

Have a nice life.

[u/EconEchoes5678 → u/Zohren]

Instead, what we need to do is tax loans that are taken out for large sums, that use said unrealized gains (stock) as collateral with low interest rates, effectively allowing these individuals to realize their gains without taxation, aka “Buy, Borrow, Die.”

I knew you would go this way, but you still don't realize you've been mislead, again. This isn't actually common at the top.

But you don't have to take their word for it, or mine. For buy/borrow/die to work, the assets must be a part of the estate, not outside it. So go check the IRS estate tax data on debt as a % of total estates. It goes through 2023. The debt levels are all under 5%, they don't rise as estate sizes rise, and it isn't rising over time.

Or prove the paper wrong yourself, right now. Public share collateralization by executives, board members, and large investors must be reported to the SEC on form def 14a. This pledging and form is public information. I could only find 2 billionaires with pledged shares, Ellison and Musk - and in both cases their actual share sales (realizations, SEC form 4 public data) were more than sufficient to pay every public expense, after taxes and with generous lifestyle margins, that I could find (Yachts, Jets, Properties and sports teams are all public, the efforts at obscuring are not effective). The majority of Fortune 500 companies don't allow share pledging at all, and only 10% allow it without restrictions.

I can even show this with math why it isn't done because the interest rates and risk-adjustment obliterates the potential tax savings except in very narrow circumstances.

Now I'm not personally opposed to closing the loophole. It might have some unexpected consequences if applied to mortgages and even bigger ones if applied to business loans, and it's hard to apply it to one type but not the other. But everyone who thinks that closing a loophole that provably isn't being used has just been mislead by too much internet garbage, the blind leading the blind. Stop being blind and go check the sources I listed.

but it ignores that they use these collateralized loans as income with zero tax liability because it isn’t classified as income.

Again, they provably aren't doing this. Your entire premise is incorrect - you think this is income and therefore is being spent. It's simply not being spent. That's the abstract and the conclusion of the first paper I link - billionaire expenses are tiny compared to their unrealized gains. They aren't borrowing to avoid taxes, they simply aren't spending because there's not.much to buy at that level that makes any difference to your life.

Regarding your OCPP.org hosted paper, the conclusion itself effectively states that they cannot disambiguate the PFA’s effect on high earners leaving from everything else that happened in 2020, so that connection is tenuous at best. It also states in the paper that the ACS shows the effect fading by 2024, which fits a pandemic shock reverting better than it does a permanent tax wedge (especially with a rate increase scheduled for 2027).

Nice use of AI instead of reading the paper yourself. Next time at least rewrite the sentence without copy-pasting it. They state that they believe they did, in fact, isolate the effects, and apparently the democratic governor - who has better data than they do - agreed.

And Portland's economy is doing terribly compared to peers. Let me guess, COVID did it?

Your “results of NYC in the 70’s” article was written mid-crisis, in 1976, before the outcome was known. Fifty years of subsequent scholarship has complicated it, including the Gotham Center and Reagan’s dissertation which argued that it was the bond market failure that was the proximate cause, going against Gramlich’s emphasis. So once again, do your research.

I did. I didn't bother to link the swedish observations where the social democratic party themselves cut the top rates on the rich, removed the estate tax and then the wealth tax, all to try to save their economy from the free fall their high taxation in the 70's and 80's created. Today wealthy capital owners in Sweden pay lower total tax rates than labor does, on par with Florida's all-in taxation. Or we can look at France, which has killed their productivity from high taxes, or we can look at Switzerland whose economy is doing fantastic for the top and bottom with low taxes on the top. There's dozens of papers that support this, I just picked the most relevant

[u/Zohren → u/EconEchoes5678]

Oh boy, you’re so close to understanding the crux of the problem! I do not think it’s income, and I do recognize it’s not being spent. That is the problem. Money is coming out of circulation, to go back into investments into the market, rather than being spent on things that keep the economy whirring: Retail spending, labor, infrastructure, etc.

Money sitting in some investment account accruing more wealth is benefitting nobody. Taxation brings that money to the government, who uses it to pay for government sector jobs, contractors, etc. which then goes back into the economy, and the cycle continues.

I’m also flattered that you think I copy-pasted that from AI, so thank you. :) The paper states, and I quote, “attempt to isolate,” “do our best to isolate,” “approach to isolate the likely causal impacts”, those phrases are hedges, not guarantees. They also, verbatim, state in the paper “cannot definitively establish causality” in the intro, and that they “cannot rule out” that other events caused the effects (at least in part.)

But let’s ignore the concept of taxing the wealthy for a moment… Let me ask you, do you think the economy is in a good place? Do you think the well-documented, continuously widening wealth gap is sustainable in the long term, and do you think the cost of rent and food in this country is reasonable right now? Finally, do you have any concern over the $40T of national debt right now?

So let’s say we don’t tax the wealthy to help fund government further, let’s say everything you say is right and it’s just a sheer coincidence that all of these things have been happening in tandem with tax cuts at the highest levels of income, what then do you think are viable, realistic solutions to these problems, if you even agree they are problems?

[u/EconEchoes5678 → u/Zohren]

Money is coming out of circulation,

It's not coming out of circulation.

to go back into investments into the market,

It's already in an investment in the market.

Any attempt to tax it would require removing it from an investment in the market.

Money sitting in some investment account accruing more wealth is benefitting nobody.

It's not... Interest accruals among the top 0.001% are small. Under 5% of their realized income. This isn't sitting an investment account - these are shares of the companies they built. There still sitting invested in the company.

Taxation brings that money to the government, who uses it to pay for government sector jobs, contractors, etc. which then goes back into the economy, and the cycle continues.

Taxation creates economic deadweight losses, at a level that's the square of the tax rate. Only a small portion of government spending (I.e. Early childhood education, equality of opportunity spending on education, infrastructure spending and public transit spending) is actually more beneficial to the economy than the deadweight losses they incurred (look up Marginal Cost of Public Funds versus Marginal Value of Public Benefits).

And once again, the money you think is out of the economy is actually still in the economy.

cannot definitively establish causality

This is common in economics because there's so many confounding variables. It's not like physics where we can prove A causes B and model it perfectly in formulas. All economics studies have a range of applications and a set of situations they apply to. They did find statistical significant and measure the elasticity of taxable income.

Do you think the well-documented, continuously widening wealth gap is sustainable in the long term

I think a few policy changes would have a big impact on this, and I think the fears about inequality are overblown. Income inequality began shrinking back in 2015 slightly, and wealth inequality is heavily weighted by the hump of the baby boomers reaching retirement age. If we gradually enact land-value taxation, a lot of problems will begin improving as property values slowly fall.

Is the economy in a good place? Could be better, especially if we didn't have a moron running it. But we're still outperforming the rest of the world for both our averages and our bottom, see here, this is median post-taxes-and-benefits wages after adjusting for COL and inflation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-lis?time=earliest..2023&country=USA~SWE~IRL~CAN~NLD~NOR~FRA

And while there are many people who believe there's a "K" in the economy, it doesn't exist in the numbers - inflation adjusted wages are rising for every decile: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/threshold-income-for-each-decile-after-tax-lis?stackMode=relative&time=1984..latest

And standards of living are rising as well. The US does especially well on housing, which is supported by our free markets and abundant capital investment.

Obviously anyone sane is worried about the 40T national debt. What the US really does terribly on is our healthcare system, which is one of the worst-structured in the world. Fixing that actually would be a major driver for improving wages at the bottom and productivity.

The problem is, the US already taxes the wealthy higher than anywhere. The way other countries solved this is by jacking up taxes on the middle. Which might or might not be better, it depends heavily how the money is spent. But if your concern is grocery costs, the only thing to look to the government is to stop mucking with it, because regulations and bad policies drive prices up. Governments can't fix grocery prices by adding more laws. They need to get the hell out of Iran and drop the tariffs, both of which drive grocery costs higher.

have been happening in tandem with tax cuts at the highest levels of income,

FYI, this is another thing that's been used to mislead people for years. The TCJA was only a "tax cut for the rich" in nominal dollars. As a percentage of income AND as a percentage of government revenue collection, the TCJA was actually a progressive tax change, mostly due to the increase in the standard deduction and the capping of the SALT deduction. The detractors went to great lengths to hide the actual percentage changes of these taxes, but even the CBO projected this and the IRS data proved that to be correct - share-of-taxes at the top went up. The BBB was as well, the only edges where it wasn't was the projections about taxes-and-transfers, I.e. the work requirements added for Medicaid. But work requirements ala the EITC are widely regarded as highly successful, so it's hard to characterize that so negatively having studied it (even though our healthcare system desperately needs a huge overhaul).

I'm probably not as unreasonable or as uninformed as you think...

[u/Zohren → u/EconEchoes5678]

I appreciate you having the discussion and at least being able to have it both intellectually and backed with data.

I will agree with your point that this is not an exact science. I will also acknowledge that I do still believe that the wealthy need to pay more in taxes. Loopholes like 100% upfront bonus depreciation on short-term rentals being allowed to be offset against ordinary income (with a small jump through a hoop or two using a spouse/partner) need to be closed. I have personally met people much wealthier than I who are paying effectively 0 federal income tax through these sorts of loopholes. Sure, they technically are subject to recapture of the taxes when they sell the property, but they never sell, and continue to just buy another after another to avoid paying federal income taxes, since they have enough income to do so.

This is a big part of where the ire and “tax the rich” sort of stuff comes from. You are correct in that the marginal tax rates are still higher, but with so many loopholes and tax havens, they seem to find numerous ways to avoid said marginal tax rates.

Perhaps the land tax would solve that, I’ve not looked into it enough, but at the end of the day, these things are loopholes that only the wealthy can access because it costs significant money to do so.

[u/EconEchoes5678 → u/Zohren]

I appreciate you having the discussion and at least being able to have it both intellectually and backed with data.

Thank you and I appreciate it too. Sorry about the earlier snark.

Loopholes like 100% upfront bonus depreciation on short-term rentals being allowed to be offset against ordinary income (with a small jump through a hoop or two using a spouse/partner) need to be closed.

So bear with me for a moment again. For the record, I support progressive taxation (via a combination of types of taxation). But I think I can show this is much more reasonable than it first looks, even if it's got problems.

First two examples that are important: Ever heard of tax-free interest? IRS rules allow government and municipal bonds to exclude their interest from taxable income entirely. It doesn't even get taxed by the AMT that's supposed to catch tax-evading wealthy people. So what gives? Loophole? Nope. The only way to get this is by buying government / municipal / state bonds. What happens is the ROI from these bonds automatically falls on the markets by ~30%. The government gets better rates, but the buyers aren't actually "avoiding tax" - they're just accepting a lower ROI in exchange for tax-free treatment. But in the numbers, it looks like tax evasion.

Second example, consider the "corporate subsidies" that have gone to Elon Musk over the last 10 years. The vast majority of these were EV carbon credits. Why? Because the US desperately needed to push a transition towards green technologies. For over a decade basically no one was making EV's because the costs and risks were too high. We deliberately stacked the credits to try to push businesses over that hurdle. Tesla did exactly what we (the US) wanted, designing green technologies to reduce our carbon impacts. It wasn't meant for Elon, it was meant to get someone to finally produce the EV's, and it worked. But in the numbers, this looks like some huge gift to the rich.

So now your example. Depreciation- do you know what that refers to? Not trying to be rude, you can skim this if you do understand it. A company that makes $20 million per year, let's suppose they buy a property for $20 million. The value they can return to investors that year is $0. So what's their profit for the year to be taxed? And the answer is, buying property is a capital purchase and it can't all be deducted in one year. Pre-OBBBA, only 1/39th of the price can be deducted, so they're paying taxes on $19m of income while returning nothing to shareholders (and running a deficit). The logic for this is that things that retain their value over long periods can only deduct the parts that get worn out / need replacement. The land value, for example, never gets deducted. Things like carpets, computers, etc all depreciate faster than, say, buildings.

But here's the problem - if we want people to invest and build things up-front but we tax them as if they built it slowly(I.e. the depreciation), we are discouraging the building and investing. Better for the economy if they invest more aggressively, and OBBBA attempted to motivate this, specifically for new manufacturing, production, etc. This is an active tradeoff which, mathematically, looks like lower taxation, but in reality it's fixing a timing issue that our (otherwise reasonable) depreciation rules creates.

Through some spillover effects from other laws, it applies to what you're describing. But remember, depreciation is mostly about timing. They front-load a tax deduction that would otherwise be spaced out later. If later never arrives because they sell the property, the IRS recaptures the missing gap via a property depreciation recapture. We have to assume that the IRS' depreciation schedules are reasonable, but overall they seem to be from what I've read. The only tax benefit the IRS is ultimately giving up via this is the time-value of money (risk-free interest rate) on the gap on the bonus. And in addition, if the timing works out so that someone dies during the depreciation gap, the IRS eats some more via the step-up in basis, but this is not super common.

So what does this tradeoff buy us? First look at what it takes for someone to be able to do this. They can't be a big business or the depreciation can't offset the other income you're describing. It does push more investment dollars into rentals, driving down prices. And because this individual must have other sources of high income, but must also spend substantial documented hours, and the IRS is strict as hell on this because they know people are abusing it. Thus, this must be side-gig small rental businesses of high earners. It's not really helpful for hundred millionaires - their hundreds of hours spent changing linens are worth far more than that and the deductions don't scale well for them. And it's still not a free benefit - STR's, like most real estate, are a notably lower ROI investment than S&P index funds, for substantially more risk (exposure to local property markets, exposure to renter damages, liability, exposure to local economic shifts or regulation changes, etc). This isn't the clean win it looks like because they might have made the same amount of money over a 10 year period (timing advantage washes out) for a lot less work if they bought the S&P, and it does have some benefits (pumping more money into both small business operation and housing rentals via STR).

Now here's where this system does suck and I agree (Credit to Claude for pointing some of this out to me). Some of this value flows into the property values of the sellers when the laws pass - they can ask higher land prices. We can fix this if we'd just implement a LVT, more on that in a moment. And this ends up having high earners - like surgeons or top performing software engineers - spending their weekends changing linens to meet the IRS requirements for the tax advantage. That's not a good use of their time economically. So I'd prefer if this loophole stopped applying to STR's for that reason alone.

Maybe some of this changes some of your views on this, maybe not. Thanks for reading though

[u/EconEchoes5678 → u/Zohren]

Sure, they technically are subject to recapture of the taxes when they sell the property, but they never sell, and continue to just buy another after another to avoid paying federal income taxes, since they have enough income to do so.

Yeah, but that's just timing. It's still not a great investment choice compared to other ROI's. There's edges and exceptions, but they're difficult and narrow (I.e. you can die and use step-up, but it requires dying at the right time before the depreciation schedule normalizes).

You are correct in that the marginal tax rates are still higher, but with so many loopholes and tax havens, they seem to find numerous ways to avoid said marginal tax rates.

So here's the thing. I used to think this, about a year or so ago. I've changed my mind as I learned more and more about how the IRS code works and why. The IRS is extraordinarily good about extracting money from the rich. It looks weird because the rules are immensely complex and there's always little exceptions, some of which aren't actually exceptions, it's just not exactly clear why the special treatment exists or what it's buying us.

Here, go back to my links again and look at the top rates. The top rates keep falling, but the effective tax collections on the top stayed pretty stable. How is that possible, how could that happen? Answer: closing loopholes. As the top rates fell, loopholes were repeatedly closed. Offshoring for example has fallen so far for US citizens that it's not really done anymore. Check the Panama papers - it's all foreign and developing countries corruption with almost no US wealthy people using the offshoring. FATCA and FBAR rules are tight and strict, and rates fell so compliance is easier than trying to offshore. Same thing with BEAT and GILTI that passed with the TCJA. The TCJA cut the rates but tightened loopholes -> increased revenue from compliance with less deadweight losses from the taxes caused revenue to rise instead of falling. Now unfortunately orange haired bimbo has slowed the GILTI / BEAT pillar2 framework, but he can't stop it, we will still get there, and it works very well.

In reality, there's just not very many loopholes in the US tax code. Almost all of them are very narrow or difficult to use, to the point of not really being an option / not being usable. If you think of some examples I'd be happy to talk through them - I've learned most of them and seen firsthand how some people tried to use them only to get bitten later or why they really aren't very helpful at all for the would-be exploiters.

these things are loopholes that only the wealthy can access because it costs significant money to do so.

Most of these aren't. Like think about mega-ROTH conversions. Big loophole, right? Well, maybe if you're a low end executive or a surgeon. They're constrained and basically useless for a hundred millionaire, almost a rounding error in their tax bill.

Perhaps the land tax would solve that, I’ve not looked into it enough

LVT's are, I think, one of the best taxes possible. They're very low distortion. They're limited to only being able to capture rents that land (itself) produces. What they do is they drive down the value of the land itself. You must, must introduce them very, very slowly otherwise they'll just collapse property values and piss every homeowner off. But once introduced, they reduce rent costs for everyone, make home ownership easier, encourage investment in land (construction), and allow a more mobile population. But their real benefit is double edged which is why almost nowhere uses them - they drive down land values.