>OK, so what is it about America that screws up a good idea?

That's a valid question. Without any particular research or reason, I would imagine it has a lot to do with politics (is it a great society program or an entitlement program?) Besides, who has better access to politicians of any stripe? Would it be bankers and landlords or the poor?

The problem isn't with the housing voucher program, or even with section 8, but rather it seems like the poor are invariably victims of systemic flaws in American style capitalism. For instance, how do you define what is "working class"? Not even thirty years ago, the working class consisted of unskilled laborers in manufacturing. Mills, mines, factories. America's largest private sector employer was General Motors, a job that paid enough to support owning: a nice suburban home, a late model vehicle, a modest boat, a cottage in the country, and a family vacation at least once a year. Now, America's largest employer is WalMart, where hourly employees can't dream to afford any one of those things.

So, even if we radically restructured our political system so that the rich didn't have an enormous ability to buy influence, and got past our silly idea that private industry is necessarily more efficient than public endeavors (newsflash: it's not) and managed to build a flood of state housing, it'd be one state of poverty rounding the ranks of the destitute. Neither of those classes shows much hope in the arena of social mobility.

This may well lower rent rates across the board. I still don't feel it's really an acceptable solution. I guess that's why I still support the voucher program as an alternative to other tenable solutions. Recipients have the ability to follow jobs or transfer to other areas.

For what it's worth, housing vouchers can be applied to mortgages. But even with stellar credit and a qualified cosigner, the banks demand at least a sizable down payment. We're talking several months worth of wages. We've tried giving away mortgages to people without the capital to make a down payment. The banks collected several years of payments, foreclosed on the opportunity, and resold the property back to the public.

That brings me to a fairly interesting tangent that I'd like to digress on. Home ownership is not the status quo in a lot of European countries. The US is markedly different in that the idea of buying a home is seen as a universal cultural value. Some time after the big stock market crash of 2008, a group called RSA Animate posted a Youtube video of a Marxist economics professor lecturing called "Crises of Capitalism". One of the claims that he makes is this notion of home ownership dates only back to the 1930s. He goes on to claim that the idea was propagated because "debt incumbent home owners don't go on strike".

This isn't to say that the European way is better or that ownership shouldn't be a vaunted ideal. Rather, it's meant to contrast the differences in the American norms versus that of other developed countries. I'd be interested to see if their public housing institutions are more equitable than ours, and corresponding data on their rent rates.

I'm all for restructuring taxes on landlords, too. But capitalism is shitty in that the merchant usually shifts taxes onto consumers. Ergo, if you increase taxes on leased property, the vendor will gradually incorporate the costs of taxes into their assessment of the property value. Of course, there is a threshold, but it encourages landlords to maximize their returns.

You might not be off, though, because rental rates couldn't increase beyond a certain threshold. You'd have to establish the tax rate beyond where it harms the consumer and all the way to the point that it benefits the public. That might not decrease rent, but it ought to increase living standards.