Talk:PragerU

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The Brazilian part

RW response is quite wrong in this one. I don't want to defend Bolsonaro here (I'll gladly vote for Lula if that means getting rid of him next year). But "the number of people in extreme poverty rose to the highest level in a decade" is a result of the pandemic, though you can say that one of the reasons why the pandemic hit Brazil so hard was because of Bolsonaro. Also, the economy didn't shrink in 2015 and 2016 because of a "decrease in exports", but because the government was incompetent. Finally, it's not correct to say that he lifted 20 millions from poverty because 1 this extraordinary figure was inflated because they changed the way they calculate it 2 it was despite, and not because Lula. I can provide sources of this. Also, the economy did shrink in 2009, even if only a bit.

Can I remove this part? GeeJayK (talk) 16:05, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

@Tuxer added it. Christopher (talk) 20:50, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

I think that the bit about Bolsonaro should stay, as he is the current president and is thus directly responsible for the economic fallout due to his hands off and boderline denialist approach to the pandemic. As for Lula, I wouldn't be surpised if the numbers were inflated tbh but maybe we should review your sources before changing it. So we can rewrite that bit. Is that fair? Tuxer (talk) 23:14, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

As I said, I don't think it's the right time, especially if we consider that Brazil's GDP dropped less than the Latam's average last year IIRC. We should wait before more academic stuff comes out in my opinion. As for Lula, I do have many sources here and I'm quite sure about what I'm saying. I'll rewrite his article in a couple of weeks. GeeJayK (talk) 23:26, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

PragerU on fascism

https://twitter.com/prageru/status/1411445395192893443 — 𝗦𝗾𝗿𝘁-𝟭 ^{talk stalk} 04:22, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Marxism more dangerous than any other thing according to PragerU subscribers

https://www.reddit.com/r/PragerUrine/comments/stjkid/they_cant_be_serious_can_they/ — 𝗦𝗾𝗿𝘁-𝟭 ^{talk stalk} 10:13, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Rental control

This article lists supposed 'stopped clock' moments, one of which is that, "PragerU also made a video criticizing rent control, which almost all economists believe is bad". One of the citations links to an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled, "The one issue every economist can agree is bad: Rent control". This article claims that, "Rent control is supposed to protect poor, deserving tenants from the depredations of greedy landlords." which is hogwash. I presume that the other two citations that are less accessible say basically the same thing. But landlords don't set the market rate for rentals, nor do they put any pressure on rates, they just happen to be the people renters pay their rent to, so that interaction makes renters erroneously think that their landlords are 'greedy' when their rents are raised, and this article exploits and attempts to validate that false belief.

And while economists may all agree that rent-controls are bad, the 'solution' for ever-increasing rental rates that this article references doesn't come from 'economists', it comes from developers, who happen to be the actual 'greedy' ones. The developer's solution, as always, is to 'build more rental stock'. But that is more hogwash, because even if building over-stock would ever result in lowering of rental rates, which it never does, developers would stop building as soon as they're no longer raking in their greedy profits! They only want to build when the land values, along with the rental rates, continue going up. Developers make money by densifying, which means they are constantly lobbying city planners to relax zoning rules (such as increasing the amount of stories for apartment/condo buildings, eliminating rules for providing parking garages, relaxing concrete to greenery ratios, etc. - laws that are meant to ensure that densified neighborhoods are livable.) and the city planners seem to have been drinking the developer's koolaide, because the developers have convinced them that building (at market rate) out of the housing crisis is viable when in fact it is ridiculous.

The only way to put downward pressure on rental rates is for governments to build non-market social housing, which is the one thing developers want not to happen more than any other scheme. In the 60s and 70s governments built a lot of social housing, but by the 80s developers had managed to convince them to stop. Ever since then land values and rental rates have steadily climbed. FairDinkum (talk) 04:24, 27 November 2022 (UTC)