{"id":193,"date":"2006-06-12T16:02:53","date_gmt":"2006-06-12T10:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2006\/06\/12\/how-to-encourage-corruption\/"},"modified":"2006-06-12T16:02:53","modified_gmt":"2006-06-12T10:32:53","slug":"how-to-encourage-corruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2006\/06\/12\/how-to-encourage-corruption\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Encourage Corruption"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems that people try to evade stamp duty (a tax imposed on the sale or transfer of real estate) by reporting a low price on the invoice and then paying the rest in cash. The Delhi government&#8217;s brilliant idea to solve this problem and get all the tax it&#8217;s missing out on has been to fix a minimum price on all real estate. (Incidentally, I am stunned that the Slimes of India, which <a href=\"http:\/\/timesofindia.indiatimes.com\/articleshow\/1637711.cms\">broke this story<\/a> did not come up with a pun involving price floors and floor areas. It just goes to show you that there is hope in this world. Or more depressingly and more likely, that the SOI staff doesn&#8217;t know enough economics to know what a price floor is.)<br \/>\nAnyway, I can&#8217;t see how this will remove corruption. For existing areas, it will of course only <em>reduce<\/em> corruption. People will be forced to pay at least the price floor on the invoice, but will still make up the rest in cash. But that&#8217;s for <em>existing<\/em> areas.<\/p>\n<p>In the long run, this will of course increase corruption. Real estate developers who are coming up with new neighbourhoods will be bribing local officials to get their neighbourhood classified as a particular class- either upwards or downwards, depending on what they think the market will take. Whenever rates have to be adjusted to account for inflation or changes in market conditions, builder and landlord lobbies will swing into action to get the rates fixed.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve already seen the effect of sixty years of a price ceiling in Bombay. Do we really need a price floor in Delhi?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems that people try to evade stamp duty (a tax imposed on the sale or transfer of real estate) by reporting a low price on the invoice and then paying the rest in cash. The Delhi government&#8217;s brilliant idea to solve this problem and get all the tax it&#8217;s missing out on has been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-and-economics","category-public-policy-and-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-37","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}