Maga Declares War on the Property Tax

North American zoning breaks this assumption since no matter how popular a given location becomes, it remains illegal to do anything on it except teardown & 1:1 replacement of existing houses. This guarantees that all land rises in value due to scarce floorspace, while simultaneously guaranteeing that most owners of the land won't have the cash to pay property tax.

If you had the freedom to build on your land, this would solve property tax 2 ways: - if you want to build, you can, and in doing so, property tax ceases to be a significant expense - if you don't want to build but others do, their doing so eases the floorspace shortage, so that land doesn't become so expensive

For bonus points, property tax should exempt the value of the structure. There's some logic to the idea that since we cannot directly manufacture land, there's always some public stake in it. But we can directly manufacture floorspace, just like we can manufacture tv's and shoes. We don't tax ownership of tv's & shoes, so it makes sense to exclude floorspace as well.

I'm now much more in favor of a Georgist-style land value tax, where wealth taxes on natural monopolies like land are the only form of taxation. This biases the society toward action (if you don't make enough money to afford the opportunity cost of your continued ownership of the land, you lose it) and aligns incentives much more between renters, landlords, entrepreneurs, and municipal governments.

I do think there needs to be standardized, publicized assessment methods that are independent of politics and local government employees. Otherwise there's too much of an incentive for governments to fudge the assessments to increase the tax revenues they can generate. Really, this is a task for a computer: run a regression on comparable sales and take human judgment out of it.

Why do people who have more income pay more taxes? Why do people with huge capital gains often pay very little? I think a good place to start thinking about these things is reading about why they had to call the Estates General in 1789.

> As the name suggests, a property tax deferral program allows seniors to defer paying their property taxes until death.

More direct pricing of police, fire, education, roads is likely the end game they're looking for - and it's kinda the case in California for new build via Mellon-Roos.

The linked article ignores an important point that many LVT proponents tend to ignore. How, and who, sets the value of your land?

Current property taxes, any flaws aside, are fairly transparent and difficult to game. A property value is set based on comparable sales in the neighborhood. If the government decides to assess your 1500sqft house at $1M but every neighboring 1500sqft home has sold for 500K in the last year, you can very successfully appeal this wrong assessment. It has to be based on actual comparable sales, and that is difficult to cheat on because it is driven by the clearing price on the market on executed sales.

A LVT is based on the theoretical value of your lot, on what it could be worth if some optimal but nonexistent building was there generating maximum revenue. But it is all speculation. This is very open to fraud and corruption.

This is a feature, not a bug. One of the reasons why Singapore develops its land a lot more sanely than most places is that its leasehold structure and progressive property taxes rationalize land use and depreciate home values. One of the single worst and medieval incentives in the American system is that home ownership is a sort of 18th century poor man's social security and people expect home prices to increase, which obviously has disincentivized construction.

I have absolutely no issue with prop 13. It's way too fucking easy for state bureaucrats to just keep soaking property owners every time they fuck up a budget.

Given that land is in fixed supply, your city/town should have a vested interest to ensure that it's used efficiently, as is the rest of society.

If your property is worth million of dollars in the middle of a skyscrapper district, then you are in truth a land hoarder.

There's a very famous movement in the 19th century called Georgism that's all about taxing land. You could liken the founder Henry George as to the American "Karl Marx", except he was never really interested in abolishing capitalism.

But I wonder what the best ways to tax people are. Broadly, the US taxes income, capital gains, sales, and property. They all suffer pros and cons with how progressive/regressive they are, complexity of implementation, ease of dodging, and revenue variability. The common belief is move from California to Texas for lower income taxes, but then you find out that property taxes are higher, there are toll roads everywhere, and a lower level of government services, so there's never a free lunch. You also have to balance local needs (Alaska has different expectations and needs than San Francisco) with preventing taxation games like Oregon/Washington sales/income tax avoidance or headaches like living in NJ, working in NYC.

(It’s particularly bad in Texas because the largest landed estates like ranches use various tricks to avoid paying most property taxes so the regressive burden ends up falling even harder on the middle class, who now has to pay the entire share of funding state services. I don’t know how Texas keeps up this reputation as a low-tax haven for fleeing California, the reality is that you’ll be paying gobs of property taxes unless you’re either a renter with no land or a baron with tons of land who can schmooze your way out.)

You want the government to pay for children's books out of the pockets of alcoholics? I know that's an uncharitable reading of what you said, but that's what it boils down to. If people drink less alcohol, generally considered a good thing for society (I say this as someone with a well-stocked liquor cabinet), then the kids get fewer textbooks.

You might be thinking of sales or state income tax, which there are none in NH.

This would probably make it more palatable to MAGA, but also I think to most other people too. It would probably destabilize municipalities: I have to imagine that most properties are dramatically over- or under-priced at present; on net I'd guess overpriced wins.

School districts are particularly tricky, though, for all the usual reasons.

If you need additional taxes, I recommend piguovian taxes on road congestion, pollution, and other bad stuff. This cut down on bad stuff within your environment and reduces incidences like fire. Cars catches on fire all the time.

Code enforcement and insurance coverage also helps with cutting down on fire and such.

Also, local government services encourages or protect economic growth. I don't like paying taxes based on usage, because public education benefits me whether I use it or not. I'll gladly pay for public education regardless.

As Mason Gaffney notes in his article, "Containment Policies for Urban Sprawl"

"Consider water distribution. If demand doubles within a fixed service area by doubling density, we need simply expand all pipe diameters—and not by double, but by the square root of two, since cross-sections increase with the square of the radius. But if demand doubles by doubling the service area, at constant density, we must, (a) double our pipe mileage; (b) double the cross section of our old system at its base, and more than double it elsewhere, to transmit the extra load through to the new extension; (c) increase pressure at the system load center to maintain it at the fringes (especially if the new lands are higher); and (d) upgrade our pipe-joints to hold the extra pressure.

Actually those four simplest considerations understate the case a good deal. We should add the factor of peaking. The fewer customers on a given line, the higher is the usual ratio of peak demand to mean daily demand because there is less pooling of offsetting demand patterns, and more lawn sprinkling. There is also a factor of planning expansion.

"Containing urban sprawl" does not imply halting growth, but holding it inside compact increments, whose ultimate density is known in advance and will be reached quickly, saving utilities from the waste of under- or oversizing their lines in the face of uncertainty. Urban sprawl as known today not only reduces density but breeds extreme uncertainty of future density."

> Amazing that Republicans would want to copy that, considering how many of the social ills that they bash California for are direct consequences of it.

Shipping out the poor and exporting conservative politics to seed elsewhere, all while property values skyrocket, seems to be just what Republicans might want! Don't you think so?

> municipalities can only keep pace with inflation by ensuring that there's a steady stream of new buyers at ever-higher prices. Because of that, they vote to [...] restrict the supply of housing ("at ever-higher prices").

Restricting housing supply would lower their income, not increase it. Two $500k homes pay 25% more property tax than one $800k home.

It would be a loss for all of us in the medium term, but, politically, it's a glass-shattering slam dunk.

Every one of the original 13 states had property taxes when they won their independence from the British. They all kept those taxes throughout the process of forming the US, and they have all kept those taxes ever since. Furthermore, every state that joined the US after that either had property tax when they joined or instituted one soon after.

Every Founding Father therefore did see property taxes. Did they hate them?

Thomas Jefferson advocated a progressive property tax that would exempt the value of property below a certain point and tax the rest with the tax rising in a geometric progression as the value rises.

George Washington didn't specifically say what he thought of property taxes, but his state, Virginia, had a property tax and as one of the largest landowners in the state he was one of those taxed the most. So if he hated property taxes it wasn't enough to actually try to change them or write about it.

Benjamin Franklin believed that property was a product of social convention and thus legitimately subject to government regulation and taxation for the public good.

John Adams was OK with property taxes, as long as they were equitable. When he was President there was an armed revolt in eastern Pennsylvania over federal taxes on houses, land, and slaves and Adams sent in federal marshals to put it down.

Alexander Hamilton regarded them as legitimate, as did James Madison. Like Washington I don't think they said whether they preferred them or preferred other taxes to raise money the government needed.

When John Jay was government of New York the state had a property tax. Like Washington he did not publish an opinion on it or try to do anything to end it.

That's doesn't sound like any of them hated them.