> Property taxes, after all, punish development because they factor in the value of the house or whatever other structure happens to be built on top.6 Instead of abolishing property taxes, shifting to land value taxation (LVT) would constitute an actual improvement.
We need both.
We need land value taxation to reflect that land is a limited resource, and incentivize building tall apartment buildings downtown instead of wasteful parking lots.
On the other hand, we still need to tax houses and buildings because they correlate to usage of local government services. Whether it's the fire department where 20 apartments are 20x more likely to catch fire than a single tiny home, or the police where a large rich mansion is more likely to be targeted by theives than a tiny home, or schools where the larger a building is, the more likely it is to have more kids needing education (or more adults who once benefited from public schooling and are now paying it forwards).
Taxes are for allocating originally public resources efficiently (whether radio spectrum or land), and for paying for mandatory government services which you're not allowed to opt out of.
Higher LVT will take care of this if you need more revenue. It is simply the most efficient way to raise tax revenue, one that encourage economic growth,
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.
A pure LVT would basically put all low income housing (as older housing) in high value areas out of business very quickly: those properties would have to be redeveloped for higher income purposes way sooner than they would have under a normal property tax scheme. You also have to plan projects not only for current land values, but for land values predicted 20-40 years into the future (and your building isn’t going to depreciate, although that doesn’t happen much in property tax systems either).
This is an oversimplification. Density in fact makes public infrastructure more efficient and more predictable.
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."
It seems like you could straightforwardly unbundle the property tax into a bunch of specific fees and insurances. We're comfortable requiring car insurance, why not fire and police?
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.
> We're comfortable requiring car insurance, why not fire and police?
For police, specifically because law and order is a core function of the state and to be provided to every resident regardless of ability to pay. If the state can't do that, it's called a failed state.
For fire, because just like car insurance there will be people who will evade the requirements, endangering others' lives and property. And we don't want firefighters to decide whether or not to save lives or neighboring properties based on coverage.
People correlate to usage of services, not buildings. An empty apartment building is no more likely to catch fire than an empty house. Taxing land and taxing people, via local sales and/or income taxes, makes more sense to me.
> People correlate to usage of services, not buildings. An empty apartment building is no more likely to catch fire than an empty house.
No, it's both.
People correlate to things like schools. Buildings correlate to things like the fire department, precisely because -- as you put it -- an empty apartment building will catch fire too. And construction regulation, and the courts, and all sorts of stuff. There are a lot of government services that really are building-oriented as opposed to person-oriented.
IMHO schooling ought to be funded entirely at the state/federal level, not the local level, just for greater economic equality and opportunity. But since it is funded at the local level, and people don't like high sales taxes (and taxing visitors buying stuff to pay for local schools is weird), and local income taxes often don't exist, it ends up being property taxes. Still, there are some states that do have local income taxes, which is generally a much better solution.
In Washington state they have a formula that factors in land value and improvements, moving the bar toward land value on the last few tax years. But ya, it’s hard to maintain schools if the needle doesn’t actually include capacity for students to service (the biggest expense paid for with property taxes here, note Washington pays for schools with statewide property taxes unlike most other states).
Not everyone needs to live in your particular neighborhood. The US native population is shrinking so baring immigration (which we absolutely do not need more of) housing prices should fall without any development.
> The US native population is shrinking so baring immigration (which we absolutely do not need more of) housing prices should fall without any development.
This will only be true in a world where nobody moves, which is not the world we live in. Like, if all jobs are in California and New York, one would expect house prices to rise there (while collapsing everywhere).
Remote would have made this much less bad, but it turns out that's not going to happen to the extent people expected during Covid (mind you, lots of people did naive extrapolation during Covid which basically hasn't worked out anywhere).
Prop 13 is actually worse than the article mentions, in terms of perverse incentives. Because tax rates are effectively frozen and assessed vaule goes up slower than inflation, 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 relax immigration requirements and promote new office jobs ("steady stream of new buyers") and restrict the supply of housing ("at ever-higher prices"). Because of that, California needs a constant supply of new industries where they can redirect an ever-greater flow of global income into the pockets of California residents, just to allow government expenditures to keep up with inflation.
Prop 13 basically enshrined a pyramid scheme into the state constitution.
And that has led to all sorts of social ills that people routinely criticize California for. The homelessness crisis is because of the revolving housing door: we don't build new housing, but we do higher more new highly-paid employees, so by the pigeonhole principle the lowest-paid Californians will be forced to either move out or go homeless. The "California conveyor", that Republican-decried phenomena where Californians move out of state and take their politics with them, is all because local governments are forced to limit housing and evict their long-time residents in order to keep tax revenues high. California's focus on high-margin industries like tech startups and entertainment is likewise because everything else doesn't generate the steady stream of new dollars and new workers needed to turn over houses and reset their property tax base. And the short-term focus of these industries, where they're willing to destroy society as long as they become a trillion-dollar company in a decade, also makes sense when you consider that existence within the state is itself a pyramid scheme.
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.
> 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.
Personally I don’t like the idea of a property tax. You don’t really own your house if some city politicians can just vote for higher and higher taxes continuously and confiscate what you are supposed to “own” when you can’t pay or refuse to pay.
Plus the increase in tax from arbitrary assessments of value is just weird. Why should a house worth more pay more? There should be fixed pricing for the services the city offers (like electricity or whatever), unrelated to how your house gets appraised.
I used to have similar feelings, but then realized that this idea of ownership, where you can just sit back and relax and "own" something in perpetuity, is a fool's errand. Why? Because reality doesn't work that way. And I don't just mean social reality - physical reality doesn't either. Entropy will swallow up your property and your society, and the money you pay in taxes largely goes to things like keeping the roads clear, the sewers flowing, the criminals out of town, etc. The ability to sit back and relax secure in your property ownership is basically the ability to freeload off of everyone else who got there afterwards.
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.
> run a regression on comparable sales and take human judgment out of it.
It's extremely rare to find enough comparable sales of parcels of land only to run a regression on. In an intensely developed area, the overwhelming majority (like 98+%) of sales will be inextricably linked sales of land and improvements of that land.
I have some intellectual agreement with LVTs, but the practical implementation is daunting and it seems to make it much harder to appeal a bad assessment.
I think of it as: You don't own land. You don't buy land. You purchase and own the title to exclusive use of the land that is recognized and protected by the government. That's what one is paying for and typically any additions (real property, i.e. structures) attached to the land. Property taxes (id prefer land tax) are the annual "protection" fees.
> 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.
Why only natural monopolies? Why should Google, say, be taxed on the value of the land under their buildings, but not on the value of the google.com domain name?
A key assumption behind property tax is that land in a given location increases in value because that location has become more popular, and thus the owner of popular land is likely in one of two boats:
- utilizing the land more intensely thus easily able to pay tax based on value
- rich enough not to care
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.
> We don't tax ownership of tv's & shoes, so it makes sense to exclude floorspace as well.
give it time and that will be taxed too. in more states than not in the US citizens are not only not allowed to own houses but also cars without paying the government a fee every year - the shoes and tvs and kids toys are coming :)
Property tax is the only common wealth tax in the US. All the issues people have with it like arbitrary appraisals and wildly variable taxes during market swings would also show up in more widespread wealth taxes.
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.
If you live in the US, you're welcome to move to one of the states that doesn't have property tax. But the states that do have it is a choice of the states. Federal doesn't have a say.
There is no US state without property tax. Maybe you are thinking of income tax (Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming) or sales tax (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon)?
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.
> if some city politicians can just vote for higher and higher taxes continuously
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.
That's a theoretical argument that is extremely rare in practice (at least in California). If you want to base your "ideas" of taxes (Do you own real estate?) on edge cases why not worry about eminent domain or property seizures without a warrant or charges being filed?
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.
> If you want to base your "ideas" of taxes (Do you own real estate?) on edge cases why not worry about eminent domain or property seizures without a warrant or charges being filed?
Particularly in the case of the latter example I would be pretty surprised to encounter someone in favor of both LVT and civil asset forfeiture. Are you sure this is a case of specific people having inconsistent policy preferences and not a case of a broad group containing people who hold incompatible views?
I grew up in the Chicagoland area. Every time the teachers' union went on strike, my parents' property taxes went up. This caused unending amounts of distress in my household, when the whole point of owning a home was to have a predictable cost of living over an extended period of time.
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.
That the TFA puts forward this as a proposed solution drives your point home
> 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.
You don't own just the building, but the land. That land cannot be destroyed or created. The increase in land value is probably where the increased tax coming from. Buildings should be depreciating in value.
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.
We need to call these articles what they are: a proposal to abolish the concept of homestead protection in the states that have them. The author claims homestead is the reason that California can't properly fund its school system, but this assumes that more money spent on education will always equal better results. If that was true, then California would rank higher in K-12 education than somewhere like Florida, which it doesn't [0].
I agree that these are attempts to disrupt homestead protections in favor of unrestrained capital but Florida k-12 education results place Florida in the bottom 10 states and Californian is higher at #30.
It is. The pointer is meant to be a citation for the fact that Florida public schools rank higher than California public schools, but since that is false (Florida is 41st, California 32nd) no such citation exists and the comment is correct not to include one.
I suppose you could say, the parent commenter, by failing to cite a source, has comprehensively cited all sources that support their statement. As you say, a null pointer.
States like Texas use property tax to replace income taxes. So where do they go for revenue if the red guards demand the repeal of property tax? Are they wild enough to implement a head-tax? Or do they close their police departments?
>> unfortunate reality is that there’s an entire constellation of municipal services and infrastructure required for even suburban development. These things cost money and the best way to raise that money is to charge the people who benefit from the value said infrastructure provides.
The unfortunate reality in my city is that approximate 80-90% of homes (many of which are investor-owned) pay a fraction of the impact they incur on the city. Property taxes may be the most progressive tax burden by a long shot. Prop taxes need to be limited and/or totally redrawn as a concept.
In the UK we have, not an 'owning a property tax', but instead a 'living in a property tax' (Council Tax). At one point there was an attempt to impose a 'living/breathing tax' (Poll Tax) but even we couldn't stomach that, and rioted until it was got rid of.
Readit News
We need both.
We need land value taxation to reflect that land is a limited resource, and incentivize building tall apartment buildings downtown instead of wasteful parking lots.
On the other hand, we still need to tax houses and buildings because they correlate to usage of local government services. Whether it's the fire department where 20 apartments are 20x more likely to catch fire than a single tiny home, or the police where a large rich mansion is more likely to be targeted by theives than a tiny home, or schools where the larger a building is, the more likely it is to have more kids needing education (or more adults who once benefited from public schooling and are now paying it forwards).
Taxes are for allocating originally public resources efficiently (whether radio spectrum or land), and for paying for mandatory government services which you're not allowed to opt out of.
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."
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.
For police, specifically because law and order is a core function of the state and to be provided to every resident regardless of ability to pay. If the state can't do that, it's called a failed state.
For fire, because just like car insurance there will be people who will evade the requirements, endangering others' lives and property. And we don't want firefighters to decide whether or not to save lives or neighboring properties based on coverage.
Deleted Comment
No, it's both.
People correlate to things like schools. Buildings correlate to things like the fire department, precisely because -- as you put it -- an empty apartment building will catch fire too. And construction regulation, and the courts, and all sorts of stuff. There are a lot of government services that really are building-oriented as opposed to person-oriented.
IMHO schooling ought to be funded entirely at the state/federal level, not the local level, just for greater economic equality and opportunity. But since it is funded at the local level, and people don't like high sales taxes (and taxing visitors buying stuff to pay for local schools is weird), and local income taxes often don't exist, it ends up being property taxes. Still, there are some states that do have local income taxes, which is generally a much better solution.
If an arsonist sets fire to an apartment building this is a bigger problem (bigger fire, harder to fight) than if they set fire to a house.
This will only be true in a world where nobody moves, which is not the world we live in. Like, if all jobs are in California and New York, one would expect house prices to rise there (while collapsing everywhere).
Remote would have made this much less bad, but it turns out that's not going to happen to the extent people expected during Covid (mind you, lots of people did naive extrapolation during Covid which basically hasn't worked out anywhere).
Prop 13 basically enshrined a pyramid scheme into the state constitution.
And that has led to all sorts of social ills that people routinely criticize California for. The homelessness crisis is because of the revolving housing door: we don't build new housing, but we do higher more new highly-paid employees, so by the pigeonhole principle the lowest-paid Californians will be forced to either move out or go homeless. The "California conveyor", that Republican-decried phenomena where Californians move out of state and take their politics with them, is all because local governments are forced to limit housing and evict their long-time residents in order to keep tax revenues high. California's focus on high-margin industries like tech startups and entertainment is likewise because everything else doesn't generate the steady stream of new dollars and new workers needed to turn over houses and reset their property tax base. And the short-term focus of these industries, where they're willing to destroy society as long as they become a trillion-dollar company in a decade, also makes sense when you consider that existence within the state is itself a pyramid scheme.
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.
> 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.
Plus the increase in tax from arbitrary assessments of value is just weird. Why should a house worth more pay more? There should be fixed pricing for the services the city offers (like electricity or whatever), unrelated to how your house gets appraised.
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.
It's extremely rare to find enough comparable sales of parcels of land only to run a regression on. In an intensely developed area, the overwhelming majority (like 98+%) of sales will be inextricably linked sales of land and improvements of that land.
I have some intellectual agreement with LVTs, but the practical implementation is daunting and it seems to make it much harder to appeal a bad assessment.
Why only natural monopolies? Why should Google, say, be taxed on the value of the land under their buildings, but not on the value of the google.com domain name?
When you massively increase the cost of something, only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
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.
give it time and that will be taxed too. in more states than not in the US citizens are not only not allowed to own houses but also cars without paying the government a fee every year - the shoes and tvs and kids toys are coming :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Particularly in the case of the latter example I would be pretty surprised to encounter someone in favor of both LVT and civil asset forfeiture. Are you sure this is a case of specific people having inconsistent policy preferences and not a case of a broad group containing people who hold incompatible views?
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.
> 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.
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.
I suppose you could say, the parent commenter, by failing to cite a source, has comprehensively cited all sources that support their statement. As you say, a null pointer.
States like Texas use property tax to replace income taxes. So where do they go for revenue if the red guards demand the repeal of property tax? Are they wild enough to implement a head-tax? Or do they close their police departments?
The unfortunate reality in my city is that approximate 80-90% of homes (many of which are investor-owned) pay a fraction of the impact they incur on the city. Property taxes may be the most progressive tax burden by a long shot. Prop taxes need to be limited and/or totally redrawn as a concept.