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High property taxes are good

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Re: High property taxes are good

#161

Post by EddieDante »

justinzollars wrote: post #131
avgDev wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what is your solution for building infrastructure? Funding the military? Social programs? Snow removal? Libraries? Education?

Governments in the West have grown tremendously. In the United States the footprint of Government is 44% of GDP. 44%! This community is "Hacker News" not "Socialist News" or "Red State". Government should be able to function much better with much less. And it is no Hackers interest for its footprint to continue its endless expansion.

You realize that there is a website called Red State and that it's a right-wing propaganda outfit, right? I personally think it's hilarious that the "godless Reds" used to be commies, and now they're Republicans.

Re: High property taxes are good

#162

Post by jen20 »

bcatanzaro wrote: post #100
anonymousiam wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 13 solved two problems at once. It forced a reduction in the out-of-control government spending, and it saved seniors from losing their houses. IMHO the only problem with Prop 13 was the "grandfathering" clause. The cuts should have been perpetual and across the board.

Grandma is a millionaire. She can take out a reverse mortgage to pay her taxes and she'll still be a millionaire. Or she can agree to a lien that pays her taxes upon her death or move. We don't need to worry about grandma losing her house.

You do have to worry about working families losing their houses in gentrifying areas though. The UK gets "property" tax right in the form of council tax. It's low, paid for by the person living in the property, and often is punitively high for the owners of empty properties.

When people say that the US is a "low tax economy" they seem to forget property taxes, which make the effective rate in almost _all_ US states higher than the UK (and much of the rest of Europe) if you own a home. It's just a "poor value for money" economy instead.

Re: High property taxes are good

#163

Post by googlryas »

But what do Chicagoans get from their high property taxes that New Yorkers don't get with their low property taxes? Services seem about similar in both places to me(though, there is a huge swath I don't have experience with, like services for the poor or school services).

Re: High property taxes are good

#164

Post by dleslie »

tptacek wrote: post #119

High property taxes are clearly not intrinsically good; they're passed on to renters, and so they decrease affordability. Land value taxes sidestep this (increasing density decreases marginal tax burden on tenants), but they're not going to happen. You have to design policy for the world we actually have, not the one you'd prefer to live in. (Property taxes are a real problem where I live; we're an upper-middle-class…

LVTs are a panacea for the concerns paper wealthy. They fear taxes on stock trades, capital gains taxes, and other forms of paper wealth tax; a LVT lets them point at the homes of the masses and say "Look, there is an easy to track and tax asset class, sink your teeth into that and not my stock portfolio or trades."

Re: High property taxes are good

#165

Post by googlryas »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #2

In my region of northern New Hampshire, there are a lot of retired folks with houses rising from $200k-ish values to closer to $500k-ish values in the last 5-10 years. As such, there's a lot of discussion around lowering property taxes to help these retirees. In my opinion? Fuck 'em. Property taxes are a brilliant method of perfectly progressive taxation: you can always choose to live in a cheaper home. If your home…

If the only thing that changes are home prices going up, why wouldn't property taxes(as a percent of home prices) go down? It's not like the city is offering new services because housing prices are rising?

Re: High property taxes are good

#166

Post by firloop »

This article doesn't provide any reasons why a property owner should want lower property taxes; why would you want to constrain prices and prevent speculation?

I don't own any property myself and am sympathetic to the idea of raising property tax, but many arguments for LVT/raising property taxes don't paint a convincing argument for why property owners should vote against their self interests.

Re: High property taxes are good

#167

Post by SoftTalker »

googlryas wrote: post #163

But what do Chicagoans get from their high property taxes that New Yorkers don't get with their low property taxes? Services seem about similar in both places to me(though, there is a huge swath I don't have experience with, like services for the poor or school services).

Rich Aldermen.

Re: High property taxes are good

#168

Post by bbatha »

chadash wrote: post #95
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #6

Land value taxes are even better. Property taxes provide a disincentive to making the land more productive. A land value tax would incentivize residential landowners to build more units which provides more supply and would lower rents.

The biggest problem (IMO) is that it's not so simple to value land. Where I live, being two blocks over can make a huge difference. It's easy to say "you paid $500k for your house, so we're gonna tax you on $500k". It's much harder to accurately say what someone would have paid for the land were it not developed. I understand the benefits of LVT, but how do you solve this? Are there any good examples of governments t…

Outside of California "you paid $500k for your house, so we're gonna tax you on $500k" is not how property taxes work. The town/city/county typically does property assessments on regular basis (usually annually). These are based on doing comparisons with like houses in your neighborhood and are equal prone to "2 blocks over is way more desirable".

Re: High property taxes are good

#169

Post by JumpCrisscross »

indecisive_user wrote: post #141
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference between the two in reality? Land value tax incentivises turning a single-family home into a multi-unit building. Property tax explicitly discourages that.

If everyone on the block turns their homes into multiplexes or high rises, this would attract businesses/restaurants to cater to the new residents which would ultimately increase the value of the land and the corresponding taxes, so I'm confused how it's different than property taxes in that regard

> this would attract businesses/restaurants to cater to the new residents which would ultimately increase the value of the land and the corresponding taxes

Lot more steps. Developing a property is risky. The double whammy of eating the development cost in addition to increased property tax bill dissuades homeowners from taking the risk. (Yes, theoretically, prices should go down as easily as they go up. In reality, obviously, no, no city does that.)

By the time your land value has increased, you’ve already made money. (Or ridden on your neighbours’ investments.)

Re: High property taxes are good

#170

Post by medvezhenok »

happytoexplain wrote: post #34
vanilla_nut wrote: post #2

In my region of northern New Hampshire, there are a lot of retired folks with houses rising from $200k-ish values to closer to $500k-ish values in the last 5-10 years. As such, there's a lot of discussion around lowering property taxes to help these retirees. In my opinion? Fuck 'em. Property taxes are a brilliant method of perfectly progressive taxation: you can always choose to live in a cheaper home. If your home…

There's a reasonable and holistic argument to be made for the generalized version of your position, but specifically wanting people to be removed from their homes by forces they can't control under the rationale, "fuck 'em", is counterproductive and - I don't think it's uncalled for to say - immoral. It's important to have a base level of humanity for people, regardless of what side of which broken social dynamic the…

The main problem is that in America, the tax structure is very much tilted in favor of home-owning at the expense of renters, that collectively, the homeowner class is receiving subsidies from the renter class (and the homeowner class already has greater net worth and everything else).

There are multiple ways to reduce the impact of the problem. All of them would reduce property values and some might displace existing homeowners. All redistribution is painful and surely people will lose out, the same way that savers lose purchasing power to inflation. Nevertheless, I think it is a necessary rebalance of a system that has been favoring owning over renting for too long.

(1) Tax on imputed rent when owning (imputed rent should not be pre-tax)

(2) Land Value Tax

(3) Remove the mortgage interest deduction

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