Is this guy paid by some rich guys wanting to abolish property taxes?
If you pay property taxes then the property isn’t yours.
In my town, the land belongs to the local government.
Certified psycho. If you think owning a plot of land within a country does not have an opportunity cost you are wrong. If you think people imposing costs on others shouldn’t pay for it say it out loud.
Just go and found your own country already, you just need a gun in order to enforce your ownership. In the end a state is just the monopoly of force in a place.
I agree with the point that land is owned by the one strong enough to enforce ownership.
I also think you agree with my point that we don’t own our land, or even our houses, the State owns it and we rent it from them.
We don’t rent it from them. We pay for continued ownership. The difference being that eviction is not possible and you do not need permits unless you do something more involved to your property. Calling it renting discounts the complexities that renting brings with it. The costs of renting usually are much higher than property taxes.
“We pay for continued ownership” sure sounds like rent to me. Make sure you tell those that had their house/property taken away from them due to eminent domain how eviction is not possible.
At that point the term renting becomes something else entirely and therefore useless to discriminate between renters and homeowners. this discrimination is useful, hence we must not weaken our language.
Yeah, this is one of the meanings of “property is theft”. To own land is deny all others that piece of land.
As it should. You’re telling me someone can just buy a piece of the earth and everyone born after them is just shit outta luck? Fuck that.
Well isn’t that pretty much what my local government did?
Considering it’s history. It was Monarch land, then took by dictator, then took by Republic, then took by dictator, then back to Monarchy for a short period during democratic transitioning. Well technically they didn’t even buy it they just took it.
While the people living here, which with me it’s 3 generations of my family but another three before that of another family (the ones who built it), had to paid for it the whole time.
At least the duchess land was really cheap, like 1 testimonial cent even in recent times.
If that sounds fair to you, then okay, nothing different from Absolute Monarchies time except the Monarchs.
This is such an excellent point. Exactly when do we get to stop paying for something that we already own
Using retirees as a tool to work against property taxes has historically been an effective strategy, but it’s important to remember:
- What we’re actually trying to accomplish
- Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
- Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
- Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
One-by-one:
What we’re actually trying to accomplish
Seems to me that the root question is one of housing affordability, in particular for retirees, who may have a lot of assets, but limited cash flow
Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
Reducing/capping property taxes does indeed make it easier for some retirees to keep affording their homes, but reducing property taxes makes real estate a more lucrative investment, driving up the overall prices of real estate. This applies for both private persons intending to use the property to live in, for private persons looking seek rent, and corporate actors doing the same. Messing with property taxes is a large part of the housing affordability issue present in many places in the U.S and elsewhere (zoning laws being another major contributor, in particular those mandating single family homes, and lack of public housing being the other major contributor). Hence, this change would only benefit those lucky enough to have purchased a home in the past, at the expense of all retirees not already that lucky, which are now less likely to be able to do so.
Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
Apart from driving up the prices of real estate for other retirees, everyone else interested in purchasing a home will also feel this broad increase in prices. This has led to large swaths of the population being effectively priced out of home ownership. This has the second order effect of making owning rentals more lucrative, as higher rents can be charged, further exacerbating the larger problem of housing affordability, but now also for even poorer people.
Finally, reductions in real estate taxes limit what public services can be funded through their use. In the U.S, this primarily means schools, infrastructure, firefighting, transit etc, all of which are suffering a lot in quality, much as a consequence of having messed with property taxes in the past.
There’s a very, very strong case to be made that the consequences have very much outweighed the benefits in this scenario. I would even say that they have been devastating, being part of the root cause of a large amount of issues seen today.
Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
There clearly are good means to tackle this problem in other ways, the principal of which I believe should be massive public investment in social housing. By building a huge supply of high quality homes affordable to everyone, we make sure no one will have to be forced to go without an acceptable home, regardless of whether they are retired or not.
The second strategy should be to entirely remove the kind of zoning laws that have contributed to the kind of increase in housing prices seen today - mandating that only single family homes should be allowed to be built on massive lots with low utilization is hugely harmful to housing affordability.
These two measures would address housing prices having gone up in the way they have historically, which would also lead to property taxes not rising in such a dramatic fashion.
What should never be done, however, is reducing or capping property taxes.
You make it sound like it’s either or. The resonable thing to do would be to reduce property taxes for the property the owner lives in and tax even more the additional properties. The goal is for people to be able to afford their homes and at the same time making properties not so attractive as an investment.
Please refer to the section about the negative effects of reducing property taxes.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that applies to reducing property taxes as a whole. I’m talking about a mixed approach.
I can’t even afford a dingy studio where I’m at… tf
Interesting. In Texas once you hit 65 they freeze your property taxes and no longer increase it. My parents are only paying $1,800/year on a $250K house. Meanwhile I’m paying $14,000/yr on a $500K house.
If you live FULL TIME in Florida there is a cap on property tax increases. Many people in Florida own homes but do not live here full time and therefore are not eligible for this protection against increases. But they don’t have an age limit that ends all increases.
Sounds like it’s working as intended to target snow birds or landlords owning multiple properties
Yes it does help limiting some snow birds. There is a whole methodology with snow birds. Unrelated to property tax and and home ownership. To establish state residency you need to physically live 6 months and a day in a state to be considered a “resident” there. Many try to get around it. But states go as far as checking where your cell phone is along with credit card purchases to catch people lying about where they were.
Sorry how much??? I think we pay like 7/800€ property tax yearly on a house worth about 400k€… I thought US had low taxes.
Low income taxes. And our sales tax is typically lower than European VAT when the comparison is valid. But those generally go to the feds and the state, that do not fund municipal services, so municipalities have to collect the remainder they need through property taxes, typically on real estate and cars. And none of them fund healthcare, so we have to pay a company premiums for that. Basically the same for higher education. When you look at our total financial burden to receive the kind of services that are funded by taxes in other developed countries, we can be deceptively expensive, especially if you start thinking about the comparative quality of those services. But our income and capital gains tax rates are low, especially if you are very rich! I made myself sad
Americans actually pay a higher effective tax rate than in civilized countries, while receiving fewer services in return.
Only the very weathy have a lower effective rate because they use discretionary spending to purchase lax tax laws.
America is a shit hole country in deep deep denial.
My state doesn’t have any income tax. So it’s offset with higher property taxes. Other states have lowe me property taxes but have an income tax.
Surely this man would be in favor of a greater and graduated state income tax then, right?
…right?
California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.
Which induces a lot of absentee landlordism, as property is held in trust and financialized rather than being bought/sold at the retail level.
Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.
So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.
It’s…complicated.
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea;
The problem is in how its assessed. A market-based tax will be vulnerable to market manipulation. A tax accessed by the agents of lobbyists and kleptocrats will be administered to the benefit of their patrons.
This isn’t a policy failure quite so much as it is a democratic failure.
Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.
Property tax hurts landlords and I’m here for that.
What did this guy pay for his house, like 20k?
I’m really trying to reconcile how the Chinese manage a more equal society while having a fraction of the tools we do; they don’t have property taxes, just a lease you renew every ~70 years, they can’t do QE like we do.
It’s like we have all the tools to delay the trajectory of capitalism, we just choose not to use it.
So you never own your house in China, is what I’m reading in your post.
In China, you own the house, you just don’t own the land. Technically, the land is leased to you. For residential purposes though, you get about the same rights to the land as you do in the US though, but in most cases it’s a lot cheaper because you pay a fee every 70 or so years vs. every year that we pay property taxes. That also means that the government has fewer opportunities to take your land away from you than they do in the US (if you don’t pay your property taxes in the US, your land will be sold in a tax sale after a couple years). Your heirs still inherit your lease and have the right to renew when that 70 year mark comes back around. It’s a contributing factor towards the insanely high homeownership rate in China, which is around like 96 or 97 percent I think?
So it’s literally impossible to own a house in China?
I don’t know his situation but I think primary residence up to certain value shouldn’t be taxed at all. There’s a huge difference between an old man living alone in a house he had built for his family 60 years ago and an “investor” who owns entire neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, where I live a property tax on as far as I remember 4th and all above residential properties has been proposed and people who oppose it the most are pensioners who live in the only property they own. Right wing media can just outright lie to people telling them the tax is going to be on every property and people go on vote against their own interests.
Agreed. I’d vote to drop property tax for those over 65 and under a certain income limit.
tying it to income means in a few decades inflation just shrinks the number of people who can actually benefit
If you own one residential property and also live in it, no taxes on that. Multiple properties? That’s taxes. Unfortunately, most primary education is funded by property tax, so you’d have to change how that works (and maybe actually pay teachers while your at it). Fortunately, none of this has any chance of ever getting implemented.
Have the income limit adjust to the cpi every year? It’s not perfect, but it works
I think an issue is that taxes are not seen for what they are. The government and agency work on our behalf but don’t get paid until I pay my taxes. Maybe the local government just needs to send these bills to people’s houses instead and get rid of taxes altogether.
I disagree that it’s an issue. I believe vast majority of people understand what a tax is, even if they feel taxes are shitty and respond with blame-y frustration. All words will be misunderstood by some people. Sometimes more and sometimes fewer. If we kept changing the name of things because a vocal minority of people can’t read a dictionary, then we will end up with a handful of generic words that don’t actually mean anything. I believe a better solution is to envest in education more broadly.
Here the increases are capped at 3% per year if you live in the house. I lived in a shitty house we bought for 35k in the 1990s crash, and property taxes when we sold it in the breakup 20 years later were still under 1k a year, though insurance was crazy high. With husband we had to buy a much more expensive house, there are no shitty ones for sale anymore, all are snatched by corps to flip and rent. So now it’s high but in 20 years maybe it will seem low again. Especially if the market crashes and it’s re-assessed more reasonably.
It’s just inflation, I do think someone owning a home costs the city in roads, trash, transit, other services, Is not crazy to tax on property ownership.
Inflation is also not what the guy with the sign is taking into account in his complaint. He’s at least 40 years older in that picture than he was when he bought his property if he’s getting social security. The real purchasing power of whatever he paid back then is much smaller than the same number of dollars is now.
$5000 in January 1985 would be the same as $15,055.50 now according to the inflation calculator on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website
Also, it’s only every three years that he’s paying that much. Honestly, he’s not making the point he thinks he is.
We need taxes to fund emergency services and local government in general. The problem isn’t that taxes go up in dollar amount. The problem is that the 1% take everything for themselves, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs. Our pay and public benefits (like social security) don’t rise with inflation because of the actions of the rich.
The solution is so obvious, but we spend so much time arguing about everything but the real problem.
Yeah, if you are comparing the house you bought in 1980 for 10k dollars and say you pay 5k in tax every three years, using 2025 dollars then that is totally useless as a statement.
I wonder if there should be an exemption for those on Social Security.
That said, I don’t know of a good way to ensure that an exemption like that wouldn’t be abused.
I think most places have a senior freeze, so once you qualify it doesn’t go up anymore.
My city has a senior discount on property taxes, where seniors that have a net worth and income both below certain numbers pay reduced or as low as 0% of their regularly assessed property tax. I’m not sure how they verify net worth, but it seems like a good system to me as long as they have figured out a way to do that efficiently and effectively
So property tax I am ok with, in theory. The people with property in a city should pay for services like fire, schools, police, road maintenance… What gets me is when the city wants more and more for stupid shit like iPads for all students… Every 3 years due to forced upgrades or just old style deprecation over 3 years.
The amount my taxes go up each year is more than any raise I get. Then add on insurance which has gone insane. I paid off my house to avoid a 20k female flood insurance bill because a 1 foot piece of concrete touched a high risk flood zone. A technicality because if I took down a screen patio, then I wouldn’t have to pay.
It’s insane how expensive owning a house has become
Every 3 years due to forced upgrades or just old style deprecation over 3 years.
iPads don’t deprecate in 3 years, nor require forced upgrades. They get nowhere near as much support as a regular Linux laptop (which is what schools SHOULD be using) and even less than Windows laptops pre-11, but if they’re being replaced every 3 years, that’s just policy, not an actual need. Currently the oldest supported iPad is going to hit 8 years since release in a month. The newest unsupported one is going to hit 9 in a month. So yes there’s forced upgrades, but that’s in like 8 years.
I work as a software engineer and most companies have had a minimum 3 year lifetime policy for company laptops. Reasoning being, after 3 years there’s a higher chance of failure, and there have been enough advancements in hardware that upgrading might save SOME dev time. If it fails before 3 years, you get a new one. If you want to keep it longer, you can keep it. But if you want a new one, it should be 3 years old first. I don’t get why school iPads need to be replaced this often, but I reckon there might be a lot more wear and tear and THAT could be the reason for a 3 year replacement policy. It’s simpler than just replacing individual units every now and then.
I have taught math for 4 years in my local school. The iPads were used by the 3rd and 4th grade students. And they never left the classrooms and were well supervised during use.
Starting in 5th grade, they were issued Chromebooks. Google Classroom was used for assignments and other communications. And since Mommy and Daddy had to pay for them IF they were damaged, they held up quite well. The IBM Education model is very robust. Not fast, but robust.
I paid off my house to avoid a 20k female flood insurance bill
Female flood sounds interesting
Did they mean FEMA, and autocorrect “completed” it?
Dont forget increased pay for public servants who more and more act like they dont work for the public
It doesn’t make sense that cities need to increase property taxes every year though
Property tax revenue should be increasing every year by default without changing the rate simply because houses and properties increase in value every year typically
If property tax is 5% and the town makes $100,000,000, the next year if property value increases by 5% then their revenue goes up 5% as well to $105,000,000 automatically. Why do they need to also increase the tax to 6%?
Yea generally electronics is depreciated every 3 to 5 years. But I can imagine that after 3 years of children usage they are done for. That aside though, I think what you would be more looking for is a fair tax system.
What I think that the problem with local property taxes is that if a city relies on it too much to pay for everything then this causes too many issues. For a poor city this could mean that if they don’t increase the taxes they can’t afford basic school care which people expect. So they moved to riched areas who can provide that. Or they move because of the higher taxes. This in turn lowers the property value and decreases the taxes further. Which in turn increases the problem.
So I believe the educational budget should be provided by the central government so the same kind of quality in schools is given nationwide. This can of course be applied to other costs a city is making.
In addition to this I think a property tax should be progressive and link to your overall assets. If you just own one house and you don’t have any more assets. Then why should you be taxed as much as somebody who owns a lot more (of course if the house is 2m and you’re living of social security it is a different story. L
Top down education doesn’t work, that’s how we get stuck with schools that have massive IT budgets with little to show for them. Most teachers don’t use anything beyond spreadsheets and Youtube.
I don’t think that there is an easy fix.
I’d like to think local autonomy would help, so small communities could design their own curriculum, but I’m too much of a pessimist and see such experiments failing quickly because of corruption and incompetence.Yea generally electronics is depreciated every 3 to 5 years.
Not really.
But I can imagine that after 3 years of children usage they are done for. That aside though
It’d be cheaper to protect the devices with cases and screen protectors.
Sorry, oh the irony is rich.
i mean, this is less of a property tax issue and more of a social security thing.
Though i am pretty fundamentally against property tax, it’s a physical thing that i can own, i don’t see why i should pay taxes on it. If you want to tax me just hit me with income tax.
income tax.
the wealthy dodge this by a bunch of schemes that don’t count as ‘income’.
I hate paying property tax, but reckon it’s the only way to get money out of the fortunate ones that are lucky enough to own a chunk.
And the bigger the chunk, the more they owe.
but that’s not going to be comparative to the amount of wealth they own though. Unless of course you artificially raise the value of land, but that’s not going to make it any more expensive now is it?
It’s pretty easy to dodge property taxes also.
Why don’t you share how?
Ask your city clerk about it. That person can tell you what the city/county/township meeting format is and how to participate. But basically, you go to the meeting, bring some photos to support your claim, and discuss the matter like a civil human being. It’s not rocket surgery. You don’t need a lawyer either.
People need to stop thinking about property like it’s any other regular thing like a vehicle.
Land is not a thing it is a limited resource.
If someone owns a piece of land in a city it doesn’t matter what they are currently doing with it, even if they do nothing with it, that’s wasting potential that someone else could be doing with it and affects everyone around that piece of land.
Cause you don’t own it. You are borrowing it from the government.
Property has infrastructure like water, roads, electrical, sewers, etc running to it that needs to be maintained. It also has things like fire fighting police surveyors etc that need to be paid in order to maintain society. Everyone could work in a city therefore the city/county/state would collect the income tax but the local town you live in doesn’t get any of that money.
Roads that are too big, house that are too spread out.
Police because stores refuse to hire their own security and offload it to onto your property tax.
Sewers because dumb people are too stupid to compost properly, and now we need chemicals on farm fields since the traditional method of composting is dead.
Garbage trucks and landfills because companies sell you wrappers and containers that outlive the products and are made from toxic waste.
It’s a wealth tax on wealth that’s very difficult to hide.
except for the fact that it’s a wealth tax on wealth that’s not really consequential. An income tax by definition must tax ALL income earned by an individual, you cannot hide from that, it’s definitionally, evasion.
How is real estate wealth not consequential?Real estate wealth is real wealth, it’s why it’s literally in the name.
Personal income tax is not a wealth tax, and there are myriad ways to avoid it without evading it.
it’s pretty fundamental, there is only a fixed amount of land that exists in the country. A billionaire has roughly 1 billion more dollars than i do. I have roughly one billion dollars less than them, they, weirdly enough, don’t have one billion more times land than me.
Theoretically they should have “1 billion times more property tax” than i do, but i’m going to imagine that’s not even possible under current tax law.
Personal income tax is not a wealth tax, and there are myriad ways to avoid it without evading it.
yeah, because then it’s not income.
Killing time are you being intentionally obtuse just to kill time?
Eh, probably paid like 25k for a house that’s worth 500k now or something. Really what we need to do is make property taxes scale more aggressively, so it isn’t economical to hoard more resources than you can actually use. Maybe something like annual tax owed = (value of all real estate owned by one person)^2/10,000,000. Perhaps with a grace period for new construction/renovations.
As for appraisal, let people declare what their property is worth, and force them to sell if someone offers 50% more than their claimed value.
As for appraisal, let people declare what their property is worth, and force them to sell if someone offers 20% more than their claimed value.
Ah yes, force people to move out of their homes. What’s lemmy’s obsession with uprooting families lately?
Land is a natural resource, and like air or sunlight, nobody deserves to own it more than anybody else.
“But my family has live here for generations!” sounds awful similar to “I deserve it because my great great grandfather killed the people that used to live here.”
You get to decide how much the land is worth to you. If you value it honestly and somebody else values it higher, a trade benefits both of you.
I value your home more than you, now get the fuck out and find a new one.
In fact going by your first sentence, this system isn’t even necessary. Why do you deserve to live where you do just because you paid some random person money? I deserve the land you’re living on just as much as you do.
Money represents things you do deserve, like the value created by your own work, as well as things you have no moral claim to, like natural resources. What makes sense to me is that the land is owned collectively. The property taxes are effectively rent to the rest of the population, and those that consider it most valuable should get to use it. I also think there should be separate taxes for things that devalue the land, like extracting minerals. You can still make a profit from extracting minerals based on the value added by your own work, but you need to pay the rest of humanity for their share of the minerals themselves.
Have to consider both the ideal and the existing situation for the best next step. Housing is a combination of value both created by human effort, and an accumulation of natural resources. I think what I’ve proposed is a big step towards fair allocation of housing, but critically, also something that could actually be implemented.
Has nothing to do with “uprooting families”. Average American families are not the ones grossly overestimating the values of their property. It’s people like Trump who use overestimated values on their properties in order to hide money and grift people into paying him more than properties are actually worth. And then readjusting to actual values, or lower, in order to dodge taxes.
Investment company comes in and buys literally everything because they can just offer 20% over value. Now they rent it out for twice as much as your mortgage cost. What are you going to do, not like there are any other houses left.
Think about what the investment company’s tax rate would look like. They’d be bankrupt instantly. They’d have to pay 10M/year in taxes to maintain ownership of $10M in property.
They can just increase rents then?
So rent is several times more expensive than a mortgage on the same property. Now what?
Now you pay the ridiculous rent because blackstone just buys up entire neighborhoods already, might as well buy up entire towns.
Why? You can force them to sell you a property and pay less on the mortgage than they pay on the same property on taxes.
Technically yes, but the problem is that they can afford to hold their investments in many small companies so they won’t even have to pay that much tax.
Just adding government oversight for this idea is going to be a costly nightmare.
That’s not how this works. A better solution would be to tax more aggressively second+ homes and severely limit what corporations can invest into.
Why should a company be able to profit off of second hand housing? This isn’t a commodity, but it’s treated as such. Companies should be able to build new housing (for sale) and own housing only for the purposes of, say, housing their employees if they so wish. I simply see no benefits to allowing companies trade living spaces like stocks.
The whole point is that you get to decide how much the property is worth to you. If it’s worth more to someone else, you’re both better off for the trade. The only losers here are people trying to cheat on their taxes by giving a “low” appraisal, and people trying to hoard multiple properties.
Plug some numbers into that formula. If you own a $100k property, you pay 1k in taxes/year If you own 10 of those properties, you pay 100k/year. This would mean you have to charge more in rent than a mortgage would cost to buy the same property. The business model would become unprofitable.
I understand the logic of it, my point is that this is a trust/honesty based system which leaves you cornered. Here are some problems with it:
- placing a low value on my house to pay less taxes exposes me to a hostile buyout
- placing a realistic (e.g. around average for the region) price doesn’t solve the previous problem. I’m still in danger of a hostile buyout, while also paying higher taxes. What’s more, even if everyone else plays fairly, this additional % someone else paid to take my house is now the minimum added on top of their own valuation, driving prices up.
- placing an unreachably high price would bankrupt me as I can’t pay the taxes, so there is no scenario in which this works out for me
- given a realistic and unequal economy, there will be those who can’t afford to place a higher price on their house, i can just go and buy them out on sale, then rent them back to them (that one might sound familiar)
The fault in your assumption is 1. that this would discourage corporations from buying up; and 2. That you live in an equal and just society;
Sounds like a problem for the renters.
Socialise the housing market and make sure every person has a roof over their head. It’s the only proven solution to homelessness.
