> My suggestion to reduce property speculation is to reduce income taxes drastically (1/2 to 1/3), raise property taxes to at least 1.5% (5x) and provide basic

> My suggestion to reduce property speculation is to reduce income taxes drastically (1/2 to 1/3), raise property taxes to at least 1.5% (5x) and provide basic tax assessment increase controls for owner-occupied dwellings, up to say $1m in value. Exactly. Unfortunately, the short term effect in most countries would be a brutal recession, probably some banks going under/being nationalised, a flight of capital out of the country, and so on - enough to dissuade any administration to try. It does not help that most politicians are from the middle upper class and own large amounts of property. Few will have the courage to devalue their own net worth by double digit percent. Thus I think it exceedingly unlikely that we will ever see a shift from production taxes and consumption taxes to "dead" asset taxes. In fact, the historical precedent is the other way round. There are many others, but France's ISF (wealth tax, of 1.5% of the government-assessed asset value per year) is one of the reasons you can buy a large castle there for less than a studio in Sydney.