7 ms·

Here's a counter-argument. Keeping property taxes means that old people have to pay yearly rent to the government to simply keep their house. In Florida that's

Here's a counter-argument. Keeping property taxes means that old people have to pay yearly rent to the government to simply keep their house. In Florida that's about 2k a year for my home. That's fine when we have an income. It's a bit more problematic when that's 10-20% of a yearly retirement income from which one also has to pay for necessities. As to the housing crisis, what laws are preventing multistory buildings? SF blocks a lot of housing over 3 stories since they want to keep the mystique of the city from the Full House days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_House). This makes housing extremely expensive since no one can easily put up a 50 story luxury housing apartment complex (which could have 1.5k sq/ft for a mere $675k).

cletus 8y ago
It's this kind of nonsense that allowed abominations like Prop 13 in CA to pass. This particular fallacy is a classic false dichotomy. It's not an either-or situation. In CA the incumbents voted themselves a massive tax break ("because retirees") when, if retirees were something you really cared about, you could simply give them a lower rate of tax or no tax at all for their principal place of residence while still collecting taxes from non-retirees.
- drewg123 8y ago
  This 100% I was disappointed they didn't have photos of row after row of poorly maintained multi-million dollar single-story ranch houses in the Bay Area. My old neighborhood in Mountain View was filled with retirees who were paying next to nothing to stay in the houses they bought in the 60s and 70s. These were the same people who would regularly vote against new housing because it "harmed the quality of the neighborhood." Every time I walked to work, I day-dreamed of how many people could live close enough to walk to work if we could put a 10 story apartment building over each of those junky old Eichlers.
- virmundi 8y ago
  Then you're showing a lot of favoritism. It's hard to universalize the idea that we should show favoritism. For example, historically we favored handicapped people. This was to their detriment. We paid for their subsistence living since we excluded them from having real jobs. It's not a fallacy if you think people own land. They shouldn't have to pay a yearly fee to keep the government from taking their property. Think about applying the same thing to laptops. Laptops are tools, or at least may be tools, for production and income. Why not tax all laptops owned by software folk as we tax other business goods? In general, this argument seems to come down to "the society provides so much, pay your damn share." How about no, I don't want the society to pay for so much? As a result, I want to pay less.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Laptops don’t require road maintenance, emergency services, schools, etc. Real estate does. If you don’t want society to pay for so much, maybe move to somewhere without one. Most of us want to live in a place where we all pitch in to help provide public services.
    - virmundi 8y ago
      While most want to live in a society that provides some base level of features, we have huge difference of opinion of what that is. For example, police. If you legalized all drugs, you'd not need as many as you have. You could save money by not having their salaries, pensions, and benefits. You could also increase revenue by having reasonable taxes on the sale of the vice. Now you don't need to take land from people. My whole point in all of this is that property taxes are not necessary. Rather they are used by people that don't want to think about ways to truly free their society. Those people limit building heights. They limit trade. They limit the very means that a state could make a reasonable income.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        No individual tax is necessary, but if you agree that government funding is needed then it’s just a question of what you tax. I don’t see why property tax should be singled out as being particularly bad, and the argument you’re making seems to be more like “I don’t want to pay so much” rather than “property taxes are worse than these other taxes.” Note than land value taxes, a special case of property taxes, are widely considered to be the most efficient means of taxation among economists.
        virmundi 8y ago
        The issue is you’re maintaining a tax on a purchase after it’s purchased. It’s perpetual sales tax. If we can tax in over ways, why create a specific instance for this kind of tax?
        8y ago
nimish 8y ago
They can tap into the equity of their home to pay the taxes. Some jurisdictions allow for a property tax deferral until sale to avoid even this. Property taxes fund the society they benefit from so it's only fair that they keep paying them.
- hadrian82 8y ago
  Yeah because who wants to keep the equity they build up while building the house and making it nice. As soon as it's paid off, let's take out a loan against it! That's the answer! "Tap" into the equity my ass, that line of thinking is the problem and why we are constantly over-spending as a civilization. Property taxes means the government owns both your land and anything you have on it and you are merely renting from them. This is not OK in my opinion, and I believe all property taxes should be abolished as it requires people to continue paying rent to the government forever. My dad had to step in to prevent my 85 year old grandmother from being evicted and having her house auctioned off due to years of overdue property tax because (shocker) she didn't have any money. So let's evict this little old woman we should be taking care of and make them burdens on their families because her breadwinner spouse died years earlier and she couldn't afford to continue paying rent to the government who did nothing but bleed money from her and her husband their whole lives. Really considerate of us as a society. Luckily she had family to pick her up. What if she didn't. I'm sorry but the government has done fuck all to make my land better other than be a pain in my ass when I want to make it better and force me to pay them in order to do any construction ON MY OWN.
  - usaar333 8y ago
    > government owns both your land Yes, that's correct and why this is so controversial. I believe society has a right to tax land, because owning a completely inelastic item like land prevents others from using it.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      That's... the whole point of ownership. You can prevent all your neighbors from chopping down the nice shade tree in your front yard, and dragging it away for lumber or firewood. The issue at hand is that if you do not pay property taxes, the government will take ownership of the land away from you. That undermines the ownership. (So does eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture.) The ability to keep out everybody except the government is still useful, but not nearly as valuable, since anyone that really wants to take something from you can just use the government to do it. There are other sticks available to encourage people to contribute money to their communities. You could still assess someone's taxes based on the value of their land property, but rather than take the property, you cut off its access to municipality services. If you don't pay your vehicle tax, you don't lose your whole car, you just lose your license plate and the ability to drive your vehicle on public roads. Similarly, if you don't pay the property tax, maybe you lose the ability to connect to local utilities and make use of public services. Cops and firefighters charge fees to come to your property. Public schools charge your kids tuition to attend. Perhaps the city won't enforce street parking restrictions at the end of your driveway, and starts leaving the roadkill cleanup truck there. Or maybe the city just publishes a list of non-payers, and local businesses start refusing you service. Most critically, the local cops won't help you defend your property ownership. The problem isn't that property taxes exist, it's what happens if you don't pay them. If the actual result for not paying property tax is identical to a landlord evicting a non-paying tenant, the actual relationship to the property is not ownership.
zpallin 8y ago
But maybe old people shouldn't be living alone in a giant house. Maybe we need to establish rules where their children - or a community - are more incentivised to take care of the elderly than the elderly are incentivised to isolate themselves in a home they will be increasingly unable to take care of...
usaar333 8y ago
> Keeping property taxes means that old people have to pay yearly rent to the government to simply keep their house. In Florida that's about 2k a year for my home. I don't see why, at least in an area with any sort of constrained land supply, it is desired to keep old people in the same home (I can see same community, not same home). From a land efficiency standpoint, where single family homes and apartments/condos both exist, you'd generally want to incentivize: * childless folks (young people, empty nesters) in smaller homes (apartments, condos) * families with children in larger homes (single family homes) Property taxes are a powerful incentive to encourage people that become empty nesters to move to smaller locations. The lack of incentive to do this is part of why Bay Area single family home prices are surging - older demographics aren't selling their homes to families that really want to own for stability reasons. (note: For the curious, in CA, Prop 13 doesn't per se create a disincentive as it allows moving the tax base to a new property for those older than 55 - but its presence removes what would be a strong incentive (cut taxes by moving). A strong tax disincentive to move though is capital gains tax structure on housing).
- clarkmoody 8y ago
  Maybe you should let people decide for themselves where they want to live?
  - virmundi 8y ago
    No, we cannot allow that. We have to allow the state to have absolute power to make poor decisions and then force everyone to conform to those poor decisions. Look at SF. The right answer is to for old people that bought into the town during the Haight-Ashbury days to sell since they are too cash poor for the rents (property tax). The wrong decision is to change the zoning laws that prevent 5+ story apartment buildings that meet earthquake code.
    - usaar333 8y ago
      Those are related things. A locality is more willing to solve a housing shortage if existing residents are also being punished for said shortage in the form of higher property taxes.
rayiner 8y ago
> Here's a counter-argument. Keeping property taxes means that old people have to pay yearly rent to the government to simply keep their house. So what? It's not like old people don't continue to use the roads, police services, etc. If they had kids, then they're also paying off what it cost to educate those kids (the property taxes they paid while their kids were in school covered only a fraction of the annual cost per student).
- virmundi 8y ago
  There are other ways to tax for that. I pay for garbage and water, both provided by the city. I pay for $133/year for fire and police as a separate tax item. I pay a 1% sales tax for all non-food items to pay for roads. I also pay property tax. Itemize a tax. Don't have a property tax. I could happily do without all those things. Create a free-living zone where I could move with little tax. https://la.curbed.com/2015/3/13/9980908/slab-city-going-legit https://la.curbed.com/2015/3/13/9980908/slab-city-going-legi...
  - seanalltogether 8y ago
    Where I live in the UK you pay a council tax as the resident of a home, instead of a property tax on the value of the property. It's an itemized tax like you describe. Do you want to know why? Because rich people owned huge swaths of land and wanted to sit on it forever without any pressure to sell. Land is a finite resource and we should absolutely make ownership of it subject to tax.
- ahallock 8y ago
  Why can't other taxes pay for that? There are surely plenty of other tax revenue streams. My parents, who were on a fixed income, had to move from upstate NY in part because of property tax increases. You never truly get to own your house and are instead renting from the government.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    You're not "renting" from the government. You're paying for the ongoing services you use, which are connected to your property (roads, police protection, etc.). As to having other taxes pay for it--that just shifts the tax burden onto other people.

cletus 8y ago

It's this kind of nonsense that allowed abominations like Prop 13 in CA to pass. This particular fallacy is a classic false dichotomy. It's not an either-or situation. In CA the incumbents voted themselves a massive tax break ("because retirees") when, if retirees were something you really cared about, you could simply give them a lower rate of tax or no tax at all for their principal place of residence while still collecting taxes from non-retirees.

drewg123 8y ago
This 100% I was disappointed they didn't have photos of row after row of poorly maintained multi-million dollar single-story ranch houses in the Bay Area. My old neighborhood in Mountain View was filled with retirees who were paying next to nothing to stay in the houses they bought in the 60s and 70s. These were the same people who would regularly vote against new housing because it "harmed the quality of the neighborhood." Every time I walked to work, I day-dreamed of how many people could live close enough to walk to work if we could put a 10 story apartment building over each of those junky old Eichlers.
virmundi 8y ago
Then you're showing a lot of favoritism. It's hard to universalize the idea that we should show favoritism. For example, historically we favored handicapped people. This was to their detriment. We paid for their subsistence living since we excluded them from having real jobs. It's not a fallacy if you think people own land. They shouldn't have to pay a yearly fee to keep the government from taking their property. Think about applying the same thing to laptops. Laptops are tools, or at least may be tools, for production and income. Why not tax all laptops owned by software folk as we tax other business goods? In general, this argument seems to come down to "the society provides so much, pay your damn share." How about no, I don't want the society to pay for so much? As a result, I want to pay less.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Laptops don’t require road maintenance, emergency services, schools, etc. Real estate does. If you don’t want society to pay for so much, maybe move to somewhere without one. Most of us want to live in a place where we all pitch in to help provide public services.
  - virmundi 8y ago
    While most want to live in a society that provides some base level of features, we have huge difference of opinion of what that is. For example, police. If you legalized all drugs, you'd not need as many as you have. You could save money by not having their salaries, pensions, and benefits. You could also increase revenue by having reasonable taxes on the sale of the vice. Now you don't need to take land from people. My whole point in all of this is that property taxes are not necessary. Rather they are used by people that don't want to think about ways to truly free their society. Those people limit building heights. They limit trade. They limit the very means that a state could make a reasonable income.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      No individual tax is necessary, but if you agree that government funding is needed then it’s just a question of what you tax. I don’t see why property tax should be singled out as being particularly bad, and the argument you’re making seems to be more like “I don’t want to pay so much” rather than “property taxes are worse than these other taxes.” Note than land value taxes, a special case of property taxes, are widely considered to be the most efficient means of taxation among economists.
      - virmundi 8y ago
        The issue is you’re maintaining a tax on a purchase after it’s purchased. It’s perpetual sales tax. If we can tax in over ways, why create a specific instance for this kind of tax?
        8y ago

nimish 8y ago

They can tap into the equity of their home to pay the taxes. Some jurisdictions allow for a property tax deferral until sale to avoid even this. Property taxes fund the society they benefit from so it's only fair that they keep paying them.

hadrian82 8y ago
Yeah because who wants to keep the equity they build up while building the house and making it nice. As soon as it's paid off, let's take out a loan against it! That's the answer! "Tap" into the equity my ass, that line of thinking is the problem and why we are constantly over-spending as a civilization. Property taxes means the government owns both your land and anything you have on it and you are merely renting from them. This is not OK in my opinion, and I believe all property taxes should be abolished as it requires people to continue paying rent to the government forever. My dad had to step in to prevent my 85 year old grandmother from being evicted and having her house auctioned off due to years of overdue property tax because (shocker) she didn't have any money. So let's evict this little old woman we should be taking care of and make them burdens on their families because her breadwinner spouse died years earlier and she couldn't afford to continue paying rent to the government who did nothing but bleed money from her and her husband their whole lives. Really considerate of us as a society. Luckily she had family to pick her up. What if she didn't. I'm sorry but the government has done fuck all to make my land better other than be a pain in my ass when I want to make it better and force me to pay them in order to do any construction ON MY OWN.
- usaar333 8y ago
  > government owns both your land Yes, that's correct and why this is so controversial. I believe society has a right to tax land, because owning a completely inelastic item like land prevents others from using it.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    That's... the whole point of ownership. You can prevent all your neighbors from chopping down the nice shade tree in your front yard, and dragging it away for lumber or firewood. The issue at hand is that if you do not pay property taxes, the government will take ownership of the land away from you. That undermines the ownership. (So does eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture.) The ability to keep out everybody except the government is still useful, but not nearly as valuable, since anyone that really wants to take something from you can just use the government to do it. There are other sticks available to encourage people to contribute money to their communities. You could still assess someone's taxes based on the value of their land property, but rather than take the property, you cut off its access to municipality services. If you don't pay your vehicle tax, you don't lose your whole car, you just lose your license plate and the ability to drive your vehicle on public roads. Similarly, if you don't pay the property tax, maybe you lose the ability to connect to local utilities and make use of public services. Cops and firefighters charge fees to come to your property. Public schools charge your kids tuition to attend. Perhaps the city won't enforce street parking restrictions at the end of your driveway, and starts leaving the roadkill cleanup truck there. Or maybe the city just publishes a list of non-payers, and local businesses start refusing you service. Most critically, the local cops won't help you defend your property ownership. The problem isn't that property taxes exist, it's what happens if you don't pay them. If the actual result for not paying property tax is identical to a landlord evicting a non-paying tenant, the actual relationship to the property is not ownership.

zpallin 8y ago

But maybe old people shouldn't be living alone in a giant house. Maybe we need to establish rules where their children - or a community - are more incentivised to take care of the elderly than the elderly are incentivised to isolate themselves in a home they will be increasingly unable to take care of...

usaar333 8y ago

> Keeping property taxes means that old people have to pay yearly rent to the government to simply keep their house. In Florida that's about 2k a year for my home. I don't see why, at least in an area with any sort of constrained land supply, it is desired to keep old people in the same home (I can see same community, not same home). From a land efficiency standpoint, where single family homes and apartments/condos both exist, you'd generally want to incentivize: * childless folks (young people, empty nesters) in smaller homes (apartments, condos) * families with children in larger homes (single family homes) Property taxes are a powerful incentive to encourage people that become empty nesters to move to smaller locations. The lack of incentive to do this is part of why Bay Area single family home prices are surging - older demographics aren't selling their homes to families that really want to own for stability reasons. (note: For the curious, in CA, Prop 13 doesn't per se create a disincentive as it allows moving the tax base to a new property for those older than 55 - but its presence removes what would be a strong incentive (cut taxes by moving). A strong tax disincentive to move though is capital gains tax structure on housing).

clarkmoody 8y ago
Maybe you should let people decide for themselves where they want to live?
- virmundi 8y ago
  No, we cannot allow that. We have to allow the state to have absolute power to make poor decisions and then force everyone to conform to those poor decisions. Look at SF. The right answer is to for old people that bought into the town during the Haight-Ashbury days to sell since they are too cash poor for the rents (property tax). The wrong decision is to change the zoning laws that prevent 5+ story apartment buildings that meet earthquake code.
  - usaar333 8y ago
    Those are related things. A locality is more willing to solve a housing shortage if existing residents are also being punished for said shortage in the form of higher property taxes.

rayiner 8y ago

> Here's a counter-argument. Keeping property taxes means that old people have to pay yearly rent to the government to simply keep their house. So what? It's not like old people don't continue to use the roads, police services, etc. If they had kids, then they're also paying off what it cost to educate those kids (the property taxes they paid while their kids were in school covered only a fraction of the annual cost per student).

virmundi 8y ago
There are other ways to tax for that. I pay for garbage and water, both provided by the city. I pay for $133/year for fire and police as a separate tax item. I pay a 1% sales tax for all non-food items to pay for roads. I also pay property tax. Itemize a tax. Don't have a property tax. I could happily do without all those things. Create a free-living zone where I could move with little tax. https://la.curbed.com/2015/3/13/9980908/slab-city-going-legit https://la.curbed.com/2015/3/13/9980908/slab-city-going-legi...
- seanalltogether 8y ago
  Where I live in the UK you pay a council tax as the resident of a home, instead of a property tax on the value of the property. It's an itemized tax like you describe. Do you want to know why? Because rich people owned huge swaths of land and wanted to sit on it forever without any pressure to sell. Land is a finite resource and we should absolutely make ownership of it subject to tax.
ahallock 8y ago
Why can't other taxes pay for that? There are surely plenty of other tax revenue streams. My parents, who were on a fixed income, had to move from upstate NY in part because of property tax increases. You never truly get to own your house and are instead renting from the government.
- rayiner 8y ago
  You're not "renting" from the government. You're paying for the ongoing services you use, which are connected to your property (roads, police protection, etc.). As to having other taxes pay for it--that just shifts the tax burden onto other people.