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Texas makes a big deal about not having income tax. What they don't tell you is how high the property taxes are. I live in a state with income tax, and if I li

• YeBanKo 3y ago
  Property tax is much fairer than income tax imo.
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    If you think flat is fair, then yes. If you are coming from California it's quite shocking. People like Elon Musk and his enablers in the media talk about the marginal tax rates in California, but the median Californian owes no or trivial state income taxes. If you transplant that median household to Texas their tax burden is higher, and they are more exposed to housing market shocks than they would be in California where the state constitution limits tax assessment increases to 2% per year.
    • saurik 3y ago
      A property tax isn't a flat tax, as the people who own the highest value assets--and are thereby able to use them to extract the highest rents from other people--are paying higher taxes for that continuing privilege. The reality is that homeowners can feel poor but they are ridiculously richer and more powerful than people at the same income level who are merely renting. If you want to limit property tax, but you don't have really really strict rent control laws (which California does not: some areas--including, notably, San Francisco--do have some minimal mechanisms, but they pale in comparison to the power of prop 13 for property owners) you end up with an extremely unfair tax system... ...which, though, does favor people with more money, and so this actually furthers the narrative of how the people who moved away from California because they wanted to not have so much tax on their income are now realizing they have a lot of assets and want to capitalize on that in California.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• scrum-treats 3y ago
  Nothing compares to that monthly AC/heating bill.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    The annual tax for my car in California was more than my summer cooling bill in Dallas.
    • apsurd 3y ago
      i don't believe you. hundreds per month in A/C vs hundreds per year. what kind of car do you own? numbers please?
      • gojomo 3y ago
        It's plausible; a $40k new gas-powered car in California would owe about $600 in annual registration fees in San Francisco. Texas's electricity rates are about half of those in California, so 3 summer months' AC costs in Dallas could be notably less, especially for a small/single-person residence. (And, Calfornia's gas costs about 40% more per gallon than in Texas, due to both taxes & other supply-limiting regulations - which one might reasonably consider an extra tax on having a car in California.)
      • dylan604 3y ago
        You know I really don’t care if you believe me or not. I’ll sleep just fine. But since you asked oh so nicely… I had a Corolla and it cost me just under $800, and I’m just over $200/mo in electric
        • apsurd 3y ago
          thanks for replying. that's surprising. $800 is a lot.
          • dylan604 3y ago
            Compared to the same car registered in Texas is <$75 a year, CA is highway robbery.
• wolverine876 3y ago
  > Texas makes a big deal about not having income tax. It's a misleading claim every time it's made. The people of Texas need to pay for things somehow; they must contribute tax revenue roughly equal to government expenses. If it's not personal income tax, then it's some other tax. I prefer income tax when it's progressive (higher rates for higher earnings), because it helps equal out the sacrifice: 10% of $10,000 income is much more of a sacrifice than 10% of $1,000,000 income. It's hard to see how any other tax is preferable. Why would I prefer sales tax?
  • gpt5 3y ago
    Income tax doesn't really tax the very rich. They earn their money from assets and generally either don't pay taxes at all, or if they do pay taxes, it's based on long term capital gain rate, which is lower. High property tax on the other hand, is helpful in two ways: 1. It directly tax the rich who hold more property. 2. It keeps housing prices lower.
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      Good point, though there is another solution: Increase capital gains tax. Property tax is a wealth tax for one (very significant) kind of wealth.
      • shortcake27 3y ago
        The problem with CGT is that it allows people to defer their tax obligations indefinitely while amassing wealth using untaxed “unrealised” gains. This can be a very effective tax-avoidance strategy.
        • Thorrez 3y ago
          What if we get rid of the step up doctrine? Then they can't avoid it indefinitely.
        • gameman144 3y ago
          This makes sense kind of, though. If you haven't realized any of your gains, what are you paying the tax with? This feels like if you're a normal person who happens to own a painting that becomes super desirable and worth millions. If you sell it then tax away, but otherwise it's literally just the same painting you've always had.
• vel0city 3y ago
  You must have an incredibly fancy house. My property taxes aren't even $20k (far from it, more like $12k) for a 2400sqft 4 bedroom house with a pool with pretty good DART access just down the street from a nice city park. Just paying $20k would place the assessed home value after exemptions at >$970k. Standard homestead exemption is $40k, so $1.1M for actual assessed value. But you're saying $20k above whatever you're paying already, I'm guessing you're probably paying close to $20k since you're looking at >$1M homes, so in reality you're looking at like >$1.5M homes. That's an incredibly fancy house, far more than normal. That's more than twice the average price of a house in Plano, a pretty nice place to live if you're gonna live in Texas.
  • dreamcompiler 3y ago
    I specifically said Austin, not Dallas. If you haven't looked at Austin real estate prices lately you might be in for a shock.
    • badlucklottery 3y ago
      +1 If OP has a big yard, a well-maintained house, and decent schools nearby, that almost immediately puts you over $1m in Austin. If their house actually has some serious square footage or acreage, $1.5-2m isn't ridiculous. You can take hits on one or more of those requirements to get the price down but it's not apples-to-apples anymore.
      • vel0city 3y ago
        What's the price for a big yard, well-maintained, 2,000+sqft, with decent schools house cost in San Franciso or LA? And not in a suburb far away, but in the city? What are the property taxes on such a place?
    • vel0city 3y ago
      Yeah but it seems you're then trying to paint that as a brush for all of Texas. Austin real estate values are stupid. You shouldn't spend that much to live in a house that small in Texas. It's like looking at a large house in actual downtown San Francisco and acting like that's the housing price for all of California. I'm just trying to point out the majority of the state doesn't pay well over $20k in property taxes. Only very wealthy people do. In 2021 the average single family home in Texas was like $260k. Values have gone way up, let's say $320k for example. Minus $40k for homestead, $280k assessed. Living in a city you're going to see like 2% property tax, so $5,600. So your $30-40k tax bill is probably six times the average tax of a house in Texas. Six times the average tax bill. See how that's just not a normal price most people actually pay?
• gorgoiler 3y ago
  US democracy and free market capitalism is so extreme that can even choose which government you buy your services from. (Though not at the federal level.) Your comment finally made me realize this.
  • pavlov 3y ago
    To be fair, some level of “government-shopping” is also part of the design and purpose of the EU. But it’s harder for ordinary people to take advantage of it because the language barriers and culture differences are larger than in the US. That’s not an impediment for corporations though. Ireland and Luxembourg have done very well attracting rich companies that can choose whose taxes to pay within the EU.
    • nvm0n2 3y ago
      It's not a part of the design or purpose. It's a part of the current status quo but the EU is a very different construct to the USA both legally and culturally. The USA has the Constitution which at least in theory places hard limits on what the federal government can do, and the Constitution is strongly supported across US culture and society. The Supreme Court for example has recently started returning powers to the states. The EU's equivalent is the treaties, which begin by saying the goal of the EU is "ever closer union". So the EU's stated goal at the very beginning of its foundational documents is to homogenize the continent's systems of government. Nothing in the EU's institutional philosophy or culture recognizes that it should be limited in scope and that countries should always have local control over some matters. For example the ECJ almost always rules in favor of more EU control, even when the treaties clearly say otherwise. Due to the widespread nature of this cultural mileu amongst the European political class, the EU routinely takes control of policy areas that it was never granted by treaty whilst facing minimal or no resistance. For example, you talk about government-shopping by companies who set up their HQ in Ireland. The EU hates the possibility of government-shopping because it thinks the entire concept is illegitimate, so they have been attacking Ireland for years to try and force it to stop being so competitive. You can see that culture at work in the language they use: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2022/733532/EPRS_ATA(2022)733532_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2022/7335... "Ireland has been criticised for the way in which its tax system has been used by multinationals to set up aggressive tax planning structures and exploit mismatches and gaps in the international tax framework" Low taxes are "aggressive" and a "mismatch" which gets "exploited". They think of a country competing against others using low taxes as some sort of hack that needs to be shut down, not a natural part of the competition between jurisdictions. In theory the EU has no control over corporation tax, but in practice the treaties let the EU regulate subsidies, so they redefined subsidy to not just mean direct payments from governments but also just charging lower taxes than France/Germany. And then told Ireland to change. Now in practice the picture is complicated by the fact that the EU treaties do supposedly limit the EU's powers, because the people who signed them recognized the danger of the EU's unlimited ambition and sought to restrict it. And the US federal government has always grown, often working around or just ignoring the constitution in various ways. But this stuff is all downstream of culture. The Americans have the Republicans and its associated culture, which tries to decentralize government at least sometimes, in some ways. Even in cases like military spending where they don't reduce the size of the federal government they do try to spread it around, hence "porkbelly politics". Mainland Europe doesn't have many similar parties or cultures. They're all very pro EU "integration" (read: passing control to Brussels). The UK had a smaller equivalent in the form of euroskepticism until they succeeded and Brexit rendered it irrelevant. And now Germany has something a bit like that in the form of the AfD, which despite being constantly smeared as Nazis has a relatively decentralized and conservative manifesto that wouldn't look out of place at a Republican convention. But you can tell how different the cultures are by the reaction: there's a very real and serious discussion in Germany about flat-out banning the AfD despite that it polls at about 20%. Nobody is talking about banning the Republicans. So in practice I'd argue that the EU doesn't have the same design or purpose with respect to government-shopping as the USA does.