We need both.

We need land value taxation to reflect that land is a limited resource, and incentivize building tall apartment buildings downtown instead of wasteful parking lots.

On the other hand, we still need to tax houses and buildings because they correlate to usage of local government services. Whether it's the fire department where 20 apartments are 20x more likely to catch fire than a single tiny home, or the police where a large rich mansion is more likely to be targeted by theives than a tiny home, or schools where the larger a building is, the more likely it is to have more kids needing education (or more adults who once benefited from public schooling and are now paying it forwards).

Taxes are for allocating originally public resources efficiently (whether radio spectrum or land), and for paying for mandatory government services which you're not allowed to opt out of.

If you need additional taxes, I recommend piguovian taxes on road congestion, pollution, and other bad stuff. This cut down on bad stuff within your environment and reduces incidences like fire. Cars catches on fire all the time.

Code enforcement and insurance coverage also helps with cutting down on fire and such.

Also, local government services encourages or protect economic growth. I don't like paying taxes based on usage, because public education benefits me whether I use it or not. I'll gladly pay for public education regardless.

"House value always go up" is a relatively recent invention.

It's a tax system to create economic incentives for density.

> "House value always go up" is a relatively recent invention.

Everyone wanting to live in a few economically hot cities is also a recent invention. If you price the LVT in those cities appropriately, then only the most income generating projects are going to be viable, and that means the lower class is basically not going to be living in those cities anymore.

It's not a recent invention that people wants to live in cities. It's the suburbanization and sprawling that's odd.

The lower class already can't live in those cities anymore in the first place. You need to expand the supply of housing to make this possible, which means more efficient use of land which is what urbanists has been advocating for years to fix the housing crisis.

If most efficient usage means most profitable usage, and LVT pushes to penalize any usage that isn’t as profitable as it could be, then the market will deliver exactly that and all other use cases are screwed.

There's no reason not to satisfy the core's demand for infill development. This means increased tax revenue for the cities relative to infrastructure cost, thus more budgetary capacity to throw at problems..

Mandating affordable housing is an expensive proposition and developers will drag their feet unless subsidized. They don't build things out of the goodness of their heart after all.

While subsidies are a useful tool, I am not sure if it's useful to allocate to affordable housing as opposed to incentivizing developers to take on more projects and urban renewal projects.

You're also discouraging adding housing stocks by discouraging new construction. This is a nonsensical approach advocating for a normal property tax.

As Mason Gaffney notes in his article, "Containment Policies for Urban Sprawl"

"Consider water distribution. If demand doubles within a fixed service area by doubling density, we need simply expand all pipe diameters—and not by double, but by the square root of two, since cross-sections increase with the square of the radius. But if demand doubles by doubling the service area, at constant density, we must, (a) double our pipe mileage; (b) double the cross section of our old system at its base, and more than double it elsewhere, to transmit the extra load through to the new extension; (c) increase pressure at the system load center to maintain it at the fringes (especially if the new lands are higher); and (d) upgrade our pipe-joints to hold the extra pressure.

Actually those four simplest considerations understate the case a good deal. We should add the factor of peaking. The fewer customers on a given line, the higher is the usual ratio of peak demand to mean daily demand because there is less pooling of offsetting demand patterns, and more lawn sprinkling. There is also a factor of planning expansion.

"Containing urban sprawl" does not imply halting growth, but holding it inside compact increments, whose ultimate density is known in advance and will be reached quickly, saving utilities from the waste of under- or oversizing their lines in the face of uncertainty. Urban sprawl as known today not only reduces density but breeds extreme uncertainty of future density."

This would probably make it more palatable to MAGA, but also I think to most other people too. It would probably destabilize municipalities: I have to imagine that most properties are dramatically over- or under-priced at present; on net I'd guess overpriced wins.

School districts are particularly tricky, though, for all the usual reasons.

For police, specifically because law and order is a core function of the state and to be provided to every resident regardless of ability to pay. If the state can't do that, it's called a failed state.

For fire, because just like car insurance there will be people who will evade the requirements, endangering others' lives and property. And we don't want firefighters to decide whether or not to save lives or neighboring properties based on coverage.

This isn't meaningfully different from property taxes, many break out costs by service anyway, but I find it compelling to view these as insurances.

I would speculate this would lead to a feedback loop of neighborhoods pushed into poverty or out of their homes by higher premiums, creating incentives for crime, leading to even higher premiums.

I don't think you do this in isolation. Ideally you rationalize the property tax while compensating for its progressive/welfare effects with other policies at the same time; certainly you don't just naively lower property taxes and hope for the best. (MAGA would never.)

I didn't miss it. I said "just like car insurance there will be people who will evade the requirements" (meaning: not buy insurance). Maybe you missed that? :-)

I don't see the point of criticizing a policy idea with an argument like "it will be implemented badly so it will be bad". Like, obviously, yes, if you do it badly it will be bad. That applies to anything, including the status quo.

Let's "unbundle it" from the property tax in the way you suggest. How do the police and fire departments set the fees? Are they fixed for everyone in their area, which is extremely regressive, or do they set a variable fee based on your property value?

What about people who don't own property. Do they not get police services? Does the state pay if a park is on fire? The federal government if it was public land? Where does that revenue come from?

How do the police and fire departments assess your property value? Does someone make a fortune building a software system for police and fire departments to manage all of this?

Does your private insurance actually pay the local police and fire department, kind of like escrow? What about people who don't get any kind of insurance and pay no fees? Does the state now step in and take the property from them, effectively enforcing a monopoly that the state doesn't benefit from?

When a derelict building begins to burn on a block and threatens in-use buildings around it, who pays the firefighters for stopping the derelict building's fire?

Let's go back to the fixed fee idea - what stops the new police and firefighter businesses from raising the price every year on every constituent? Will there be competing police and fire departments that offer lower rates (for lesser service?)?

When grandma on fixed social security's fire fighting fees go up too much for her to afford to live there any more, and now the state comes to take her home from her, what has changed from property taxes?

Once you really sit down and think about it, the idea that you "own" any real estate is kind of a joke. Your ownership is fully dependent on the operating paradigm of the government and society which has a monopoly on socially accepted force to establish and defend your property boundaries for you. For that, you pay rent to the state. Every discussion I've ever had with a "true" libertarian about this has had them eventually twisted up in circles to reinvent the state, with the only difference being that money (which the state currently makes meaningful) or willingness and ability to use force matters more than votes, both of which create winner-take-all feedback loops.

And that is exactly why any service that is universally required is best handled as a "tax". I put tax in quotes because it might be literally paid from taxes, or could be a mandatory fee charged by the government under some other name, but still looks and quacks like a tax, so same thing.

So yes, car insurance should be simply part of the registration payment. No use making it more complicated since everyone is better off if every car has insurance. Anything that is unconditionally mandatory is best paid from taxes.

I'm not sure the case for one-big-bundle-of-property-taxes is any better, though. Where does THAT number come from?

> Every discussion I've ever had with a "true" libertarian about this has had them eventually twisted up in circles to reinvent the state

Same!

It isn't some mysterious, unknowable thing made up out of thin air. You can, in fact, dig into your local budget and find out what these things cost, how much you are paying for them, and the history of decisions that led to them being what they are.

1. Also apply to the present day pricing of property tax:

  - "How do the police and fire departments set the fees?"

  - "Are they fixed for everyone in their area"

  - "how do the police and fire departments assess your property value?" - "Does someone make a fortune building a software system for police and fire departments to manage all of this?"

  - "Does the state now step in and take the property from them, effectively enforcing a monopoly that the state doesn't benefit from?"

  - "When a derelict building begins to burn on a block and threatens in-use buildings around it, who pays the firefighters for stopping the derelict building's fire?"

  - "what stops the new police and firefighter businesses from raising the price every year on every constituent?

  - "When grandma on fixed social security's fire fighting fees go up too much for her to afford to live there any more..."

  - "What about people who don't get any kind of insurance and pay no fees?"

  - "What about people who don't own property."

  - "Does the state pay if a park is on fire?"

  - "Will there be competing police and fire departments that offer lower rates (for lesser service?)?"

 - "Functionally, the state is in the best position to capture the necessary revenue to support these services." (The state simply can be the insurer! I did not even propose *private* insurance.)

I think in fact a well-executed insurance-like system would be functionally equivalent to the status quo, except that it would be far more efficiently priced.

I suspect the only real difference is that property tax, due to the path-dependent history by which it got this way, has wound up being substantially progressive as a tax, compared to what you would get if you tried to rationalize it. And it therefore feels impossible to replace it, because you'd set back all that progressive taxation, only to run into the problems that lead to the status quo in the first place. We really don't like to admit what it is what we're the govt paying for; the lump sum of taxes is a way of protecting the revenue streams that support public benefits from too much individual scrutiny.

But surely there is some other approach to keep moral-upside public goods in tact than this "security through obscurity". Surely.

> Once you really sit down and think about it, the idea that you "own" any real estate is kind of a joke.

I agree with this! It would be far better to model property ownership outright as renting from the public. People are awfully attached to the fiction of "ownership", though, and I think that deserves some credit.

No I didn't.

> I think in fact a well-executed insurance-like system would be functionally equivalent to the status quo, except that it would be far more efficiently priced.

I argued against this. Taking the principals of HN and assuming good faith here, I think you're missing my points, so I will try and connect them to your arguments more clearly.

> All your objections either:

> 1. Also apply to the present day pricing of property tax

No they do not. Property tax rates are transparent, insurance prices are not. I know what was voted on and who chose what to set my property taxes, I do not know why my insurance is half the price at one insurance provider compared to another.

Is the cost of American Healthcare more transparent in the US with mixes of public and private options or in single payer countries?

> 2. Or pertain only to a version of my proposal where the insurance is not effectively required, and people can freely opt out

No, my point is that this cannot be successfully enforced (we try, all the time), so the world where it is "effectively" required is one that does not exist, thus the arguments must be made for a real world where X% will not pay for private insurance, and X% is >0 and probably <15% of uninsured motorists.

> 3. Or, are irrelevant to the specific question of how private property is taxed

We are talking about paying for policing and firefighting. If you include policing, then you must include people who do not pay the local police simply because they are traveling, unhoused, passing through, visiting a friend, or otherwise. How exactly does this work for them to pay for the services rendered?

> The state simply can be the insurer! I did not even propose private insurance.

> It seems like you could straightforwardly unbundle the property tax into a bunch of specific fees and insurances. We're comfortable requiring car insurance, why not fire and police?

This is what you said, the state does not provide car insurance so I made the assumption you meant private insurers.

If you meant the state provides the insurance for all of these things then you have simply reinvented the existing taxes. Literally nothing has changed.

> I think in fact a well-executed insurance-like system would be functionally equivalent to the status quo, except that it would be far more efficiently priced.

It would be *exactly* the status quo - the sate is the monopoly provider of these services, and they are required. Why would renaming them make them more efficiently priced? It would still be a monopoly, it would still be subject to both politics and the bureaucracy. I feel as if you are trying to argue both points simultaneously - that it should be a private competitive market (so it is priced efficiently) and that it should be a state enforced fee that goes to the state and pays for services provided by the state.

There is no such thing as efficient pricing for public services because...

> I suspect the only real difference is that property tax, due to the path-dependent history by which it got this way, has wound up being substantially progressive as a tax, compared to what you would get if you tried to rationalize it. And it therefore feels impossible to replace it, because you'd set back all that progressive taxation, only to run into the problems that lead to the status quo in the first place. We really don't like to admit what it is what we're the govt paying for; the lump sum of taxes is a way of protecting the revenue streams that support public benefits from too much individual scrutiny.

You cannot "rationalize" policing by the value it provides, public goods have benefits beyond the immediate receiver of those benefits. Who is getting more benefit from police officers, a person in a bad neighborhood who has to call every week over a disturbance or violence or someone who has a lot of property in a wonderful neighborhood whose entire life is propped up by the state's monopoly on force to defend them?

Okay, so firefighting isn't quite the same as policing and let's say you go with something like risk pricing. You're going to end up with a bimodal distribution - the poor tend to live in higher risk neighborhoods or zones and the wealthy have lots of assets to protect. So you've effectively shifted the burden away from the middle class to the poor and wealthy. What benefit did that give?

> We really don't like to admit what it is what we're the govt paying for; the lump sum of taxes is a way of protecting the revenue streams that support public benefits from too much individual scrutiny.

This is where you keep really losing me. Public taxes are transparent, you can find something like this at almost any level: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/assessor/buildings-and-proper.... The budgets are public. The history of decisions are piublic. You've probably even voted for a bond proposal that would be paid for with property tax changes, meaning you had a direct say in how much they are!

The gist of the argument I have read is:

1. Rename the revenue the state collects for some public services from "tax" to "insurance payment."

2. Send individual bills for those different services.

3. ???

4. Efficiency goes up.

I can guess that this would not change the cost of those services because of mass revolt, but I can guarantee that the billing systems alone would cost so much more that whatever efficiency you think would be gained would be eaten up by a private provider of billing software and call center services :)

But it would be economically devastating to homeowners if they do not have fire coverage.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39516346

No, it's both.

People correlate to things like schools. Buildings correlate to things like the fire department, precisely because -- as you put it -- an empty apartment building will catch fire too. And construction regulation, and the courts, and all sorts of stuff. There are a lot of government services that really are building-oriented as opposed to person-oriented.

IMHO schooling ought to be funded entirely at the state/federal level, not the local level, just for greater economic equality and opportunity. But since it is funded at the local level, and people don't like high sales taxes (and taxing visitors buying stuff to pay for local schools is weird), and local income taxes often don't exist, it ends up being property taxes. Still, there are some states that do have local income taxes, which is generally a much better solution.

If an arsonist sets fire to an apartment building this is a bigger problem (bigger fire, harder to fight) than if they set fire to a house.

This will only be true in a world where nobody moves, which is not the world we live in. Like, if all jobs are in California and New York, one would expect house prices to rise there (while collapsing everywhere).

Remote would have made this much less bad, but it turns out that's not going to happen to the extent people expected during Covid (mind you, lots of people did naive extrapolation during Covid which basically hasn't worked out anywhere).

Prop 13 basically enshrined a pyramid scheme into the state constitution.

And that has led to all sorts of social ills that people routinely criticize California for. The homelessness crisis is because of the revolving housing door: we don't build new housing, but we do higher more new highly-paid employees, so by the pigeonhole principle the lowest-paid Californians will be forced to either move out or go homeless. The "California conveyor", that Republican-decried phenomena where Californians move out of state and take their politics with them, is all because local governments are forced to limit housing and evict their long-time residents in order to keep tax revenues high. California's focus on high-margin industries like tech startups and entertainment is likewise because everything else doesn't generate the steady stream of new dollars and new workers needed to turn over houses and reset their property tax base. And the short-term focus of these industries, where they're willing to destroy society as long as they become a trillion-dollar company in a decade, also makes sense when you consider that existence within the state is itself a pyramid scheme.

Amazing that Republicans would want to copy that, considering how many of the social ills that they bash California for are direct consequences of it.

> Amazing that Republicans would want to copy that, considering how many of the social ills that they bash California for are direct consequences of it.

Shipping out the poor and exporting conservative politics to seed elsewhere, all while property values skyrocket, seems to be just what Republicans might want! Don't you think so?

> municipalities can only keep pace with inflation by ensuring that there's a steady stream of new buyers at ever-higher prices. Because of that, they vote to [...] restrict the supply of housing ("at ever-higher prices").

Restricting housing supply would lower their income, not increase it. Two $500k homes pay 25% more property tax than one $800k home.

It would be a loss for all of us in the medium term, but, politically, it's a glass-shattering slam dunk.

Plus the increase in tax from arbitrary assessments of value is just weird. Why should a house worth more pay more? There should be fixed pricing for the services the city offers (like electricity or whatever), unrelated to how your house gets appraised.

I'm now much more in favor of a Georgist-style land value tax, where wealth taxes on natural monopolies like land are the only form of taxation. This biases the society toward action (if you don't make enough money to afford the opportunity cost of your continued ownership of the land, you lose it) and aligns incentives much more between renters, landlords, entrepreneurs, and municipal governments.

I do think there needs to be standardized, publicized assessment methods that are independent of politics and local government employees. Otherwise there's too much of an incentive for governments to fudge the assessments to increase the tax revenues they can generate. Really, this is a task for a computer: run a regression on comparable sales and take human judgment out of it.

It's extremely rare to find enough comparable sales of parcels of land only to run a regression on. In an intensely developed area, the overwhelming majority (like 98+%) of sales will be inextricably linked sales of land and improvements of that land.

I have some intellectual agreement with LVTs, but the practical implementation is daunting and it seems to make it much harder to appeal a bad assessment.

Now you take a sample of sales within the area of the parcel in question, subtract out the regressed values for the improvements, and smooth & average it, and you have a rough approximation for the value of the land. It's not going to be perfect: it assumes that features are linearly independent, for example. But it should be close enough, and doesn't suffer from the same incentive problems as letting a human assessor put in values for those features.

Either you need to bring in human judgment to account for those factors, or have enough data to hope that people will accept that these differences will reliably come out in the wash. If you could, Zillow probably wouldn't have lost around $1B robo-buying during a massive real-estate boom.

“Why does this basement hallway have 4 half-baths and 4 tiny bedrooms full of shelves, 2 bedrooms right off the main entry, and no living room? Taxes.”

I just can’t see how to eliminate human judgment from the valuation process of the parts when humans are unavoidably the ones valuing the combination.

Actually, now that I think about it more, the output of the model would have to be a direct estimate of $Z (rather than an estimate of $Y, which is surely easier), making some of those concerns moot when the most recent sale was long ago (but not for new transactions).

I still can't figure out what the appeals process when the model gets it wrong (or is perceived to be wrong) is going to be based on. It seems like we're likely to end up right back at "human judgment", though perhaps that of an actual judge trying to interpret the parcel's value taking into account the model's output and the arguments of the plaintiff land owner instead of a city assessor trying to argue comparable sales with a land owner, which is a process most everyone can wrap their head around and have a pretty good feeling how they'd fare if they took it all the way to court.

- Take the most recent sale prices of all neighboring parcels within a quarter mile

- Take the land-area weighted average price per square foot

- Assess the given property as its land area times that average

Practically, this can be assessed without ever visiting any of the properties, and there are no games for either the assessors or the owners to play to manipulate it. Each neighbor serves as an example of the potential use (and therefore value) of local parcels. Yes, your hole-in-the-ground gets taxed the same as a skyscraper of the same size. Have you considered building something useful on it?

(Yes, as usual, parks, churches, and other non-economically-extractive community amenities would be exempt from _paying_ the tax, but that doesn't change the assessment)

But: Land above a subway station or in a main business square is worth A LOT more than the same amount of land 1300 feet away. Waterfront land is wildly more valuable than the land just across the street. In districts with front setbacks, corner lots are less valuable per square foot than mid-block lots.

And I’d really hate to own a normal mini-skyscraper 4 blocks away from the skyscrapers overlooking Central Park and have my building’s land be valued as the average of the sum of all the units overlooking the Park.

But your “dumb” idea is smarter than most I think.

Why only natural monopolies? Why should Google, say, be taxed on the value of the land under their buildings, but not on the value of the google.com domain name?

The idea of a "natural" monopoly is also fairly broadly applied in modern Georgism. Things like the natural resources, the electromagnetic spectrum, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions are included, for example, in addition to land. There's a good argument for things like utility rights of way. Some proponents (more radical than I) also favor including IP in it, which actually would cover the google.com domain name.

I'd prefer some other mechanism (outside the scope of Georgism) to handle cases where "You built a monopoly through your own efforts to deliver a superior product, but now you've moved on and the current managers are mismanaging this resource to the detriment of society, but since it's a private monopoly there are no ways the get them to stop doing it." This is a really common problem in the economy today, and I'd like to find a way to manage it that preserves the incentive to invent new things while also removing the ability to prevent others from inventing new things.

To answer your problem in the last paragraph, we should recognize that the world is moving much faster now, and so 20 years for a patent in tech is ridiculously long. Even more ridiculous is 95-year-long copyrights. Those should revert to 14 years like they originally were.

That doesn't let you do something specifically for a mismanaged company, but I'm not sure there's much you can do under anything like our current legal system.

Also, it doesn't do anything about domain names, but those aren't exactly IP, are they? IP is patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. Domain names can be related to a trademark, but they aren't exactly the same.

You say that 20 years is too long, and that five years is more reasonable in today's environment. But you haven't exactly examined the abuse of patents in historical example.

For example, James Watt was just one of many inventors who worked on the steam engine, and he was himself stymied by at least one patent he couldn't use until its expiration. His competitors similarly just wait for his patents to expire before they could release their own inventions.

That suggests to me that patents have bad incentive early on.

When you massively increase the cost of something, only the wealthy will be able to afford it.

In practice, it's likely going to incentivize large corporate landlords and tall residential towers near city centers (where this allows the greatest number of tenants to enjoy the natural amenities nearby), while pushing the poor and elderly out to the outskirts (where land is cheaper and structures are smaller). But that's probably what you want, since a larger number of income-generating residents can enjoy the inner-city amenities while the elderly have less use for them.

North American zoning breaks this assumption since no matter how popular a given location becomes, it remains illegal to do anything on it except teardown & 1:1 replacement of existing houses. This guarantees that all land rises in value due to scarce floorspace, while simultaneously guaranteeing that most owners of the land won't have the cash to pay property tax.

If you had the freedom to build on your land, this would solve property tax 2 ways: - if you want to build, you can, and in doing so, property tax ceases to be a significant expense - if you don't want to build but others do, their doing so eases the floorspace shortage, so that land doesn't become so expensive

For bonus points, property tax should exempt the value of the structure. There's some logic to the idea that since we cannot directly manufacture land, there's always some public stake in it. But we can directly manufacture floorspace, just like we can manufacture tv's and shoes. We don't tax ownership of tv's & shoes, so it makes sense to exclude floorspace as well.

give it time and that will be taxed too. in more states than not in the US citizens are not only not allowed to own houses but also cars without paying the government a fee every year - the shoes and tvs and kids toys are coming :)

But I wonder what the best ways to tax people are. Broadly, the US taxes income, capital gains, sales, and property. They all suffer pros and cons with how progressive/regressive they are, complexity of implementation, ease of dodging, and revenue variability. The common belief is move from California to Texas for lower income taxes, but then you find out that property taxes are higher, there are toll roads everywhere, and a lower level of government services, so there's never a free lunch. You also have to balance local needs (Alaska has different expectations and needs than San Francisco) with preventing taxation games like Oregon/Washington sales/income tax avoidance or headaches like living in NJ, working in NYC.

> Thorne Bay is a Second-Class City within an unorganized borough on Prince of Wales Island.

> Thorne Bay does NOT LEVY PROPERTY TAXES.

> https://thornebay-ak.gov/land/

You get what you pay for as far as services are concerned though.

This is a feature, not a bug. One of the reasons why Singapore develops its land a lot more sanely than most places is that its leasehold structure and progressive property taxes rationalize land use and depreciate home values. One of the single worst and medieval incentives in the American system is that home ownership is a sort of 18th century poor man's social security and people expect home prices to increase, which obviously has disincentivized construction.

The linked article ignores an important point that many LVT proponents tend to ignore. How, and who, sets the value of your land?

Current property taxes, any flaws aside, are fairly transparent and difficult to game. A property value is set based on comparable sales in the neighborhood. If the government decides to assess your 1500sqft house at $1M but every neighboring 1500sqft home has sold for 500K in the last year, you can very successfully appeal this wrong assessment. It has to be based on actual comparable sales, and that is difficult to cheat on because it is driven by the clearing price on the market on executed sales.

A LVT is based on the theoretical value of your lot, on what it could be worth if some optimal but nonexistent building was there generating maximum revenue. But it is all speculation. This is very open to fraud and corruption.

Why do people who have more income pay more taxes? Why do people with huge capital gains often pay very little? I think a good place to start thinking about these things is reading about why they had to call the Estates General in 1789.

Particularly in the case of the latter example I would be pretty surprised to encounter someone in favor of both LVT and civil asset forfeiture. Are you sure this is a case of specific people having inconsistent policy preferences and not a case of a broad group containing people who hold incompatible views?

I have absolutely no issue with prop 13. It's way too fucking easy for state bureaucrats to just keep soaking property owners every time they fuck up a budget.

> As the name suggests, a property tax deferral program allows seniors to defer paying their property taxes until death.

More direct pricing of police, fire, education, roads is likely the end game they're looking for - and it's kinda the case in California for new build via Mellon-Roos.

I suppose you could say, the parent commenter, by failing to cite a source, has comprehensively cited all sources that support their statement. As you say, a null pointer.

That seems to come from https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho....

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education, however, puts Florida at #22, and California at #38.

That feels like a wild swing, so I have no idea how these estimates are determined.

The NEA says, at least, that California is #2 in attendance, and Florida is #42. That sure feels significant: file:///private/tmp/2025_rankings_and_estimates_report.pdf

States like Texas use property tax to replace income taxes. So where do they go for revenue if the red guards demand the repeal of property tax? Are they wild enough to implement a head-tax? Or do they close their police departments?

The unfortunate reality in my city is that approximate 80-90% of homes (many of which are investor-owned) pay a fraction of the impact they incur on the city. Property taxes may be the most progressive tax burden by a long shot. Prop taxes need to be limited and/or totally redrawn as a concept.

Probably the biggest policy mistake ever, in my uneducated (on this topic) opinion.

I can't speak for property other than the one primary residence of a citizen, but the concept of having your land taken away post-purchasing is....absurd.

"But...utilities/services/something?" Pay for them.

Primary residence purchased land ownership for citizens should be a right enshrined in the constitution.

Every one of the original 13 states had property taxes when they won their independence from the British. They all kept those taxes throughout the process of forming the US, and they have all kept those taxes ever since. Furthermore, every state that joined the US after that either had property tax when they joined or instituted one soon after.

Every Founding Father therefore did see property taxes. Did they hate them?

Thomas Jefferson advocated a progressive property tax that would exempt the value of property below a certain point and tax the rest with the tax rising in a geometric progression as the value rises.

George Washington didn't specifically say what he thought of property taxes, but his state, Virginia, had a property tax and as one of the largest landowners in the state he was one of those taxed the most. So if he hated property taxes it wasn't enough to actually try to change them or write about it.

Benjamin Franklin believed that property was a product of social convention and thus legitimately subject to government regulation and taxation for the public good.

John Adams was OK with property taxes, as long as they were equitable. When he was President there was an armed revolt in eastern Pennsylvania over federal taxes on houses, land, and slaves and Adams sent in federal marshals to put it down.

Alexander Hamilton regarded them as legitimate, as did James Madison. Like Washington I don't think they said whether they preferred them or preferred other taxes to raise money the government needed.

When John Jay was government of New York the state had a property tax. Like Washington he did not publish an opinion on it or try to do anything to end it.

That's doesn't sound like any of them hated them.

From my perspective, it would be great to drop property tax as then I could do both. But the consequence is nobody else will be able to buy my home.

Whatever they're saying, ignore the words and look at the effects

They want to increase the deficit because it applies pressure (via lack of funding) on the social services they despise.

For example there was recently a measure on the ballot here to raise the property tax for the county library from something like 0.32/1000 (i.e., $0.32 for every $1000 of your property's assessed taxable value) to something like 0.45/1000.

The last ballot measure for the library was in 2017, and costs to provide the same level of services today that they were providing then have gone way up.

A lot of people, even people who said they strongly supported the library, were urging people to vote no. Their argument was that assessed property values have gone up by a much larger percentage since 2017 than the library says it needs, so the prior measure should still be raising all that the library needs.

What they didn't understand (and many still did not understand even after I and others explained) is that there are at least 3 different ways that things funded by property taxes work, two of them do not get an increase when assessed values go up, and the library is one of those that does not get an increase.

Those three are:

1. The way most people think they all work. A rate is set once, say 1.00/1000 and if you pay $400 one year and your assessment goes up 20% the next year you pay $480 next year.

2. The way many bonds that fund a specific project work. The bond is to raise a fixed a fixed amount, for example $5 000 000/year for 3 years in order to build something. There is no fixed rate. Let's say you pay $400 for this one year, and your assessment goes up 20%. If the average assessment goes up 20% that year, you will again pay $400. If the average assessment goes up less than 20%, you will pay more than $400. If the average assessment goes up more than 20%, you will pay less than $400. On your tax statement a rate will be listed, but that rate will go down each year that the average assessment goes up and vice versa.

3. The way many bonds that fund open ended things work. They are similar to #2 in that they raise a fixed amount every year, and the rate automatically adjusts down when assessments are up and up when assessments are down. The difference is that the amount raised can increase up 1% a year to cover increased costs without the need for voter approval.

The library bond is a #3. When it passed in 2017 the rate was something like 0.49/1000. It was now down to 0.32/1000 because assessments were up around 50% over their 2017 values. Thus, that 50% windfall that so many people thought the library must have reaped from that rise in property values did not exist. All the library has gotten since 2017 are those 1% increases.

PS: the library measure did pass.

The solution is to replace the property tax with a sales tax.

To ensure that the sales tax doesn't hit the poor too hard the state can determine how much someone at the poverty line pays on average in sales taxes every month ie $200. The state then sends a check for $200 to every state resident every month.

You might be thinking of sales or state income tax, which there are none in NH.

(It’s particularly bad in Texas because the largest landed estates like ranches use various tricks to avoid paying most property taxes so the regressive burden ends up falling even harder on the middle class, who now has to pay the entire share of funding state services. I don’t know how Texas keeps up this reputation as a low-tax haven for fleeing California, the reality is that you’ll be paying gobs of property taxes unless you’re either a renter with no land or a baron with tons of land who can schmooze your way out.)

You want the government to pay for children's books out of the pockets of alcoholics? I know that's an uncharitable reading of what you said, but that's what it boils down to. If people drink less alcohol, generally considered a good thing for society (I say this as someone with a well-stocked liquor cabinet), then the kids get fewer textbooks.

A drop in alcohol sales would cause the budget to be reworked. If they decide to cut the education budget in response, that's fine, but they would not simply throw up their hands and say "oh well, no books for students".

If you worked two jobs, and deposited one paycheck into a bank account that you labeled "food" and the second into a different bank account labeled "rent, savings, and everything else", and you lost the job that got deposited into the "food" account, would you starve?

Those states have sales taxes, income taxes and property taxes.

The point is: misaligned incentives.

Thanks for the reminder!