In Washington state they have a formula that factors in land value and improvements, moving the bar toward land value on the last few tax years. But ya, it’s hard to maintain schools if the needle doesn’t actually include capacity for students to service (the biggest expense paid for with property taxes here, note Washington pays for schools with statewide property taxes unlike most other states).

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 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.

Higher LVT will take care of this if you need more revenue. It is simply the most efficient way to raise tax revenue, one that encourage economic growth,

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.

People correlate to usage of services, not buildings. An empty apartment building is no more likely to catch fire than an empty house. Taxing land and taxing people, via local sales and/or income taxes, makes more sense to me.

I found your comment enlightening.

> 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?

This part of your comment doesn't follow for me:

> 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.

I mean, it would be a guaranteed win for R's if they eliminate prop tax (or subsidize states deciding to do so) and draw interests back down to zero.

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

Is that a null pointer in a list? :)

I agree that these are attempts to disrupt homestead protections in favor of unrestrained capital but Florida k-12 education results place Florida in the bottom 10 states and Californian is higher at #30.

I used to have similar feelings, but then realized that this idea of ownership, where you can just sit back and relax and "own" something in perpetuity, is a fool's errand. Why? Because reality doesn't work that way. And I don't just mean social reality - physical reality doesn't either. Entropy will swallow up your property and your society, and the money you pay in taxes largely goes to things like keeping the roads clear, the sewers flowing, the criminals out of town, etc. The ability to sit back and relax secure in your property ownership is basically the ability to freeload off of everyone else who got there afterwards.

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.

A key assumption behind property tax is that land in a given location increases in value because that location has become more popular, and thus the owner of popular land is likely in one of two boats: - utilizing the land more intensely thus easily able to pay tax based on value - rich enough not to care

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.

Property tax is the only common wealth tax in the US. All the issues people have with it like arbitrary appraisals and wildly variable taxes during market swings would also show up in more widespread wealth taxes.

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.

If you live in the US, you're welcome to move to one of the states that doesn't have property tax. But the states that do have it is a choice of the states. Federal doesn't have a say.

That's a theoretical argument that is extremely rare in practice (at least in California). If you want to base your "ideas" of taxes (Do you own real estate?) on edge cases why not worry about eminent domain or property seizures without a warrant or charges being filed?

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.

That the TFA puts forward this as a proposed solution drives your point home

> 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.

>You don’t really own your house

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.

You don't own just the building, but the land. That land cannot be destroyed or created. The increase in land value is probably where the increased tax coming from. Buildings should be depreciating in value.

Given that land is in fixed supply, your city/town should have a vested interest to ensure that it's used efficiently, as is the rest of society.

If your property is worth million of dollars in the middle of a skyscrapper district, then you are in truth a land hoarder.

There's a very famous movement in the 19th century called Georgism that's all about taxing land. You could liken the founder Henry George as to the American "Karl Marx", except he was never really interested in abolishing capitalism.

Haven’t you heard, by some sleight of rhetoric flat taxes are actually “regressive”. Don’t you want to be “progressive”? Progress is good, after all.

> The founding fathers would hate to have seen property taxes. It's so unamerican and against freedom.

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.

It used to be that the poor wanted to get rid of landed gentry.

The US often has both "owning a property" and "living in a property" taxes; we call the latter an "HOA Fee".

You propose giving wealthy landowners another tax break, because they need to be prioritized over people who are working, are young, or rent?

NH is almost entirely funded by property taxes. It has some of the highest in the nation.

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

> New Hampshire replaces this tax by selling hard alcohol

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.

NH has property tax and it’s actually quite high. They don’t have sales tax or income tax.

You are very incorrect about NH, it lacks income and sales tax but property taxes are extra-high to make up the difference. The same is true in other states that lack income taxes like Texas and Washington.

(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.)