Fines seem to be more flexible in their enforcement and cancellation, possibly as negotiation tactics. The label, as opposed to 'tax', comes with the idea of punishment and can more logically be increased to higher levels in ways not possible if considered a cost of doing business.

Relatedly, it'd be interesting to see a tax with a built-in ratcheting up effect each year. Imagine if you had a tax that doubled each year a property remained vacant -- that'd be similar to how they're using these fines.

Sounds like how the repeater tax works in the NBA; each year you are over the salary cap,you have to pay a penalty per dollar over, and you pay a higher percentage each time you are over. Once you get under the cap, it resets.

The money gets split amongst the non-tax paying teams, with the idea of balancing competition between wealthier teams and poorer teams.

http://www.cbafaq.com/salarycap.htm#Q18

In the US fines are not tax deductible, so that's one fiscal difference between taxes and fines. I have no idea if Spain considers fines to be tax deductible or not.

On the other hand, in the United States the Eighth Amendment forbids imposing excessive fines, and a very good argument could be made that some of these fines could be classified as “excessive”.

The aim of laws is compliance. If the low and medium fines of previous years have failed to achieve compliance, and fines eventually escalate to high, I'd argue it's far from excessive. If it were excessive a much lower amount would have achieved general compliance with that particular law, would it not?

Our regular human ideas for excessive don't count. There's a legal standard there. I don't know it.

Nobody does, really. It has to be defined in context of the 'gravity of the offence'. I'm sure someone could make a good argument that 1% of the value of a property is reasonable.

As a 'fine', 100 or even 200 percent of a property could be argued reasonable. 'You aren't using this property as the law intended, so you have to give it to us and pay a penalty'.

If I steal an apple from Walmart, should the fine be 1 percent of the value of the apple? Clearly not.

It is exceedingly rare for a fine to be struck down as a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The standard as articulated by Waters-Pierce Oil Co. v. Texas, 212 U.S. 86 (1909) is that the fine must be "so grossly excessive as to amount to a deprivation of property without due process of law."

That case was about a $5000 a day antitrust fine, which had accumulated to $1.6 million, but had not forced compliance with the law. The Supremes concluded that the fine was not excessive, because the business was doing well enough not to comply despite the fines.

The fine would have to be grossly in excess of what it would take to force compliance by a reasonable business. A fine that amounts to a doubling of the property tax would almost certainly not be a violation of the Eighth amendment.

Well I would counter argue that if previous lower fines failed to influence anyone then a larger fine is not really excessive. I think the problem is that everyone always thinks it will be the other guy first and that why should they act before anyone else. Well the message is pretty clear now hurry up before the crap hits the fan we are serious and coming for you.

As these are investment funds, they would generally sell off the SPV holding the property. Whether they are tax deductible or not ultimately doesn't matter, as they are not collecting rent (i.e. they'd only pay tax on the gain).

Interestingly, tax refunds are not always tax deductible, either. I paid federal taxes on the previous year's state tax refund this year. How does that make ANY sense?

It makes sense because you didn't pay federal taxes on that amount last year. Ideally your withholding should have been perfect last year and your refund would have been $0, and then you would have paid the federal tax amount on it last year.

Relatedly, I got a ~$5k state refund last year and I'm not paying additional federal tax on it this year because the SALT deductions are now gone under Trump's tax changes, so my state tax burden doesn't affect my federal tax burden anymore.

Into the weeds a bit here, but if you deducted your payments to the state in 2017 on your federal 2017 tax return (filed in 2018), and you got a refund from the state in 2018, you should be entering that on your federal 2018 tax return.

Since you won't be deducing SALT in 2018, any state refund in 2019 wouldn't be reportable for federal tax year 2019.

If this were otherwise, people would have purposefully massively over pay to the state in 2017, claim a large deduction in tax year 2017, get a large refund in 2018, and not have to pay back the deduction they didn't really deserve.

Yup. I happen to be in an AMT situation where the state refund from last year isn't taxable this year, but it might still be for others as you point out.

> Why is it a fine? Why not a tax?

Fines (at least, non-criminal ones) and taxes, while sometimes procedurally distinct, are essentially functionally equivalent.

In general, taxes are deductible whereas fines are not.

And you usually don’t self-assess fines, but you do self-assess taxes.

Leave the fines for when taxes aren’t self-assessed.

> Why is it a fine? Why not a tax?

what's the difference?

Traditionally, you only pay a fine if you’re caught.

Cynically, one could claim the same about taxes.

Not paying taxes is a criminal matter, though. The fines being assessed are civil matters.

Fines are usually neither civil nor criminal, they are administrative matters.

If you park in a car park for too long but no one notices you can drive off and be totally fine. If you don't pay taxes someone could work it out and look in to history to catch you out.

Maybe fines offer more discretion for officials (easy to impose, revise, and target specific landlords) as opposed to a tax which would be more rigid (slow to implement, difficult to change)?

is it good that fines allow them to target specific landlords?

Can be either, depends on society.

Bad if the officials are corrupt and will use that power to extort money for personal profits.

Good if the officials are democratically elect, supported by the public, do what people want them to, and the public is mostly good people.

Have no idea about Barcelona's officials nor society.

Spaces dont pay taxes. Only people pay taxes. Taxing it through estate or through income is not taxing space vs taxing human beings.

Yeah let's just get rid of income taxes and have an empty-building based economy that makes a lot of sense

Or lower one with the revenue from the other...

I also prefer sales taxes over income taxes with cheques to counter their regressive nature.

And carbon taxes over sales and income taxes. Taxing destruction is a good thing.

That's fair but I don't think, at least with empty buildings, the revenues would be anywhere close to being able to replace a significant portion of income taxes. The scales are vastly different. But I should apologize for an overly snarky initial comment.

Depends on how much unused real estate there is, and what counts as unused. There are beautiful places out there filled with cottages that are unused 80-90% of the year, while the locals struggle.

Taxes serve as a discouragement, so let’s tax the harmful things first. Then those that can afford it without any real harm to quality of life, then lastly everyone else.

An underused property tax hits the first two really well.

While we are at it, lets tax the vacant hours of the unemployed - those evil speculators who are consipiring to restrict the supply of labor. That will encourage them to work and thereby be able to afford all that brand new housing!

We call it the opioid tax and it works pretty effectively at eliminating the unemployed.

the objective of the tax would not be to eliminate the unemployed, but rather to put them to work

Lazy athletes performing 2-3 hours a night for 75 days a year and retiring at 35.

Much easier to beg for votes saying we "fined these evil landlords" instead of saying increasing taxes on empty buildings. I think there will be many fires in Barcelona this year.

If the tax %age on the empty buildings is high enough, voters will like it.

I fear it won’t be big enough so they didn’t say it, but I don’t know Spanish culture.