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.