Re:Book Review: Progress and Poverty
by pessimizer on Friday May 13, 2022 @10:13PM
(#31374496)
Lobbyists, PR professionals and the people who pay them own lots of property and pay property taxes. They're far harder for the wealthy to dodge than income or capital gains taxes. Of course the public has been trained to hate them, like they've been trained to hate estate taxes, and in some years public polls would show near-majorities against progressive taxation in general.
edit: it seems obvious because of the thread topic, but property taxes are the most easily and intuitively justifiable tax. People with more property use more public services.
I'm thinking of my buddy back in Missouri -- not wealthy; not a lobbyist, PR professional, or any kind of professional -- who told me (more or less):
"It's unfair. It's the one tax you can't avoid. No matter what you do, you can't opt out. It's like you don't even own your own property. The government owns it. You never really own anything, as long as they can tax you just for existing on your own land."
That's the intuitive, everyman objection.
It is a sort of silly objection -- you can avoid property tax by having no property, in the same way that you can avoid income tax by having no income. I guess it is probably easier to evade income tax, than property tax, though.
Yes, but note that property taxes are extremely unpopular:
> America's most hated tax: Local property tax (42%) By far, America's most hated tax is your local property tax! It's almost ironic that your home, perhaps the single greatest source of taxable deductions on your federal income taxes, is also the greatest source of dislike when it comes to taxes in general among the American public with 42% responding that they felt it was the least fair tax of all.
Source: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/02/americas-5...
It looks like that 42% number comes from this Gallop poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx
They have a sort of purity and logic that appeals to economists, but they're intuitively hated by everyone else.