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.
Property taxes aren't progressive: although they're levied on individuals who tend to be well-off, a significant proportion of those costs end up passed on to renters. Additionally, poorer people tend to spend a larger portion of their income on housing (be it rent or otherwise) than the rich.
Property taxes are very progressive and we should absolutely have more of them (fair ones, not like the one in this article where you lose your home if you fail to pay some trivial sum).
The reasons are best described in the article below, but in summary, we all pay to defend and enhance your property (by supporting the police, roads, local services, etc). It's fairer for property owners to take a larger share of this burden since they alone get the benefits from it, like the ability to sit in the garden and enjoy the view or the increased value of the property when the government builds a road to it. Land taxes also raise revenue without deterring productive work (unlike, say, income tax).
To answer your direct question, since property owners are overrepresented (they vote more often and are far more likely to be politicians), yes of course they've tried to get rid of progressive property taxes. eg. This in Nevada:
I don’t really understand why people say a tax on owned capital is so far fetched when we are all okay with property taxes which is literally a wealth tax on a subset of owned capital. The only difference is that property taxes are regressive and not progressive
i'm mostly learning about this just recently, but i still downvoted you because i don't think that's true. property tax, for all intents and purposes, seems to just get passed down to the renters both commercial and residential.
i used to knee jerk think that raising property taxes to the market rate was a great equalizer. in california that bill got killed, but actually i'm more informed now and i don't think it's that easy.
Property tax is progressive because rich people purchase more property, and real property tax is critically important because real estate is a permanently finite resource.
Property taxes are pretty bad! Everyone hates paying them, retirees can’t afford them, and they tax building improvement which motivates owners to tear down their buildings.
LVT is a much better related tax.
Anyway, wealth taxes are probably bad because taxes are supposed to be deflationary, but wealth taxes are inflationary if you collect them in USD, since taxpayers have to sell assets first. Unless the IRS is willing to take a % interest in a collectible painting as the tax.
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.
Property taxes are a significant burden on people with fixed incomes. It amounts to a permanent rent, and requires an income. It amounts to a form of servitude to the government I think.
Sales taxes are good because tourists pay them. Most people mad about taxes hate property taxes, because they want to move all the tax burden to tourists (and their own children.)
Yes property taxes have another dimension of “fairness” to them, but that’s not why economists favor them: it’s because they can’t easily be dodged and are easy to extract (knowledge of property ownership is pretty reliable).
Taxation isn’t necessarily based on what’s fair or rational, it’s a way of financing public expenses. It might be more logical from the perspective of the people as a whole to tax wealth more and income less (for example) even though wealth is less logical and “fair” to tax than income or consumption.
> Property taxes are regressive, prevent you from ever truly owning your own plot, and disproportionately reduce the wealth of the people who spend most of their lives creating it for other people.
Property taxes are a form of wealth tax. The more wealth you own in the form of property, the more you pay in tax. Many people who work for a living don't own any property at all - about 35% of households in the US are renters. They don't have this problem of "wow my house is worth $1.2 million so I've got to sell it and move" - they've got bigger problems.
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.
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