If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
Cool. Can I get a tax rebate for being too poor to own a home?
Cool. Never going to happen because it will fuck with basically the friends of every country’s leader.
How about the good ol’ “nobody gets seconds until everyone’s had firsts” rule
I always said this.
Any home that is not a primary residence should be taxed four or five times normal rates
Man, property taxes are such a weird fucking thing.
Back in the day, they used to tax based on frontage, which was essentially how much width the front of your house took up. So naturally, people responded by building ridiculously thin, ridiculously long houses. You can still find them in older cities like Charleston and in some of the older parts of Atlanta.
Nowadays, I can’t even figure out what the actual metric or system is supposed to be.
For example, the house I own is apparently worth around $500,000 now. We bought it for $220,000 in 2016. I can assure you that my house did not magically become twice as much house simply because Zillow or the county decided it was worth $500K. And yet, I’m being taxed according to that inflated valuation.
Some states don’t even charge traditional property taxes. They have completely different mechanisms. Florida, for example, is doing some kind of financial black magic that I still haven’t entirely figured out.
And honestly, why should my property taxes be based on the superficial market value of my house in the first place? If I bought the damn thing for $220K, why can’t that be the basis for taxation? That’s basically how cars work. You buy the car, pay your ad valorem tax when you register it, and then you don’t get an annual bill based on how much some guy thinks your car is worth now.
Why do we have to pay property taxes every single year on an asset we already bought? At some point, I would like to stop paying rent to the government for the privilege of owning the property I supposedly own.
And here’s another fun one: I drive an electric car. My annual registration isn’t $20 like it is for a regular gas-powered car. It’s around $250 because the state isn’t collecting gasoline taxes from me.
So essentially, the government looked at my electric car and said, “Congratulations on driving an environmentally friendly vehicle. That’ll be $230 extra.”
I’m beginning to think the entire tax system was designed by a committee of people who were locked in a room with a calculator and told to make everything as unnecessarily complicated as humanly possible.
Humanity is not long for this world.
I’m beginning to think the entire tax system was designed by a committee of people who were locked in a room with a calculator and told to make everything as unnecessarily complicated as humanly possible.
There’s a good chance that they chose the simplest method where “simple” means the easiest to understand change set, not the easiest to understand overall system. People usually have an easier time understanding small changes.
Fully agreed
No, it needs to multiply every time a new property is added
Agreed. And multiplied again for property owned by a corporation. Especially residential.
Bigger pockets = bigger taxes, proof. Every vent you have should go towards multiplying your liability.
And no loophole for multiple bank accounts, or offloading ownership into LLCs or some BS like that (no idea what the correct terms are for that, but I’m not an accountant). If you have any legal right to be able to touch money, that money counts.
Maybe separate personal and business accounts, since if you’re running a business correctly and aren’t getting obscene profits vs your workers, then having a big business shouldn’t necessarily increase your personal liability, but if you are hogging with profits, then it bleeds over. But tax the business more and more according to the money (in all accessible accounts (including savings) it has access to, same with people.
Also, we need to remove the possibility for money to make money. Maybe that would just be a side effect of making excess money too expensive to have, but if not it needs to be addressed too.
What constitutes a home? Does a property with multiple buildings mean multiple homes?
The rich will amalgamate all the lots together to avoid paying taxes.
That’s not to say do nothing but that the issue is much larger.
Does each apartment in a high rise count separately
Yes.
Pay up or sell it as condos.
Why 1% each? If housing is a human right, and it is, then we need strict limits around one per person. Companies should not be allowed to have long-term ownership at all.
Excuse me sir, I’m sure that multiple massive corporations would disagree with you on housing being a right!
They’d just make 2,000 shell companies, each with one house.
Perfectly legal.
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to own housing
I’d add a couple short-term exceptions: Construction companies may own housing during construction and for the amount of time it takes for newly built homes to sell to resident owners. Banks, credit unions and such should be able to foreclose on defaulted mortgages and take possession of the property for a certain amount of time, if it’s not sold within that time it goes to government auction.
They should not be allowed to retain ownership over mass amounts of occupied dwellings.
Denser housing like apartment blocs may need to work like condos, residents either outright own their portion of the building or become stakeholders in the building’s corporation, how to do that without inventing the turbo HOA will require further research and development.
Or other companies.
What about LLCs to represent polycules that can’t get married because for some reason Christianity norms are law?
No. Polycules should also be allowed to own homes. If we are changing the rules then let’s fix this as well
I always thought “if corporations are people, then why can they own other corporations”
They often do that already.
It reduces the liability when sued. If you do something dumb and owe someone $100,000,000. You just abandon that one property and make that company bankrupt, you don’t lose all your other properties too.
because of that reading government anti-corruption investigations can cause vertigo - just getting through the tense web of shells and shells of shells and mothershells and whatnot - there was one case in which the company had like 50 entities removed from the culprit
Every hurdle makes it more expensive to run and less profitable
Just put in wealth caps
Nobody should be able to have of control over 10 million, for example
But like on ALL their properties not just the excess ones
This is why wealth tax is so elegant. It doesn’t matter if you own a bunch of houses personally, or you own shares of a company that own a bunch of houses, or you use the shares as collateral to borrow a bunch of money; your total wealth is the same. There is no way get around it :3
The real wealth are the NFTs we made along the way.
There is and there always will be as long as capitalist have the political control.
Wealth taxes are necessary, but with offshoring and hiding accounts, I’d say they’re bureaucratically complicated rather than elegant.
They’re elegant in terms of limiting wealth hoarding. It’s just like estate tax that’s already implemented. Anyway, good to have more government jobs too.
Exponential*
If it were 2% on the first, it’d be 4% on the second, 8% on the third…
I think Ken Paxton, man of the people, family matters, wears $40K watches, has 15 homes on a 150K salary.
So 32,768% sounds fair for inhuman scum like him. That’s 14 more homes on the market hopefully.
I don’t even know what it would be for Blackrock, the largest homeowner in the market. They own more homes than individuals do in the country.
Looks like Ken’s love language is bribery with real estate .
