I would love to see no tax on primary home property at all. Just for commercial/investment properties. Unfortunately, a lot of that would be passed on to renters unless income taxes were assessed differently. But that would also mean drastically changing school funding, which could be a good opportunity but would likely turn this into every more of an impossible shitshow.
If you are referencing property taxes funding schools, you should know that it actually only funds about half of total school funding. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones and according to this article [0], it has been this way since at least 1995.
So if you actually informed people that the wealthy areas don't get more funding, I don't see why it would be an issue.
I thought it says they are relatively neutral? And that 35 states have policies to counter local discrepancies?
Maybe I'm just missing stuff - that page is a design/user nightmare. But I do agree that the pet student funding tends to be pretty fairly distributed.
"So if you actually informed people that the wealthy areas don't get more funding, I don't see why it would be an issue."
I generally agree. I think the main point that the rich areas would not like, is that often the state money has restrictions on what it can be used for, or comes with policy requirements attached. If I remember correctly, PA schools could lose state funding if they didn't implement and enforce the state's masking policy. This caused a bit of friction in many districts.
I think one argument is this incentivizes in the wrong way regarding home buying. It seems similar to the mortgage interest rate deduction argument: it incentivizes larger homes, it's regressive because it benefits those with more wealth in property than those with less, increases the likelihood of defaults due to people being incentivized towards more expensive homes, and potentially distorts housing prices, related to excessive borrowing.
Maybe. My idea is to shift property tax to income/capital gains tax. In theory (depending on the structure) that should provide less net income because the number of working years should be lower than the number of years living in any property, and it should impact the higher earners more. This lower net income should lower the amount one is approved for (and hopefully stay the same towards the lower income range). This should reduce the burden on people who are on a fixed income while keeping houses a similar size. Maybe even smaller since the tax is taken off the top rather than perpetually taken off the back end - people tend to notice a smaller paycheck more.
This is an interesting perspective, thanks for clarifying. I think it would also be interesting if it leads to a more equitable method of funding schools.
I think it would be a mix in my view. Most of that should be income taxes at the state level, but still allow for some smaller percentage income tax to be collected at the local level. This should provide a higher base level of per student funding across the state, but still allow local municipalities to collect a smaller amount of funds that wouldn't have state restrictions on them. Maybe something like 95% fed and state funding with 5% local.
It sounds plausible if we could get around the PR issue of any raise in state income taxes being viewed as an evil. (I do think this would cause the need for higher state taxes, considering how many state and local municipalities struggle to fund education programs through general funds).
It reminds me a bit of the universal healthcare push. It seems very hard to convince people that, yes, their income tax levels may go up, but their overall costs will go down.
