hugh wrote
John Williamson wrote
hugh wrote
John Williamson wrote

I know a number of people who have been in the same house for over thirty years. Are you suggesting that their
property taxes should be based on a value from the 1970s?

Why not? Their property value now is determined by what other people can afford to pay for it, whereas they may
well could not now afford to buy it themselves.

The reality is the whole principle of a property tax is largely "unfair". But first you must define what criteria
for assessing "fairness".

One fair method would be to calulate that each person in a town generates on average X kilos of rubbish per year,
uses a certain anount of street lighting as they move round, and so on, then charge each person for what they use...

You say fair without first defining fairness.

It isnt even possible.

Is it fair to charge everyone the same amount, even the destitute and the sinking rich ?

Is it fair to charge someone who hasnt moved for 60 years much
less than someone who has moved in the last couple of years ?

The biggest items of expenditure for local government are social
services and education, neither of which are directly linked to properties.

Yes, and some places only charge the property owner for non social
services and education is paid for by taxation thats not on propertys.

There are advantages and disadvantages with both approaches.

If you only charge an income tax, those who dont have
any taxable income dont have to pay any taxes at all.

The US system sees the bottom HALF of tax payers
pay no nett federal income tax. That completely mad.

Oh, didn't they try that? It was called the Poll Tax, IIRC, and got thrown out very quickly. Or you could charge a
local income tax, but that would be too complicated to work out....

Poll tax was unpopular simply because suddenly people who had never paid anything found themselves with a tax bill.

Its also unpopular amounst economists and others
because its a VERY regressive tax when even the
destitute pay as much as the stinking rich do.

Atleast a VAT isnt quite so regressive because the stinking rich
do tend to spend a lot more on what does incur the VAT and
quite a bit of stuff like basic food is often exempt a VAT tax.

Corse the stinking rich can escape much of a VAT just by
spending much of what they spend out of the country too.

There is no such thing as a 'fair' tax.

If there was, we'd have found it by now and everyone would be using that approach.

Bring back the rates. At least they were based on a nominal rental value for each property, which meant that bigger
homes paid more rates on average than small ones.

But the nominal rental values varied enormously within the same town.
Generally under the present system residents of larger homes pay more.

And why should they have to when that particular tax mostly pays for the
sort of services that dont vary much if any at all by the size of the house.
And those in the larger houses are rather less likely to be recieving social
services from local govt too.