"There was never a danger other than the obvious" is a really remarkable thing to say as an excuse.
There was absolutely no fentanyl or sex-trafficking danger. Zero.
Yes, certainly possible. When California in 2020 proposed split roll, i.e. assessing commercial property at actual value over time (the measure lost by 4 points), it would have exempted properties worth less than $3m, with additional small-business exemptions.
The problem is property tax also has a value in the form of land use rationalization: when your value is going way up, under whether capitalism or social democracy, that's a signal that it would be better for you and for the community at large to redevelop at a higher use. Right now zoning often bars that, but take away the bad kinds of zoning and you still have all the small owners with no incentive to go through the disruption / slight risk of selling up. (Or, worst of both worlds, they flip the house to someone higher-income.)
(A land value tax instead of a property tax would be a better incentive, but set that aside for now.)
There's also an equity issue in that someone might be low-income in retirement, but sitting on a tremendous amount of property value they plan to pass down to their children and that it would be an unfair giveaway to completely exempt. The value could even be a source of income through taking out equity, and that wouldn't be counted in means-testing.
Here's my idea for how to get the full value of property tax - generating public revenue, no giveaways of long-term sat-on value, and creating a land use incentive - without forcing anyone out of their homes.
Just charge tax on full value, but defer collection until the value is realized. Keep capping tax growth at 2%/year (Prop 13), but if value grows by more than 2%, the difference goes on the owner's account. So when they sell the house down the line, maybe they have $50,000 deferred tax that's piled up over time - but they're netting $200,000, so you're fine. (And the deferred tax obligation is cleared if they don't net enough to pay it, considering capital gains and other taxes.) If the owner dies, the deferred amount survives the inheritance process.
So if someone just wants to live in their house for the rest of their life and doesn't care what they could sell it for, they can do that - they just have to weigh that against how much value they want to leave to their children. They'll realize they can get more through selling up to a small apartment, and make the choice without unfair pressure - just fair pressure.
Pittsburgh had the land-value tax until old people complained that it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
This happened in the 80s, so I can't complain about Boomers.
Here in Ohio, the Republican majority had a great new idea - a flat tax!
Our state income tax is a flat tax, but no one calls it that.
7: That's interesting! As of now, Ohio has a slightly progressive income tax ranging from 2.765 percent to 3.990 percent. The flat tax proposal would tax all income over $26,050 at 2.75%.
It's 3% of all taxable income. The city/school tax is 3% of wage income only. We subsidize investors and the retired because they're great or something.
3 Hard disagree. You write "when your value is going way up, under whether capitalism or social democracy, that's a signal that it would be better for you and for the community at large to redevelop at a higher use." Bollocks. Sometimes it's just very wealthy people wanting to buy and tear down your house and the ones to either side so that they can put up a much larger house (see Westerly, Rhode Island, and many other similar locations). Or real estate developers seeing a chance to make a quick buck. It's only "better for the community at large to redevelop" if you believe that the distribution of the gains from such development don't matter (as in the gains from trade under free trade).
Your proposal is clever and well motivated but too complicated to be workable -- there's too many points for creative accounting, valuation et al and it would require massively complex regulations that would themselves become a problem.
Sometimes it's just very wealthy people wanting to buy and tear down your house and the ones to either side so that they can put up a much larger house
I'm fine with making that harder via zoning (lower lot coverage for oneplexes, etc.) and tax policy. Right now we super-subsidize big expensive homes.
Or real estate developers seeing a chance to make a quick buck.
In most of the world, cities densifying allows real estate developers' interests to converge with those of the public at large: building up freely creates more homes at constant or lower prices. (See Auckland rents since 2016.) We in North America and the UK are the ones who forcibly limited new apartments to the upper income spectrum by boxing them into more than 5% of any city at best. And now this is going to be the same old debate, so I'm going to limit my responses unless there's something new I can be saying.
Around here, people grow trees to block their view of the beautiful mountain so they don't have to pay taxes on the view. I can just imagine the games they would play to get their property into a lower tax bracket.
I wonder if you could dig a hole here, make your lot steeper, and get a lower property tax bill?
Your proposal is clever and well motivated but too complicated to be workable -- there's too many points for creative accounting, valuation et al and it would require massively complex regulations that would themselves become a problem.
It's no more complicated than the current Prop 13 regime in California. (You can pass the cap on assessed value down to your children but up to a certain dollar amount and for a single property... your taxes go up by no more than 2% but if value goes down you can petition for lower, then if it goes up again your taxes can go up again but to no more than if they had always been on a straight 2% trajectory from year 1... you can keep your capped assessed value if you swap houses and add to your assessed value just the difference between old total value and new value... ad nauseam.)
How it would be marketed as a ballot measure: "Houses are wealth and we should tax them at a fair rate, but only if and when the gains arrive."
Speaking of valuation problems, I always figured it would be hard to separate the value of the land from the value of the stuff you build on the land. But apparently that was never a problem. It's still separate on the assessment. I'd clean up if they went back to land-value tax.
15: Yes, it's separated here in CA too, and for my property it even seems like a reasonable estimate (I made an independent estimate of the land value for tax reasons), but it doesn't affect anyone's bill so I imagine it's done at least somewhat by rote and would need an overhaul if we went to LVT.
Texas does also have a sales tax. Alaska is the only state that taxes neither income nor sales.
12- There's a higher deduction on federal taxes if you're blind but almost no one acts on the incentive.
I didn't try to fuck my mother. I didn't try to kill my father. And I didn't blind myself out of guilt.
Alaska is the only state that taxes neither income nor sales.
NH would like word.
I re-read the OP, and .... it seems like all this scheming for a way to re-introduce progressivity into the property tax system is intrinsically wrong-headed: the *point* of the property tax system, of the sales tax system, is regressivity. That's the *point*, not some accident. If you were to devise a scheme that properly reintroduced progressivity, that scheme would then be targeted just like a progressive income or wealth tax.
20: You do have some sort of weird income tax on non-wage income. (And a corporate one, but so do we.)
I specifically checked that before writing 17 because I knew it would come up.
the *point* of the property tax system, of the sales tax system, is regressivity
How are you defining regressive in this sense? I define it as something that hits people more the less their means are. So sales tax is regressive, and head tax is the most regressive of all, whereas an income tax with graduated rates is usually progressive. On this scale, a property tax is almost exactly in between - similar to an income tax without graduated rates, so less progressive than the federal income tax but more than state sales taxes.
And on what basis do you say the point is to be regressive? Part of the goal is to raise revenue with property value being a decent proxy for means, but another part is directly to make sure a share of property value (which the commonwealth has a large part in creating!) goes to the benefit of the public.
In colonial America, colonies collected a lot of their revenue through head taxes. The post-Revolution states generally switched to property tax, which in the context of the time was quite progressive, and that stuck.
With their low tax rates NH can't even afford indefinite articles.
Prop 13, of course, makes it much more regressive, because it benefits homeowners over renters, and gives you more of a tax break over time the more your property value is.
We have a kind of unofficial version of Prop 13 caused my fear of increasing valuation above the purchase price. It's really unfair, but I've been in the house long enough that I'm coming out ahead.
You do have some sort of weird income tax on non-wage income.
Its true there is an interest and dividends tax, as well as a room and meals tax. I guess we wouldn't need those if we had oil.
You should see what Vermont is doing and copy that.
Don't do what Alaska did. Turns out it doesn't work very well.
Minivet: I was writing somewhat-metaphorically. But also, it's well-documented that wealthier property-owners routinely get lower assessments; IIRC some investigations have found that Black people receive higher assessments, too.
Look: what I'm trying to say is really simple: the system is set up the way it is, for a *reason*. You can invent lots of ways of changing things so that they're more progressive, but you should also add on a pony, b/c at least then you might get the pony.
It's Texas, ffs.
I mean, here in CA we have state income tax. And they're not stupid about it: capital gains (long-term, short term, whatever) is taxed as ordinary income. That's a big deal, and lots of rich people get bent-out-of-shape about it. Now imagine that in Texas. Hell, there'd be assassinations.
the *point* of the property tax system, of the sales tax system, is regressivity. That's the *point*, not some accident.
I literally made pointed out that this was a rhetorical question in the OP, and went on and on about what a terrible state it is.
You should see what Vermont is doing and copy that.
Nah, Vermont is upside-down.
Heebie: fair cop. I read that, but got distracted in the comments. Sorry, my bad.
re: your last sentence in OP: lately I've started to feel that a useful metaphor is hurricanes. In this time of climate change, each time you survive one, you think "well, we made it thru that, we can make it thru the next!" and so we stick around in our coastal waterside houses. But eventually a big one's coming that'll wash it all away. And no flood insurance is going to fully compensate for all the loss. Why hurricanes? B/c there's nothing you can do about them. I was thinking about Georgia (in the Caucasus) today and Russia in 2011. People in Russia tried to protest, too -- and got squashed flat. Sometimes civil society actions work -- even if some people must die (see: Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity). But sometimes the authoritarianism is bad enough, civil society measures don't work anymore. You can either leave, or pick up a gun.
Maybe it's having grown up there that tarnishes my assessment, but I feel like at this point, that's where Texas is. It's not going to get better, and no amount of "if we just protest harder" will change that.
I don't really think it's going to get better on a large scale, but there are small battles you win here and there.
Look: what I'm trying to say is really simple: the system is set up the way it is, for a *reason*. You can invent lots of ways of changing things so that they're more progressive, but you should also add on a pony, b/c at least then you might get the pony.
This really seems to elide the distinction between what is now and what is determined to always be - and to ignore the great strides that have been made in the past against entrenched power. If you think movements toward better and more equitable government are universally doomed to fail, I suppose there's not much common ground for us to be conversing at all.
If it matters, I'm not really talking about Texas. I have no idea what will get Texas on a better track.
Minivet: Yes, I was writing specifically about Texas. And a bit more generally about the South. B/c even as DA Willis is doing her best in Atlanta to see justice done, the Georgia legislature is reacting to shut her down. I might be on shakier ground there.
But Texas? Stick a fork in it: it's done.
I *do* believe that movements toward better and more equitable government are possible and can win: otherwise I wouldn't be citing Georgia (in the Caucasus) and Ukraine. But the reason I cited Russia in2011, is that sometimes the weight of the authoritarians is too great, and you can't push them back with only civil methods. I think that that's where Texas is. I fear that that's where the entire South is.
OK, I see our common ground.
I think like in prior decades, the clearest conceivable path out for a lot of states is federal action. An apex of power enough to defang the Supreme Court could create enough state-level voter protections, anti-gerrymandering for state legislatures, etc. to change the political calculus within states. But this will be better for states on the verge like Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina; Texas might be resilient to that.
I think they may have too many of those already.
I'm thinking that the Fetterman template - progressive but codes as extremely manly and non-pretentious - is a way more workable template in red states than that nice Beto fellow.
Texas is so broken.
(HOW BROKEN IS IT?)
They tried to fix Texas by turning the power off and back on again and even that didn't work.
43: It's worth keeping in mind that Fetterman did significantly worse than Shapiro running for governor that same year. Admittedly, Shapiro faced bigger piece of shit.
We ran a Fetterman-type for State Rep in a red corner of our county and he put on a good race but people there still gonna vote for an R.
I'm sure he's extremely manly and down-to-earth, but the best way to describe the visual impact of Josh Shapiro is "Josh Shapiro."
We ran a Fetterman-type for State Rep in a red corner of our county and he put on a good race but people there still gonna vote for an R.
I don't think you get proof of concept either way in a red corner of anywhere. It's the state, the suburbs, etc.
Anyway, he is now the only Pennsylvania governor I've seen m person. I don't think I shook his hand.
Yeah also state reps districts here are like 3800 people, so maybe you are right that the analogy to Texas isn't great.
Fetterman is maybe three people, no more.
They used a lot of forced perspective to make him look bigger. He had two aides who looked identical but one was 5'10" and the other 4'9". They'd switch them as needed.
Three raccoons in a trench coat still better than Dr Oz
Three Dr. Oz in a klan robe are better than Mastriano.
Semi-OT (but related to the discussion of zoning), the vox explainer about the current debates around homeless encampments is interesting and depressing, in that there really don't seem be good short term options: https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/3/8/23618237/homelessness-tent-encampments-housing-affordable
The short-term option seems to be "pushing homeless people to other communities." A lot of people who show up here had a bus ticket from Florida.
It does feel like there's a pitched battle between Florida and Texas for who can be the shittiest state, but both of NC's legislative bodies are just a single vote away from veto-proof GOP majorities, so keep your eye on the dark horse here.
||
The Cossacks above all -- considering themselves distinct from 'settled' Russians and yet, at the same time, appointed carriers of the essential Russian values - display that syndrome with gloomy intensity. A Russian is somebody who subdues non-Russians.|>
59: yep. Though be aware that Cossack tradition is also seen as a big part of Ukrainian national character, see Serhii Plokhy "The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires" which was inexplicably in my small local library.
And modern Ukrainians today cite Cossack character as a reason they are beating the Russians - flexible, self reliant, independent, innovative, rather than a nation of (as le Carre said) carnivorous bloody sheep.
56: it's weird that they point out that Houston has had a large decrease in homelessness and at the same time a large increase in encampments, but then don't explain why or how that's happening at all.
Here's an additional perspective to the problem of tent encampments: they are 100% invisible to anyone who doesn't have reason to drive by one. I would guess that a majority of people outside of major cities have very little idea that these exist, and certainly not the scale and scope of the problem.
62: Where do they say that? I see they say it "still has hundreds of encampments". That's not a comparison over time.
63: Unless it's near their neighborhood and then they go apeshit.
64.1: You're right it doesn't say that explicitly, I may have misread it. I think I got that from the sentence saying "tents have also sprung up" which made it sound new.
Maybe the stakes were not in deep enough?
Or maybe it's just spring time?
The United States is the only country on earth that decrees that the seasons begin and end on fixed dates, rather than when the weather gets round to it.
The United States is the only country on earth that decrees that the seasons begin and end on fixed dates, rather than when the weather gets round to it.
Really? Other countries don't define them by the solstices and equinoxes, too?
I think Canada goes by the judgment of a convocation of elderly beaver.
"This is some third quarter weather we're having here in the first quarter!"
I don't know which country I'm spoofing.
a convocation of elderly beaver
MILF porn, as the kids say.
The weird thing about defining the seasons this way is that logically the solstices and equinoxes should be the midpoints of the seasons, not the boundaries between them.
I guess the kids probably say GMILF porn. Perspective, man.
78: Maybe it was decided by people who clap on the 1s and 3s.
I don't even have the slightest idea how people figure out which is the ones and the threes. I might be clapping on twos and threes.
82: Listen for the backbeat. If there isn't one, it probably doesn't matter nearly as much when you clap.
You can find a definition next to "recursion" in the dictionary.
Sadly the "behind the beat" thread seems to be lost in the hoohole.
Alternatively, the song "Rock 'n' Roll Music" by Chuck Berry is basically an instruction manual.
It's got a back beat, you can't lose it
Clearly Chuck Berry never saw me dance.
The dictionary says backbeat is "the thing that Chuck Berry asserts you cannot lose. "
88: But maybe I'm misunderstanding the lyric. Maybe he's saying you're not allowed to lose it, not that it's impossible to lose it.
Anyway, I'm variously pwned. Sorry. Usually you don't need to refresh so often.
The weird thing about defining the seasons this way is that logically the solstices and equinoxes should be the midpoints of the seasons, not the boundaries between them.
It is a little weird, but that's why we console ourselves with conversations about seasonal lag.
"Other countries don't define them by the solstices and equinoxes, too?"
Absolutely not, and it leads to some very odd results. June 15th is still spring? Really?
You can be four days from Christmas but still in autumn? It's in the bleak midwinter! Christina Rossetti wrote a carol sbout it!
I use a very informal, but conveniently simple division of Dec-Feb winter, Mar-May spring, Jun-Aug summer, Sep-Nov autumn (all complete calendar months). But that's entirely contingent on the British climate.
95 is a formal thing, I've seen those called the meteorological seasons.
Actually, in my head I do 95 as well, just from imprinting on how months are taught to small children. No relation to the actual weather of the places I've lived for 10/11ths of my life.
I've long thought that we should shift the calendar about six or eight weeks compared to the actual seasons. You'd have a much better chance of a white Christmas if it fell around what is now the end of February or the start of March. And then the long grumpy post Christmas winter bleakness and grimness is replaced by the knowledge that spring is very close - within a couple of weeks of Christmas the snowdrops would start to flower.
Meanwhile, the shortest day of the year would fall around the end of October, which gives a great excuse to turn Halloween/Bonfire Night into a properly pagan Sunreturn festival - lots of fireworks and parties and big fires and so on.
re: 99
Latitude specific. So you might have to split into two calendars:
1. Universal calendar, shared by everyone
2. Celebratory calendar, to ensure maximal fidelity between celebration events and their weather/seasonal tropes. So, at the extreme, Australia would have Christmas 5 or 6 months different (on the universal calendar) relative to Scotland.
The celebratory calendar might be usefully split into N latitude bands (whatever number is practical).
Like this: https://content.meteoblue.com/en/research-education/educational-resources/meteoscool/general-climate-zones/climate_zones_lightbox.png but we'd probably want to create more zones, just to make it confusing and so that more places would feel a bit special.
"It's Edinburgh, Malmo, Copenhagen, Vilnius, and Chelyabinsk Christmas today!"
Here's the thing that I always wonder: 28 days is baked organically into the natural world, and 365 days is baked organically into the natural world, and 28*13 is 364. So why aren't there 13 months and one extra day to tack on somewhere? Why 12 months?
I've read historical explanations but they somehow don't quite address why 13 months hasn't sprung up naturally from time to time.
99/100: Look, just let the holidays vary continuously with geography, okay? It's simplest that way.
Now can we please implement continuous time zones, like civilized people?
One certainly wouldn't use the equinoxes as mid season here. Neither June 1 nor October 1 are in the Western Montana summer. September 1 isn't fall.
I just stopped wearing white because who knows when summer is.
Because a lunar month is not 28 days, it's 29.5 days! How is 28 days baked into anything?
I don't think that counts. It's a 12 month calendar with a filler.
Some people say that February is the worst month, but I get paid the same for fewer days.
Supporting Moby, the wiki link says,
The Ethiopian calendar has twelve months of thirty days plus five or six epagomenal days, which form a thirteenth month.[1]
which hardly takes advantage of the idea that 28 divides 365 with remainder 1.
I think that lots of ancient calendars were 12 months plus whatever is left over as a separate thing.
The answer is explained here, which also explains why some modern druids are doing it WRONG based on NONSENSE from ROBERT GRAVES that is NOT DRUIDIC. Basically, months even in solar calendars are ways of sort-of bringing in moon cycles that were used in most earlier agricultural calendars into a solar calendar, and 13 28-day months are an even worse way to do that than a 12 month cycle.
https://druidcraftcalendar.co.uk/other-calendars/the-myth-of-the-28-day-13-month-year/
I've had to write calendar converters in the past.* Julian to Gregorian. Meh. Except when you get to strange shit like 1752 in the UK and related countries. Then you start hitting things like Hebrew luni-solar calendars.
From wiki:
"The Hebrew lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the solar year and uses the 19-year Metonic cycle to bring it into line with the solar year, with the addition of an intercalary month every two or three years, for a total of seven times per 19 years. Even with this intercalation, the average Hebrew calendar year is longer by about 6 minutes and 40 seconds than the current mean tropical year, so that every 216 years the Hebrew calendar will fall a day behind the current mean tropical year.[2]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar#Months
* astrolabe cataloging project.
One day every 216 years seems pretty good, pre-computer society. It's just that Jewishness has really good staying power.
113: As Upetgi points out, 28 days has nothing to do with anything. The Ethiopians approximate the lunar month with 30 days then separate out the remainder. Elegant.
Thanks for burning Nicholas Cage Edward Woodward.
FIFY
117 back when I was doing my failed PhD in Islamic studies I had a great calendar converter for the Mac (OS 9, unfortunately. It was that long ago). It converted a lot of different calendars, not just AH to CE but Hebrew, Zoroastrian, Syriac, Ethiopic, stuff I'd never even heard of.
By the way, if anybody here ever gets a time machine, there is a meetup is Stockholm on February 30, 1712.
120: I don't have anything against him.
Time zone conversion just makes me thing of the most famous StackOverflow answer:
re: 121
When I did it, there was a handy reference book in the museum library that someone had already written that had paper version of the algorithms you needed for the various conversions, written both as human performable maths, and as some kind of computer pseudo-code. So I could crib from those to write the calendar conversion. I didn't write them totally from scratch, I just had to turn the paper formulas into code.
One day every 216 years seems pretty good, pre-computer society. It's just that Jewishness has really good staying power.
It's a point of pride that it's never had to be adjusted. The tradeoff is that it's so staggeringly complicated that no one ever knows when anything is without checking the calendar.
You can tell Hanukkah because of the plastic candles on the roofs of minivans.
