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Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

> How does that help in the situation of a homeowner not being able to afford their tax bill because their property increased in value?

If you cant afford the tax, you should move out and sell/rent out. This whole premise is absurd.

Sorry down voter. But this is a fact. We have property tax to discourage under utilization of scarce resources. If you can't afford the tax rate, you should you should find some way to increase your income. This is a prime example of why we don't need the 0.001% to screw over the rest of us. We the 99% are perfectly capable of screwing over ourselves!

The "community" doesn't owe long time residents or new residents anything just because they decided to buy instead of renting. Let's be rational here.

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"If you cant afford the tax, you should move out and sell/rent out"

This makes zero sense to me. Someone bought the property 50 years ago and now is the sole owner, but it is reasonable to force them off their property / out of their home? I get it, other people are willing to pay more for it, but it is the owner's property.

Taken to the full Georgist theory, a person is entitled to property in themselves, and in what they create, but not to land and other natural resources; they have no right to excludes others from natural resources without paying the rest of the community rent for its use.

This reminds me of an article posted on HN a few years ago (not California) but one state was increasing property taxes based upon the persons view the State increased his home value by over a hundred thousand dollars and his house was something like a cabin.

If you bought 20-30 years ago when housing prices were more reasonable but due to bubbles created by the Government your property increased in value from 150k to 600k your property taxes now would be about $800 a month. Living in San Diego you cannot really buy a house for less then 500k. Raising everyone's property taxes to this level would essentially evict many millions of homeowners. Prop 13 is a good thing there are plenty of taxes already including a very high income tax, property tax addons (extra fees besides the main tax), sales taxes, prepared food taxes, lighting and fixture taxes on businesses, sewer tax, and many other thousands of taxes for the the California Government to mismanage.

Those would go down if prop 13 were fixed.

and the homeless population would skyrocket.

No it wouldn't. Average price of housing would stay the same.

Same argument can be made about buying in the bay area. If you can't afford it, move. My argument is just as unreasonable to make as telling someone to leave their home.

> But this is a fact. We have property tax to discourage under utilization of scarce resources.

I'm going to have to ask for a citation on that. In places where land is cheap and plentiful, and there not even remotely a problem with under utilization of scarce resources, they still tend to have property taxes. Property tax rates tend to be set at a level that correlates almost perfectly with local government funding needs. That suggests that we have property taxes to fund local government.

This is a major reason why a Land Value Tax is more equitable than a property tax.

You own land in downtown SF? That's a very scarce resource, and you ought to be taxed on it in order to make sure it's correctly utilized. (Note: the infrastructure within SF is relatively good, which is theoretically what the land tax is paying for.)

You own land outside of a small town and you wish to build a factory? Your land is next to valueless, and the improvements you build shouldn't be discouraged through taxes. (Note: the infrastructure out here is fairly poor, which explains why the land tax is minimal.)

To jump to a theoretical conclusion, Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated through the Henry George Theorem[0] that the quantity of public goods a municipal government supplies is equal to the amount it would receive in a land value tax, given certain assumptions. In short, a land value tax would optimally fund local government.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

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