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Comment by ArkVark | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with a lack of land and property taxation. Elderly people will hold onto assets forever, until death essentially, whilst the building and society collapses around them. Meanwhile they demand a huge amount of welfare and healthcare services without paying into the system.

At least the land tax system in the USA encourages downsizing and efficient allocation of this resource.

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And what would you'r solution be? Take from them the houses they worked their whole lives to acquire and put them in elderly homes? They have paid their share to society by providing the taxes for 65+ years that they have worked and brought us where we are today. Those homes are not vanished from the market. They will be inherited by their children and so on. Land taxation is by my opinion inherently bad for that specific reason ( if they have only one piece of land )

The problem is that we are pilling into cities where land is minimal and thus the market works in supply and demand.

Hopefully as years pass, where remote work is more and more accessible you can be owning your own 1 euro or whatever home in any area and not worry about limited land.

I really don't understand this argument. Land taxes are supposed to pay for the various services in the area (schools, roads, etc). You don't pay your fair share and be done, you pay every year because those services cost money every year. If, at some point, you can no longer afford those costs (excluding those situations where social welfare safety nets are supposed to help), you move somewhere else. You don't get to keep taking advantage those services without paying for them just because you've been there for a long time.

In Germany thats what income tax is for. The municipality receives the money and funds local infrastructure from it. I think the rest of Europe is at least similar in this regard.

One can argue about which system is better, but taxing elderly people out of their homes would never fly politically over here.

... and that's why we have families who are on the verge of welfare not selling their expensive (additional) properties, waiting them to appreciate even more in value, dreaming of selling them somewhere in future and making their children set for life, while working class people have to pay 50% of their already heavily taxed wages for rent...

> In Germany thats what income tax is for.

No. The main funding for local communities are property tax ("Grundsteuer") and business tax ("Gewerbesteuer"), income tax share only accounts for about a third. The height of both are also set on the local level the community has a very direct way to change the available money.

And Grundsteuer is quite cheap compared to property taxes in North America.

This is known as the Poor Widow fallacy.

edit: https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html

edit: A solution to this problem is to allow seniors to defer payment of the land value tax until the next purchase of the land, at which point the next buyer will receive the deferred tax burden.

Copying your URL here and adding the scheme so it renders as a link:

https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html

Land tax also does not allow you to simply exist - you have to make a profit to pay the tax. You can't just grow your own food and ignore the economy. It also comes with perverse incentives, like opposing anything that might raise property values unless you want to sell.

Perhaps it's a uniquely American view, having no connection to the land you live on, looking at it as just an economic resource to be 'allocated'.

Even in pre-civilised societies you couldn't simply exist. You didn't pay taxes, yet you also had to work hard to protect the land from intruders, or, heck, even had to bust your ass off to provide regular access to basic things such as water and food.

This. Nothing ever simply exists (entropy!).

Money in the bank changes in value. Investments in companies that go bang or bust. Ignoring a fruit plant that dies...

Change is the only constant in life.

> like opposing anything that might raise property values unless you want to sell

Are you in America? Raising your property values is like a religion here.

Where the land tax works. Which is not most places in the USA.

Most of the USA doesn't have a land tax. Instead, there is a property tax, which is determined by what's sitting on the land.

This not true. US property taxes nearly all tax both the land and any improvements (i.e. permanent structures) that sit on it.

My property in the US is taxed by: ( [assessed value of the land] + [assessed value of the building(s)] ) * [tax rate] = [total tax]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...

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