Hacker News Reader

Comment by carlio | Hacker News Reader

Local governance running well, public services like cleaning, helping homeless etc, all require tax dollars. Saying "I'd pay tax if they had enough money they get from tax to fix the problems that cause me not to want to pay tax" seems like it's a bit of a chicken-egg problem.

View on HN

This argument seems to make sense on the surface, but California already has some of the highest income taxes in the country. To make an appeal to extremes, if California had a 40% income tax they wanted to raise to 45% asking, “show me how you have demonstrated good stewardship in what you are already taking” would be, I imagine, somewhat common. Reasonable people can of course debate that percentage, and can do so today based on California already having high income taxes.

California does have high income tax, but property taxes are some of the lowest in the nation, and a recent attempt to reform those taxes failed. That leaves California 12th in state tax burden.

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...

Only helps if you're a homeowner. If you rent California probably has one of the highest tax burdens.

Property taxes in CA punish the newcomers and reward old money. When I bought in Mill Valley in 2001, I was literally paying 13X more taxes than my neighbor, a masseuse who inherited the property and kept the same tax rate her parents paid in the 70s. And as a very liberal town, every new tax initiative always passed, which again hit us harder.

If at least Prop 13 benefits could not be passed as inheritance, that would go a long way to balance things.

I'm happy I moved to WA now where my property taxes do get reassessed every year, but it balances out with no state income taxes.

> property taxes are some of the lowest in the nation

That's like citing the average rent in San Francisco. Great if you've been living in a rent controlled apartment for 30 years, but irrelevant if you've moved there recently.

California’s governance with respect to property taxes is horrific and inequitable to the point that it should be illegal in many ways it has distorted the national economy in good and bad ways as folks sitting on property have turned into the 21st century version of a French aristocrat by sitting in their 50s ranch.

That cohort of Californian is dying off now, and it may be better for all involved if companies pull out and disrupt the status quo. California’s incompetence shouldn’t drag down everything.

the property tax rate is fair. unless there is a cap on speculative activity on real estate with a real interest and initiative in keeping housing prices stable, prop 13 is the untouchable third rail.

just stopping foreign investment in california real estate will make an enormous difference. removing the prop 13 waiver for those who inherit property with the old tax rate will also help. with older people on the clock to die sometime within the next decade, ca will see a flood of plumped up property taxes when the homes change hands. but just the two measures is a good short term relief. million dollar homes are bought sight unseen and then flipped for 40-60% markup by foreign investors and people who dont even reside in california. making it a speculative rodeo circus. let the Gov. fix THAT first.

Valuation based assessment is a core principle of property taxes. The prop 13 stuff is gross and I’m always surprised that it was never shot down in the Supreme Court.

California can be California, but the problem is more than some junk ranch house is selling for $3M. It’s bullshit that the whole country is essentially held hostage by “too big to fail” California mortgages that homeowners cab just walk away from.

Actually property taxes are ad valorem. [..] An ad valorem tax is a tax whose amount is based on the value of a transaction or of property. It is typically imposed at the time of a transaction, as in the case of a sales tax or value-added tax. - Wikipedia[..]

Property taxes are paid EVERY year. What asset do you own that you keep on paying sales tax on?

The real estate market should be stable and for free market forces to aid that, we have to make many more fundamental changes before even touching prop 13.

1. Starting with children and grandchildren who inherit property not benefiting from the prop 13.

2. Secondly, a moratorium on all foreign investments in the real estate market in California.

3. A tiered tax rate for homes left empty while enjoying prop 13 benefits. Additionally, the primary home can also be entirely tax free wrt recurring annual taxes.

California’s problem is not low taxation. Our problem is our state budget and gross mismanagement of our tax dollars by our elected representatives.

I would like to see how they manage our current levies and with more transparency before we hand over a bigger portion of our pay check. If people don’t have disposable income to spend, the economy will crumble and collapse.

Every other jurisdiction that I’ve owned property uses comparable sales to establish fail valuation. In New York, where I live now, jurisdictions do a comprehensive reassessment when market changes start creating structural inequities. Exemptions are for elderly, disabled vets, etc are expressed as a capped percentage of valuation, backed by an alternative revenue source.

An owner with an identical property should be paying identical tax.

You clearly don’t know the history of prop 13. It is untouchable because the last time they increase it, thousands of retirees and seniors on fixed income had to sell their homes to pay the tax. Not everyone is a millionaire in CA. Most of the population is working class and can’t afford raising taxes.

California property values rose dramatically. NY and NJ are the worst places to own property. The whole housing depends on landlords and rent controlled apartments. Where they make money from insanely expensive utilities by strangling the poorest people. It’s a different kind of scam. Upstate NY is a whole different kind of hell with seven months of gray and knee high snow.

This is why there was no Silicon Valley in NY. This is why NY didn't create as many millionaires out of middle class and provide upward mobility to citizens as well as opportunities to immigrants. What’s NY’s GDP? What’s NY’s population? What’s NY’s total state tax revenue?

I’ll tell you. NY’s GDP is comparable to South Korea and is at 1.7 trillion. CA’s GDP is comparable to Great Britain and is at 2.97 trillion(highest in USA) NY population is 8.5 million vs CA’s 39.5 million. As an aside: our Ag income alone is in excess of 50 billion and that’s just 2% of our economy. We also have non millionaires and retired people on fixed income. NY’s taxes were around 73 billion vs CA’s total taxes were close to 450 billion.

NY is swimming in red ink due to deficits shortfalls ..2.8 billion in 3 months due to covid. Our tax income increased. I don’t think NY’s budget modeling is something for CA to emulate ..with all due respect. NY should do what it does and leave CA to Californians to vote and decide. CA is not NY. We are a country on our own. Our problems can’t be solved by anything that works for other states. The struggle is real.

Blind comparison is not useful or helpful.

California also has one of the lowest property taxes in the country. Income tax is high and so is sales tax but to look at a single form of taxation and conclude that taxes are high in general is a non sequitur. Texas, for instance, has high property tax but it would not be considered a high tax state for this reason alone. At the end of the day it costs a certain amount to run a modern government, the question is simply a matter of what taxes are the most fair way to finance it.

Note: California’s government probably could be leaner, but there is also broad bipartisan support for more prisons, police and firefighters. The California republican party’s focus on cutting spending overlooks the deeper problem that we aren’t getting good value on a lot of the spending and budget cuts only exasperate the problem. More meaningful institutional reforms are needed.

San Francisco spends $50k per homeless person. The problem doesn't seem like it's money

Really? That’s more money than we use for the unemployed here in Finland. And they get healthcare, food and house.

SF is expensive for sure, but that expensive? Where is the money going to?

a Rube Goldberg machine of non-profits and inefficient, non-transparent spending leaving little to help the plight of the less fortunate.

I remember an article from somewhere in the valley that they considered to support families in need with some money for housing. Family in need was defined as yearly household income below $250,000.

It's probably this you are thinking of:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-rent/palo-alto...

It sounds dumb but IIRC it's an attempt to have teachers and police and city employees able to live there...

Follow the drugs.

Individual cities can’t solve national problems. Due to migration there are no great solutions at the individual city level, other than being “blessed” with an inhospitable area.

In 2015 84% of Santa Clara homeless where from the county when they lost their home. Only 6% where out of state when they became homeless. Source: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/opa/nr/Documents/SantaClaraCoun...

I live in SoCal so I thought you would even see more homeless migrants because of the weather. However, from speaking with homeless I would say in my experience most have lived in the area for a long time, with only one beach bum guy I spoke with who actually was "fresh off the bus". Until I saw the statistics though I was also under this misconception.

It’s a complex topic, first homeless is often a temporary condition where people cycle through homelessness. Second only 37% of American homeless population is unsheltered. So, the people who moved a long distance while homeless is a small percentage of the overall population, but also a much harder population to serve.

Anyway, hospitality isn’t really a question of weather as Alaska for example has relatively high rate of homelessness and NYC one of the highest. Mississippi on the other hand has the lowest rate despite mild winters and significant poverty.

Alaskan "homelessness" is very different in practice. The institutional definition of homelessness is very self serving. Nomadic peoples are considered homeless under this fiefdom.

The stigmatization and criminalization of not paying taxes to lease a deed of property is a big problem, this planet as a whole belongs to all forms of life inhabiting it, not just the primates that choose to play that game.

There is pretty powerful statistical evidence that when Regan moved homeless services from the federal level to a state responsibility it cratered the numbers of beds (especially in small towns) and created an unsolvable situation in that when you're struggling in your small town who has zero homeless support, you make a move to some place else, somewhere where being homeless is not has bad weather wise and has a bit of infrastructure. So now you have all of the struggling people from "Mainstreet usa" moving toward the main cities all at once (over a couple decades) an essentially a burden on them to deal with EVERYONES homeless problem instead of historically their own.

This problem was working much better in the 70s and 80s when their was a national framework for it. While SF and LA's government is flawed, this blame state/city is like blaming the individual ushers when the fans run on the field after a football upset. It was more of a structural failure than a local.

So some dude in Montana should pay for cleaning the streets in San Francisco?

States like Montana receive far more in federal tax dollars than states like California. If you think Montanans are going to be subsidized Californians and not the way around, I have a bridge in Montana I've got to sell you.

This will need a number to back that up. I've seen claims in both directions here on HN. It's also a number that's easy to distort to say whatever you want. Are people employed by the IRS being "subsidized"? Civilian logistics coordinators working for the DOD? Are you talking per capita, per square mile, or gross?

https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...

From an accounting standpoint, gross money in be money out is what matters. Per capita makes sense to compare relative benefit, but realistically Montana is small potatoes on the Federal Balance sheet. Measuring per sq mile seems like some ludicrous ploy by Alaska’s senator to screw over New Jersey.

Here: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1-7-19b-Bala...

Or, the same data with a very hard to read circular bar graph visualization:

https://howmuch.net/articles/federal-budget-receipts-and-exp...

The numbers are actually pretty straightforward. "Expenditures is a broad category and covers a variety of things, including direct payments to people like Social Security, contracts for local governments, wages for federal workers and sub-contracting work."

Oftentimes when this sort of stat is quoted, it is because of social security payments to retired people - for example, Florida

Not for rural sates. Farm subsidies, military spending, and rural healthcare initiatives etc, move a lot of money to such areas. Social Security disability is also used by poor states to get people off their welfare rolls.

Infrastructure costs are U shaped where extreme density is expensive, but so very low density. Mail delivery is a clear example where ultra low density just makes things more expensive.

LOL. Should some dude in Montana get to use an iPhone because it was funded in California?

The selective "my tax dollars would never" is anti-american

This is what happens when people are told to move where the work is.

They just aren't using it correctly. If there was a way to just give homeless people the 50k in a UBI esque way things would drastically improve.

Unfortunately I don't believe something like that is practical unless it's done on a national level.

If the majority of them weren't addicted to hardcore drugs and could make intelligent, rational decisions, I might agree that giving them money directly could be a good thing. Drug addicts tend to not make good monetary choices.

See this recent documentary by KOMO News in Seattle about their problems, which are pretty similar to Portland's, SF's, LA's and a lot of other major cities with larger homeless populations. Crime is soaring. Most are homeless due to drug addiction. Until that part is solved and they can think clearly and rationalize normally again, giving them cash will likely only fuel the problem and keep them right where they're at. And with everyone walking around with $50k cash in their pocket, because they don't have bank accounts, crime would be even more rampant as they steal it from each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WijoL3Hy_Bw

I think it's pretty obvious nobody is proposing giving homeless people 50k in cash, all at once..

I don't really buy that money would fuel the problem, is there any study that indicates that? They'd still be drug addicts, but they'd be more comfortable, well fed drug addicts which makes things better for everyone.

If anything I think money for a place, clean clothes, and food would make it much easier to get off drugs.

Homelessness is a mental health problem and judges won't allow forced stays in mental institutions.

Yeah, and they shouldn't allow it. Not sure what this has to do with my comment though.

Anyway, saying it's a mental health problem is really reductive. Plenty of people with the same problems aren't homeless; some of these people can potentially dig themselves out if given a chance, most importantly a place to live.

Is this true? This makes me want to cry for how bad SF governance is.

> San Francisco spends $50k per homeless person.

A commonly repeated falsehood. Is totally incorrect. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...

You’re linking to an article from mid 2018, before SF passed the largest tax in the city’s history: 2018 Prop C, a gross receipts tax for homeless services expected to raise another $300M. Several other additional tax measures were also passed since then to raise funds for homeless services.

These do not make fifty thousand opex per homeless person per year or anything around that. Both before and onwards, much is capex to build out.

If you read that article it talks about how some of that money is spent on prevention so it's a bit unfair to just use existing homeless as the denominator- it's still an obscene amount of money per person. So saying it's "totally incorrect" is a bit of a stretch.

San Francisco absolutely has a Homeless industrial complex that isn't trying to solve the problem but just keep their cash flowing.

The article calculates that the actual amount spent per "visible homeless person" was ~$3800 per year in 2018. The majority was spent on prevention.

It seems pretty fair to say that being off by 10x is "totally incorrect".

If you use the term "Homeless industrial complex" then it is immediately obvious that you have no idea what you are talking about.

That’s just the city’s spending. Once you consider other sources, including private ones (nonprofits), it is much higher. The Seattle area was spending $1B a year on homelessness as of a few years ago, which is nearly $100K/year per homeless person (https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness).

You got fed some right-wing propaganda, and bought it without doing your own research since it matched your priors.

SF doubled their budget over the past 10 years, while virtually every problem has gotten worse.

More money isn't always the answer. Maybe the answer lies elsewhere...

But it seems like local governance doesn't work especially well for the state as a whole. I get the impression that the state has systemic problems that no tax will fix. Local governance is a problem in the state because all the wealthy cities do everything they can and use all their tax dollars to protect their own interests, often at the expense of everyone else. Needless to say it's a very complex problem and it's unclear that just throwing more tax dollars at everything will fix every problem every time.

That’s not the argument. Many people are willing to pay tax if they see evidence that it is being wisely managed and is improving the quality of life. If the money is disappearing into a vacuum of corruption and inefficiency then people will wisely avoid contributing to such a needless waste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com