> If you own your property it should mean
... that you pay for the necessary law enforcement, justice, defense, etc.
Why do you expect those to be free?
... that you pay for the necessary law enforcement, justice, defense, etc.
Why do you expect those to be free?
I did not say anything about anything having to be free.
Since you brought it up. No, they are not free. We have to pay for them. My point is that I should be able to own my paid-off home. The government should not be able to take my property away because of taxes.
Payment for the services you mention should have no connection to home ownership. Everyone uses them. Everyone pays for them equally (with some consideration for low income individuals).
We need to stop thinking about taxing everything from farts to homes to pay for the running of society. Send everyone a bill on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. We all pay for it. Don't tax my farts.
If you don't own property, you might still benefit from these services. But they don't affect your net worth.
Depends on where you live. Property values could actually increase! Portland, Oregon, for example.
Disclaimer: Since so many these days have lost the capacity to recognize and accept it...that was a lame attempt at humor. Please don't lose your shit over it. This is called a "joke". Jokes were an accepted form of social interaction many decades ago.
Suppose you own a home, free and clear, no mortgage, no property taxes.
Once a quarter, you receive a tax bill (calculated in whatever equitable way you prefer) to cover your share of the upkeep of our shared society.
What action do you propose society take if you choose not to pay that bill? There's basically three routes here:
1) Take no action. The quarterly tax system becomes a voluntary system, and those who continue to choose to pay feel more and more bitter towards those who don't.
2) Debtors prison. You owe money to the government, and they are permitted and expected to imprison you until payment is made (which, if you were relying on income for that payment, might pose challenges).
3) Confiscating your real wealth. If you do not voluntarily pay your quarterly tax, the government can compel you to, by taking it in the form of assets you hold.
Our current society has recognized (3) as the least bad option of the above. With your proposed movement to quarterly tax bills, but without a change in this overarching policy… the government will still take your house if you do not pay your taxes, even if those taxes are not "property" taxes and do not scale with the value of the property. What else can they take, in the end?
You are missing an entire family of methods that would work quite well and not lead to the kinds of problems periodic billing would engender.
Sales tax, VAT, etc. is one form of this.
And then, of course, there's income tax.
We have somehow lost control of the simple idea of the "village" getting together to pay for stuff by exploding into a system of thousands of different taxes nobody can keep track of. The end result is massive waste of resources, bad management, substandard results and large government organizations that are mostly incompetent at nearly everything they do.
My street has been repaved twice in 25 years. They tell me they are planning on repaving it yet again next year. This street is 25 years old. It was as close to perfect as one could get when I moved in, months after the built it. It was just as perfect just before they repaved it (twice). It is perfect now. And yet, they are going to do it again.
The financial waste on this one street alone is nothing less than vomit-inducing. They are doing this to keep unionized government-agency workers employed. Oh, yes, they tore-up and rebuilt our perfect sidewalks a few months ago. Absolutely and utterly unnecessary.
While I do recognize the idea of sending people a bill for taxes isn't great, sometimes I wish we had that, maybe for a year or so.
Why?
People have no clue whatsoever about how much of their money is being consumed by hundreds, if not thousands, of taxes they encounter on a daily basis. It would be fantastic to see one lump-sum bill show-up every month. I guarantee you voting decision would change radically after just a few months of that. What they are doing to the population through this explosions in taxes should be criminal.
I am replying to your comment proposing periodic billing…
A comment on HN isn't a full study of all available options and ideas along with comparisons of their effectiveness, consequences and probabilities of success.
Besides, given the impossibility of property taxes ever going away, this is very much on the category of...
Just because things need to be paid for doesn't mean it has to be through a property tax.