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That wasn't my question. I wasn't asking "why are property taxes necessary". I was asking: how is that inherently better than taxing income?

As to to the question you answered, I could understand land value taxes, or some other forms of taxes that are actually based on the infrastructure cost for supporting your home. (And you could add exemptions/tiers for people who can't afford it, that's beside my point.) But property taxes seem nonsensical for exactly the reason you mention: that they depend on the value of the home (at whatever point) rather than on the cost of the infrastructure itself. Whether my home sells for $1 or $1M, my pipes and wires are going to act the same. And neither of those tells you anything about my means for payment - I could easily lose more money on a more expensive home.

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Your zip code is better correlated to the public spending you benefit from than your salary.

Then tax based on ZIP codes instead of property sale value? But again: why not just try to do something that's more computed from the public expenditures for that location rather than based on the location itself?

I think we are saying the same thing. I am not calling for California to end its state income tax either. I am suggesting that prop 13 was a disaster.

Hot take: One possible compromise is limit prop 13 to a single property maybe two bed two baths for the owner and each adult state resident also gets this "credit"? I mean what the owner and every adult living in the household can help keep the property tax low but only for their own primary residence. but beyond that raise the property tax every year based on property value.

Not californian, but my interest was piqued by this “idea”. So what you are saying is - if my property values double - so do my taxes? Is the goal here to force me out of my home?

> Not californian, but my interest was piqued by this “idea”. So what you are saying is - if my property values double - so do my taxes? Is the goal here to force me out of my home?

In the comment you just replied to, weren't they specifically saying this wouldn't apply to your primary residence?

I see, indeed, I misread the sentence.

I don't think we're saying the same thing, but rather speaking past each other. I think I need to dissect these two parts of your original comment:

> What worries me is California refuses to raise property taxes

Sure, if you're trying to increase taxes somehow, then the proposal in your reply could be one way to do it, and it sounds less painful than increasing everybody's property taxes. That logic isn't what I have issues with, since you're just comparing different ways to do property taxes regarding primary residences. (This isn't to say I agree or disagree with it.)

> Raise property taxes because without it, your income tax will have no upper bound.

This is the part I took issue with. It appeared you were trying to motivate property tax increases by arguing income taxes are an obviously worse way to make up for them, but... why? I didn't understand the logic behind that, and that's what I was asking about. If I'm a policymaker trying to choose between increasing income and property taxes, why should I choose property taxes to be the one to increase?

I think we are pretty aligned on this topic. My ulterior motive for pushing for high property taxes is to satisfy a mental curiosity I have -- will raising property taxes to sky high rates (my ideal cap is about seven to eight percent of the sticker price of the land) lower the sticker price of the land/property? I just want to know what happens if you have to pay the sticker price of a piece of land (compounded) every ten years or so.

But that's not relevant to why a policy maker should choose to raise property tax over income tax. You could argue both ways here - income taxes are straightforward because you can basically get your cut at the source of income but property taxes are good because you can't hide or take land with you to another state. And in general, I am not an expert on this or any matter but California is very lopsided with prop 13. I don't even live in California.

You’re basically arguing for land value tax. I don’t spend much time worrying about LVT because it isn’t widely used in the USA.

StrongTowns likes to talk about it: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/8/if-the-land-tax...

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