Would high property taxes really be a good thing for a state that has the highest income tax in the country?
Texas has no income tax which is why they have high property taxes.
Texas has no income tax which is why they have high property taxes.
In a place like New York, Massachusetts, or California, you have alot of intellectual property driving the economy, so you need to tax income. New York's discretionary budget is essentially derived from income taxes on a few thousand people. New York/Mass vs. California shows why each thing is important -- NY and Mass are leaders for K-12, California is ranked like 35-40 among states.
Local control of property taxes mean that the former can fund education effectively, which they do outside of the hood. California schools are stuck with trying to extract dollars from the state legislature, as the boomers effectively pay no property tax.
CA, NY, and MA all have terrible problems with housing and land use in general, largely caused by poor allocation of land due to extremely poor taxation.
Land in Manhattan, Cambridge, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles is some of the most productive land in the world, but the extraction happens because of the network effects of bundling people together.
By taxing the land rents, poor uses could be replaced by far better ones, increasing the land value and economic output even further.
Property tax isn't quite as good as a land value tax, but it's at least getting towards taxing the right thing.
Most people radically overestimate California income taxes because of propaganda by the narrow group of people paying top marginal rates directed at the broad group of people who pay closer to the median rate, because the former group wants the latter group to act against its own interests.
This was another California Republican idea, namely Reagan's, and I think he implemented it nationally when he was president too.
This means that in boom cycles with lots of IPOs and acquisitions, the California state coffers are bulging with money, but in a broad economic downturn there are a few news cycles of "California has a $XYZ billion state budget deficit" before the new budget is set since that deficit is how the new budget is set (no news articles on the balancing, though). There's a big appetite for anti-California news and I have little patience for the assholes who gobble up that misinformation...
With property taxes you don't have that coupling between changes in income and changes in the tax. That can make a property tax way more painful.
That's exactly what should happen in a productive economy: big cash payments to give up underutilized land to somebody who can make better use of it.
People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.
Where are you getting that from?
In most cases when granny sells her house and moves due to high taxes the buyer will be a single family that will live in the house. In the vast majority of cases that family will have less than half a dozen people, and in the vast majority of cases they will not have been homeless before.
That’s a distasteful and predatory way to speak of someone who rightfully bought her property, possibly a widow, and just wants to live in peace versus having someone (business or gov) try to break the rules to take her property.
It's far more distasteful to ignore the needs of everyone to give a very minor convenience to somebody with a lot of wealth.
Winston Churchill on this sort of old and wrong political argument about widows:
https://savingcommunities.org/docs/churchill.winston/budgetr...