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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Good for MAGA, if no property tax other things will be used to get revenue.

IIRC, New Hampshire replaces this tax by selling hard alcohol (no private sales), high fees and other things. They get a lot of business from surrounding states for that alcohol. But I think NH is loosing some business to marijuana sales in other states.

Money has to come from somewhere, no property tax, other forms of revenue will be created.

EDIT: I got property and income tax mixed up, but $ does have to come from somewhere :)

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NH is almost entirely funded by property taxes. It has some of the highest in the nation.

You might be thinking of sales or state income tax, which there are none in NH.

You are very incorrect about NH, it lacks income and sales tax but property taxes are extra-high to make up the difference. The same is true in other states that lack income taxes like Texas and Washington.

(It’s particularly bad in Texas because the largest landed estates like ranches use various tricks to avoid paying most property taxes so the regressive burden ends up falling even harder on the middle class, who now has to pay the entire share of funding state services. I don’t know how Texas keeps up this reputation as a low-tax haven for fleeing California, the reality is that you’ll be paying gobs of property taxes unless you’re either a renter with no land or a baron with tons of land who can schmooze your way out.)

Texas also has a business wealth tax, known as business personal property tax. All assets that a business owns are subject to the tax (with exemptions for farmers and ranchers...). This means that high capital factories on small plots of land also pay tax on their capital.

> New Hampshire replaces this tax by selling hard alcohol

You want the government to pay for children's books out of the pockets of alcoholics? I know that's an uncharitable reading of what you said, but that's what it boils down to. If people drink less alcohol, generally considered a good thing for society (I say this as someone with a well-stocked liquor cabinet), then the kids get fewer textbooks.

Budgets are fortunately generally not this inflexible.

A drop in alcohol sales would cause the budget to be reworked. If they decide to cut the education budget in response, that's fine, but they would not simply throw up their hands and say "oh well, no books for students".

If you worked two jobs, and deposited one paycheck into a bank account that you labeled "food" and the second into a different bank account labeled "rent, savings, and everything else", and you lost the job that got deposited into the "food" account, would you starve?

The point is there are perverse incentives. Societies really want lower alcohol consumption. But at the same time politicians know if it goes down they'll have to come up with the money via a different, maybe less popular tax.

Incidentally, alcohol in NH is considerably cheaper than in neighboring VT, MA and certainly NY.

Those states have sales taxes, income taxes and property taxes.

So what? People drinking less alcohol is something we should strive for, but I don't see the problem with taxing it and using the income to fund schools. Yes, if people drink less alcohol that will be less money for schools, but that does not automatically mean it will be less money than they receive today.

If people drink less alcohol politicians will have to raise tax revenue some other way, or cut school funding. Either one may cost them re-election. So maybe they won't try so hard to reduce alcohol consumption. In the extreme, sociopathic case, they could tank funding for addiction programs, to take one hypothetical.

The point is: misaligned incentives.

NH has property tax and it’s actually quite high. They don’t have sales tax or income tax.

Yes, just realized that :)

Thanks for the reminder!

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