Tag: Taxes
Property Taxes Should Be Progressive
Here in San Diego, housing long ago crossed into the “insanely expensive” category. As much as it’s not good for many, it seems as though we could do more to provide a public benefit from all of that.
In a brief search of how property taxes are calculated, it doesn’t seem as though they are ever progressively taxed. No matter the assessed value of a property, the rate is always the same percentage. The person living in the $600k apartment at the bottom of the building is paying the same 8% (or whatever it is) as the $10.2 million penthouse at the top of the building.
Because of this, I’m sure as a city, and a society in general, we’re leaving a ton of money on the table that could go to fund better schools, education, transit lines, parks, or other things to reduce housing costs (like my super-controversial plan to publicly subsidize parking garages!).
Policy as a Filter
I once had the brilliant idea of imposing a California state tax whose sole purpose would be to use the funds to help bring smart, promising young individuals from red states to California. It could be used as part of their college tuition, moving costs, or whatever else was needed to get smart people here who would help to make our state better.
The secondary benefit of my tax was that it would increase state taxes, which would help to drive away more tax-hating individuals who are in general more than likely, just a draw on the state’s resources, and whose principles inhibit our ability to push harder into science, technology, education, equity, and better governance.
I of course recognize that there are conservatives that add value to the state, and especially some conservative businesses that provide jobs and tax revenue. But there is a larger discussion that should be had on how much of that is needed, balancing private wealth generation and its actual cost to the public. Perhaps it’s a good thing to court those businesses, perhaps not.
But the idea of using policy to attract those you want, and filter out those you don’t isn’t something I see discussed very often, although it already plays a significant role in shaping individual states. There are some interesting discussions that could be had around this topic, and what types of policies we should have, not only to shape policy within the state, but also in terms of attracting the type of talent that we want and need to progress.
No Taxation Without Equal Representation
People a long time ago had the right idea with the notion of “no taxation without representation, ” but they didn’t quite get it fully where it needed to be.
We’re currently in the situation where those who provide most of the funding to the US (primarily those terrible liberal cities, and successful blue states) have less and less say in how the country is run, along with how those funds are spent, and where it gets directed (generally red states). And as conservatives continue to gerrymander the nation to hell, the ratio of taxes sent to Washington vs our voice in the direction of the country continues to skew.
Our new rallying cry should be: “no taxation without EQUAL representation”. Until we all have an equal say in how our tax money is spent, we should do whatever we can to correct the imbalance. In reality, the amount I pay in taxes should factor in the amount of representation that I get.
I like the phrase since it has a bit of a conservative ring to it. I would like to think there are a few sane republicans out there who do value fairness, and perhaps it can appeal to them as well to push our cause forward. Yeah, I’m probably not fully living in reality.
Collectively Not Paying Taxes
I see comments online that we should all stop paying federal taxes (in response to the new military presence in our nation’s cities, a masked and un-uniformed police force rounding people up off the streets, withholding funds to blue states for green energy programs, using the powers of government to go after political enemies, etc..). This isn’t really feasible, since we all have to pay taxes individually, and since there are severe penalties involved, the likelihood of us all acting together on this are pretty slim.
Perhaps it was brilliant design, to limit the power of states (or other jurisdictions) in this way, but I wonder if there are some exploits that could be made to make it possible. (And I’ll admit here that there are probably many problems with this next idea, but a central idea of this blog is to push further into these thoughts that are potentially dead-ends).
A Unified Release of Tax Returns
States could potentially create a mechanism for releasing everyone’s individual tax returns at once. For instance, here in California we could enact a “State Office of Federal Tax Fulfillment”. That office’s responsibility is to basically do your federal taxes for you . This could be outsourced to existing tax professionals, or perhaps we would do taxes as we do now, they just get routed through this office for final release to the federal government. The central idea is just that the taxes are still coming from you, they’re just finally “released” by the state organization, but they are released together at the direction of the state government.
This would give states more power to withhold those funds collectively if residents aren’t feeling as though their money is being used well.
Of course, there are plenty of problems with this — the federal government could still go after individual tax payers, so I’m not sure what protections could be put in place (or loopholes to be exploited) to mitigate that danger, other than for a state like California, there would be 39 million of them. And you’re right, this very well could spell the end of America if all states did this (which they would). And for the record, I’m all for paying taxes, and we (those who make more than most), should probably be paying more, but perhaps taxes could be a larger leveraging tool for making the nation better.