Property taxes are not wealth taxes, they are consumption taxes.
You can easily tell this because a person who owns a home outright pays the same tax as someone who owns a similar home but has a large mortgage. These two people have different levels of wealth but pay the same tax. This is because their consumption is the same.
A property tax takes effect without sales occurring, without the property being used, etc. There is no act of consumption to tax, other than simply existing. And before anyone argues that the use of the land is the consumption, that would only make sense if the value of the house wasn't taken into account as part of the property tax.
If property taxes were only levied at the time of sale (e.g. stamp duty in Australia), then it would be fair to call it a consumption tax.
It's not exactly the same as a sales tax that is paid all at once, but it's basically the same as the size of the tax scales with the size of the consumption rather than the size of one's wealth.
No. And if you buy an apple pie, you pay the sales tax on it, even if you give it to your kids to eat. And the sales tax is based on the price of the apple pie, not how many apples it contains.
It is still a consumption tax. If you rent the house out to others, presumably you'll pass on the consumption tax (or not, it doesn't matter).
Say you and I each buy a house. Yours is new construction and cost $1mm, mine was built in 1970, never remodeled, and is perhaps located somewhere more expensive and also cost $1mm. Common scenario in the SFBA.
Is one year of your consumption equivalent to one year of my consumption? Like a car, the longer you use it the higher the likelihood that something expensive goes wrong. But unlike a car, our homes are probably appreciating at close to the same rate.
That's a circular explanation, but maybe I'm reading it that way because we aren't aligned on what 'consumption' means. For a durable good like a house or a couch I think it would be something like expected service life / interval * over-or-underuse multiplier.
The interval technique makes sense to me on goods that are used over time or taxed over time. You can pay for a house all at once, and if you were only paying property tax once I think I would agree with you that the tax is consumption tax. Yet property taxes are annual, so in order for property tax to be a consumption tax we would have to enumerate how much consumption is occurring during that year.
Consider something simpler, like a sofa. We both buy the same sofa with a service life of 10 years. Did we consume the sofa when we bought it? Or do we consume it over its useful life? If I jump on the sofa daily and it lasts for 1 year, I've consumed it in a year. If you barely sit on it and it lasts you 20 years, you've consumed it over 20 years.
Does that make sense? How are you defining consumption?
I believe that in most jurisdictions, the "guts" of property tax millage formulas is based on a 10-year interval (or maybe more accurately, 1/10 of the assessed value). However, that's always seemed arbitrary to me, as: 1) it's never "paid-off" and 2) millage rates are set in conjunction with this known value.
So while it may not be a satisfying answer, in my experience, self-circular is just sort of the way it is.
Also, the consumed / depreciated value comparison doesn't sit right with me, since for business expenses (tax write-off purposes), it's based on zero value at end of life. Any previously depreciated value recovered at sale has to be (re)taxed; you only get to ultimately deduct true depreciated value, albeit (re-)payment is delayed to year of sale.
Regardless, real property (non-movable) is rarely disposed of for zero value, so "depreciated" value isn't a good estimate for "consumed " value.
Property taxes are neither wealth or consumption taxes. Those are not the only two options.
You could just as easily charge the mortgage holder the property tax, and that mortgage holder will then charge the that amount as an extra fee on the mortgage. What does that do to your argument?
Seem to me Property tax is basically a toll. Just like you pay a toll to use a road, you pay a toll to use a house.
The wealth difference is not as great as it seems, it's just the interest on the mortgage minus tax incentives and the opportunity cost of paying it off.
What if you're into houses, you don't have a car, don't have a computer, you spend all your money on a nice house. Why should you pay more local taxes than people who pay one-time taxes on stuff (computers, music, clothing#?
If we believe rich people should pay more taxes (higher percentage), then we have already established a system for this. Why not making local taxes a fraction of income taxes?
Why are lower class people who's only capital is their house taxed on their capital, while rich people who own bonds and stock not get taxed on THEIR capital?
True. But housing is also tax-privileged in other ways. Most notable is the mortgage interest on federal income tax.
More subtle is the fact that the value of the imputed rent from owning your own home is not taxed. I.e. if you rent your home to someone else, you pay income tax on the rent you collect. But if you "rent to yourself" by owning your own home, you don't pay tax on this implicit form of income.
If I own my own house, I do so because I already paid for it. That cost me more at that time than the person who's renting pays in rent. So why should my owning my house be considered "implicit income" because I don't have to pay rent? It should be considered money I've prepaid.
And then there are similar situations. If I've paid off my car, is it implicit income because I don't have a car payment? If I don't own a cell phone, do I have implicit income on the amount of a cell plan?
For that matter, the homeless have lots of implicit income. That's not a useful way of analyzing their circumstances, though.
I feel like the "implicit income" idea has an unstated assumption: The "normal" situation is for you to be paying out every dime you receive, and if you don't, that part you don't spend is "income". I absolutely reject that view. The world is not entitled to my spending.
I don't think that's the assumption that it's based on. It's more like, when you own an asset, you get to benefit from the consumption of that asset.
You did not "prepay" for the consumption of that asset. You paid to own the asset, which entitles you to consume it while you own it, but the value you get from consuming it is not deducted from the resale value of the asset. Example: you buy a house in 2010 for $500,000 that would cost you $4,000 a month to rent. In 2012 you sell it for $500,000. During those two years you received $96,000 of value from owning the house. You are now $96,000 richer than if you had rented the house instead of buying it (minus expenses associated with the house, and opportunity costs of having your money tied up in the house).
It's true that the same reasoning applies to other assets. I would assume, but don't know, that the reason people don't talk about imputed income for other assets is that the amounts are just much smaller in most cases.
Well, dcolkitt was talking about imputed income in the context of tax advantages. I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that the subtext was that people who own houses should be taxed on the "imputed income" as if it were real income. That raised my hackles - perhaps wrongly.
Still... there's something funny in the "imputed income" accounting. Let's say I buy a house for $500,000. I live in it. I don't pay rent, though the house would rent for $4000/month.
Or, let's say I buy the same house, but don't live in it. I live somewhere else instead, paying $4000/month in rent. But I also rent out the house I own, receiving $4000/month in rent for that house. My net is $0... except that I probably pay taxes on the $4000/month I receive. But if dcolkitt's point is not that should have to pay taxes on the "imputed income" of owning my house, then the "imputed income" is exactly offset by the "imputed foregone income" - I could have rented out the house, but I didn't.
I think your example actually helps make the case for imputed income, because whether you happen to live in the same house you own has huge tax consequences, which doesn't seem optimal. Without imputed income you are incentivized to live in the house that you own, even if it is worth less to you than what you could rent it for, because that way you don't have to pay taxes on that consumption value.
If you had to pay taxes on the imputed $4k a month then you would prefer to rent it out to someone who actually values it at $4k a month, and move yourself to a house that is better suited to you.
Right. But then you've changed the default from "not having to pay tax" to "having to pay tax". That is, far more people live in the house they own than rent out the one house they own and live somewhere else. Right now the 5% (say) who rent out the house they own get taxed, the 95% who live in the house they own don't. The change you propose would result in the 95% now also being taxed. That's fair, I suppose, but it's also the most drastic change you could make to create fairness. You could, for example, offer the 5% that the rent they pay could offset their rental income for tax purposes.
So why change it in the direction you propose? We're back at my initial complaint: This turns into "Saving money rather than spending it deprives us of the tax we would have received, so we'll tax your saving as if you had spent it. Don't own a cell phone? Pay us the taxes that would have been on your monthly bill anyway. Don't own a car? Pay us the registration fee anyway. Walk to work? Pay us the gasoline tax anyway. Don't drink alcohol? Pay us the taxes as if you did. Don't smoke? Pay us the taxes on the cigarettes that you could have smoked. Don't visit national parks? Pay us the entry fees anyway."
Do you see that that's insane? But if it's insane, why isn't "imputed rent" as something taxable insane?
It's insane, but we're basically already there, on some levels.
Politicians have been using that method of accounting for years, when describing taxpayer savings.
And it's not quite the same, but the method of tabulating the number of deaths in Puerto Rico after Maria also comes to mind. No "receipts", just statistics of what the numbers should be.
You also don’t get to claim 3.6% deduction of basis of the improvements (everything but the land) plus other rental related expenses if you live in it which you would if you rented it out. This has the effect of significantly reducing the tax owed on rented property throughout the course of ownership.
Similarly, rented property has an unlimited deduction on mortgage interest rather than the capped deduction available for owner-occupied housing.
Except in California we had proposition 13, so that property taxes are severely hamstrung; I wonder how much impact that alone has on the overall analysis given the size of California as part of the US economy.
I really think we should bring them back but it's anathema. The usual argument has something to do with a little grandma living on a fixed income who suddenly can't afford taxes on the home she's owned for 40 years. (And not, say, a landlord who owns dozens of buildings, though it benefits him far more)
I'd have to do the math but to me it seems like ridiculous housing prices make up for prop 13, while also pushing the tax burden to those best equipped to handle it (people in the position to afford to buy expensive houses)
So while grandma's only paying taxes on a tax-appraised value of $200k for a home worth $1mm on the open market, people who buy today are paying tax on $1mm+ for homes that "should be" (or would be in other states) worth $200k.
Not really. See some of the charts here [1]. Key quotes to show the effect:
"The year before Proposition 13 passed, property taxes comprised over 90 percent of cities’ and counties’ local tax revenue. Today, that share is less than two–thirds."
"Cities’ and counties’ tax revenue per person has declined since Proposition 13. However, looking across all California local governments’ per–person revenue—excluding state and federal funds—revenues increased 36 percent since Proposition 13. In comparison, similar per–person revenues for local governments across the country increased by almost 70 percent over the same period."
Basically the state had to struggle to make up the tax revenue difference via other fees and assessments, and it never caught up to where it was before or to where it is in other states without such a measure.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2013/06/29/l...