Commerce and wealth-based taxes (income, sales, capital gains, etc) are sufficient to cover any and all social needs. Taxing people on their own possessions - especially those critical to living - is beyond unethical, it is evil.
A property tax on a primary dwelling residence is unethical because it is not attached to any act of commerce. It is your home. It is your family’s life and legacy. Property taxes do not care whether the owners are billionaires or do not have a penny to their name, so they harm the middle class and the poor while it’s little more than an afterthought for the wealthy. Case in point: Hawaiians who are forced to sell their ancestral homes because they cannot afford property tax… because the “value” of their ancestral land is constantly and steadily increased by wealthy interlopers. This is just plain, old-fashioned banditry and theft - nothing more and nothing less… and if you advocate for it or justify it, you advocate for evil.
That only works if a municipality has a commercial or industrial base to tax. There are lots of bedroom communities in the USA where the main/only land use in the town is residential. In these cities, there isn’t a tax base significant enough to fund residential services.
If you don’t pay your taxes, yes
HoA fees
Eminent domain but they will pay you “market value”
Being force into a sale due to investor taking over a condo building
Property taxes of most primary dwellings should not be a thing.
This is how you get subscription-only fire departments.
Commerce and wealth-based taxes (income, sales, capital gains, etc) are sufficient to cover any and all social needs. Taxing people on their own possessions - especially those critical to living - is beyond unethical, it is evil.
A property tax on a primary dwelling residence is unethical because it is not attached to any act of commerce. It is your home. It is your family’s life and legacy. Property taxes do not care whether the owners are billionaires or do not have a penny to their name, so they harm the middle class and the poor while it’s little more than an afterthought for the wealthy. Case in point: Hawaiians who are forced to sell their ancestral homes because they cannot afford property tax… because the “value” of their ancestral land is constantly and steadily increased by wealthy interlopers. This is just plain, old-fashioned banditry and theft - nothing more and nothing less… and if you advocate for it or justify it, you advocate for evil.
That only works if a municipality has a commercial or industrial base to tax. There are lots of bedroom communities in the USA where the main/only land use in the town is residential. In these cities, there isn’t a tax base significant enough to fund residential services.
So many bad arguments here.