Except you mean a lot better (tempted to spell with many 'o’s but it looked like “loot”).
There’s this idea that paying taxes distributes wealth, but I don’t think it should even be controversial to say that public spending multiplies wealth. If instead of paying municipal taxes a person got to spend all that money specifically to benefit themselves, they’d almost certainly be worse off.
Roger that. All one needs to do is look at how much of a higher quality of life people in places with higher taxes have. It’s not hard to see the difference and what the difference is.
But if @JeffreyHayner really wants to live somewhere with low property taxes, as @Ryuthrowsstuff notes, he has options. Florida, Alabama, Mississippi…
An alternate perspective:
The benefits of poor as well as rich areas of a city with well-paved, well-lit streets seems obvious to me, but apparently some places are downloading that onto HOAs, turning them into an extra level of government and providing unequal service to residents. They don’t see that when they let areas to turn crap, those areas get bigger over time.
There’s little in the way of property tax in Germany. $13.5 each day strikes me as patently absurd and would mean that many low income owners would have to move.
And yet we manage to finance streets, public schools, police and a fire department.
Avery couple of decades you get hit with a large bill for maintaining the road you live at, and it sucks when you didn’t prepare for it, but those are events you can plan for and they don’t evict you if you can’t pay right away.
The whole “we are going to lose our home because of property tax”-trope one can find in US drama is as alien as the “we are ruined because a kidney failure“.
Property taxes might be low, but you probably have other taxes to make that up (and maybe less loopholes, etc, than what we have here).
This is absolutely true. But many of the people who are complaining about high property taxes aren’t the ones losing their homes. Many working class people, especially those in cities don’t own a home, but they rent.
If we had higher taxes for paying for our local services, we could lower property taxes, but that’s what is paying for local services right now. and the differences between a city like Anne Arbor and cities in places like FL or Alabama are striking and the people who lose out are the working class people.
Sure, would you want to live in Somalia or Sweden? Sweden has among the highest tax rates in the world but living there or starting a business there compared with Somalia which has no taxes is a no brainer.
Quite frankly we could pick up a lot from the Scandinavian countries which are heavily taxed but then you don’t find people living in the streets. Essentially Bernie’s plan - but Hillary’s new book is all about not being her fault and I bet you now that the Bernie-ites have been purged from the party she will run again.
There is an easy solution to the huge inequality in the US and elsewhere.
The top has all the money and pays no taxes (ie Romney got off with less than 10% vs the average citizen 33%)
The bottom isn’t earning any money and pays most of the taxes
And then those at the very bottom have no money and dont pay taxes at all (the 47 percent that Romney talked about)
all of this is patently unsustainable.
Pick your tax regime, from the 50’s 60’s or 70’s you will generate more revenue and create patterns of consumption in the middle.
The other thing is that people have been accumulating debt as a surrogate for low wage growth, and that needs to stop -maybe a one time helicopter drop to those affected -as they did in Iceland. (I bet you anyone who comes up with that will be very popular.
Did you actually read my comment or did you just see the words “no property taxes” and assume I was arguing for that? Because I wasn’t. I was arguing against @JeffreyHayner complaint of high property taxes. Please read what I wrote instead of making assumptions, thanks.
Yes, I’m well aware of the difference between Somalia and Sweden, though the actual conditions in both countries are a bit more nuanced than one has high taxes and one doesn’t. Sweden was never colonized by the British for example.
Now did you read my comment and assume that I wasn’t agreeing with you? rather than just expanding on different tax jurisdictions. (I suppose I could have phrased it better)
Of course there are nuanced differences, and sometimes colonization leaves behind benefits - for instance the Czechs inherited an excellent educational system from the Austrian Empire. And for what its worth, Sweden had its own international ventures - it still has a number of Czech national treasures that they looted during the Thirty Years War.
But nowadays they set an excellent example of system that just works.
Yes, I indeed did, so thanks for clarifying what you meant.
Sweden was never colonized (brutally, and with the aim of extracting massive amounts of their natural resources for the benefit of the imperial core) in the same way Somalia was. They didn’t just decide to become a libertarian state, all John Galt like, of course.
I agree that Sweden works, though it’s not a “just” works. It works because of choices people make to ensure it’s continuation. They have a humane system that benefits its citizens, but they’re lucky that for the most part, they don’t have people looking over their shoulders and intervening in their national affairs, and drone bombing their population. My point is that just comparing Somalia and Sweden is apples and oranges. History matters here. How Sweden got to where it is today is just as critical in understand the history of Somalia of course, but the weight isn’t nearly as heavy a burden. It’s yet another white privilege, to be able to lightly carry ones history and to refer to it or not.
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