Council tax in England and Wales is based on the classification of all domestic properties into one of eight capital value bands based on the property’s value as at 1 April 1991. Each home will have been classified into one of these eight bands, A to H.
This means the bigger your house, the more you pay in local community tax.
I can get behind an idea like that. especially because i really want to build myself a tiny home! 
Except that it gets ridiculously applied so that the range is unrealistically small. The range is only 3 to 1 so if you live in a tiny single person flat you pay 1/3 as much as an extended family of 3 generations living in a mansion. Not only that, but around here villages (mostly rich retired people) which are expensive to service pay less per band than urban areas. The result is that in our area Lord Oxford pays much less in local community tax per head than does an old age pensioner living in a one bedroom flat.
A poll tax based on the number of people inhabiting a house is fairer (but brought down Thatcher.)
The difficulty is that property taxes are easy to apply (it is hard to hide a house) but as usual the rich don’t want to pay their share so the system gets biased in their favour.
thanks for the clarifications! that doesn’t sound good, apparently I need to learn and read more about this idea.
yeah, this is the problem in most places.
this is the problem with wealth in general. when we bartered each person would trade something of equal value. when we decoupled these transactions we created a system that could be gamed and now most of the consuming is done by people contributing very little. the lower classes have to work harder and harder as the wealthy harvest their sweat equity. the disparity in consumption and wealth has gotten way out of hand.
Council tax is kind of like property tax in the US.
Except the properties are very rarely reassessed. Last time was 1993? No govt wants to do that because it would bump houses up into higher brackets and increase people’s tax. So you pay one of eight values based on what your house was worth 20 years ago. Little consideration of how many people are in that house (there is a single occupant discount, and a temporary reduction for empty properties).
A local income tax would be the fair solution.
Property taxes arise because they are less gameable than income tax.
It’s worse than that. House price inflation means that house owners get richer and everybody else gets poorer. It’s another example of what Piketty is on about; a system designed to transfer assets from those who have little to those who have much.
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