Really seems to me that there should be no exemption for land tax for non profits or religious reasons. It is just far too subject to abuse, and it means that we have large churches in the middle of incredibly dense cities that pay almost nothing in taxes.
The issue is that, most of the time, "incredibly dense cities" are not the places where this is hitting the hardest. It's the smaller towns where the impact of hospital rollups hits hardest on the property tax rolls.
Problem is, of course, that if we don't get one of the hospitals in, say, Houston, to put a facility in, say, Nacogdoches, on its books; then that facility may go away entirely. In which case you'd have issues in the market with inequity of access for the very populations who may need that access most. (Elderly and poor.) But if you do allow it, well, you have issues with property tax rises.
So local leaders are put in a position of having to weigh the value of having a hospital or clinic be available locally, against any potential decrease in property tax revenues. Now you hope they get that cost-benefit analysis correct, but there's no guarantee.
In my metro area it irks me to see the churches with large empty parking lots empty most of the week. We have a housing shortage and they seem to have no little incentive to convert their parking to more productive use.
I agree, the whole ruse that these 501s meaningfully does charitable work for our communities is laughable and their tax exemption should be revoked, at least with regard to land taxes.
There are almost no places where a housing shortage is due to a lack of land. Housing shortages have all sorts of reasons, from constructions cost, to zoning, to restrictions on what can be built, but it's virtually never a lack of land.
And parking is a productive use - they have services once a week, and parking means people can come to the service. That's the definition of productive use. Something does not need to be used 24/7 to be productive.
Church goers using parking lots like this is a use, but I doubt it's a productive charitable use that should to be subsidized by localities.
Every other contemporary development in my area that faces real economic reality is ground floor retail, commercial/residential on top, and optionally underground parking.
There are certainly productive religious charitable efforts using facilities like this: homeless shelters, community low-cost/free clinics, soup kitchens. I think these uses should be tax subsidized, but other mystical efforts should not be whether they generate a profit or not.
I think a good reform to the 501c3 system would be to make non-profits like these churches and hospitals classify their actual charitable activity and separate it from their other activity, just like individuals with a mix of personal/small business income/expenses are required to do.
Why should churches get great real estate in central locations but not housing? If people only come to church once a week, surely they can spend the extra time driving further.
The idea is that we give up the land tax revenues in exchange for the services the non-profit provides. (And of course the government does not decide which services are useful or not, the people do.)
One thing I might agree with is land tax for non-profits that charge fees for services, as opposed to those who work off of donations. I think that would fix the issue without destroying non-profits.
Do you think a government should be able to seize property under eminent domain if they believe that selling it to a third party to commercially develop would lead to higher tax revenue?
The government already has and does do exactly this. Is this suppose to be a gotcha? If you have very valuable property, you should pay taxes on it. Claiming that you have ownership over land on this planet is odd, you didn't create the land and governments change overtime.
Property taxes are the most evil of taxes because they force you out onto the street if you're unable to pay them. Qualifying it with the words "very valuable" to solve the problem creates an arbitrary two-tier system that is inherently unfair.
>Claiming that you have ownership over land on this planet is odd, you didn't create the land and governments change overtime.
Property taxes are the most just of all taxes because they are the most correlated with your consumption. Speficially, the land value tax portion of property tax (ideally, that is the whole component).
>The government didn't create the land either.
The government did create the peace and order that allows you to sleep at night on your land without having to worry about another tribe taking your land from you. Without an ability to defend it, "your" land is a tenuous label.
The government, and the rest of society, also pays a hefty price routing utilities, police, ambulances, and people around your property's borders. The more property you have, the more it costs the rest of society, not just in money, but in time.
Earned income taxes are the most evil of all taxes. Why would you have to pay for the act of providing value to society?
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Because it is politicaly unpalatable to tax landowners, we tax economic activity instead.
The result is that return on effort are reduced. That mean labor, entrepreneurs, and capital bear the burden of supporting government budgets as opposed to landowners who benefit from the economic activity making their land valuable.
Taxes as a rule discourages whatever get taxed. The exception to this is land, because land isn't created. It already exists in nature.
Historically speaking, I am not sure if humans argued that they have created the land and therefore they should be allowed to use it. Ownership of the land and its use is, rather, simply tied to one's ability to retain it ( possession being 9/10ths of the law and all that ).
Yes, you are correctly identifying that all land rights stem from one's ability to claim nature's productive power as his own and monopolize all output from it.
This was self-evident in the feudal era, when landlords (Lords) had to at least raise their own militaries to assert this monopoly right. But the modern State and the landlords reached a compromise: the State will provide security to protect the lords' monopoly on nature so long as the landlords don't raise armed forces.
It may be absurd, but do you have a workable framework that can replace it? If not, it makes zero to no difference whether it is absurd or not. It works for the society in place.
Yes. A high land value tax prevents the capture of unearned wealth by owners of land without introducing market inefficiencies or price distortions.
The current arrangement demonstrably does not work for society in place, and as AI (whether in this wave of innovation or the next) increases productivity further, it will work less and less by virtue of further increasing land rents, thereby pricing out larger and larger swaths of society from a place to live, work, or otherwise exist.
Huh? Last time I checked, municipalities big and small fight for every bit of investments they can get and they typically get it by offering a swath of incentives at the cost of the actual taxpayer. That high value land ends up being tax free for the actually wealthy while a schmuck like me get his bill increased and argues with otherwise well-meaning people that akshually high taxes are good for me.
I think that what I am saying is that, in practice, the well-intended solutions like the one that was listed above are effectively nullified as they do not seem to anticipate real world human reactions. What ends up happening is that it is only a subset of the people, who own land that pay higher taxes. The solution is to remove any and all subsidies. Governments of all levels have not exactly proven to be a reliable steward over the past few centuries..
Well it's pretty easy to have a useless conversation if you're going to act as if the words your interlocutor are saying are "effectively nullified."
My solution does anticipate real-world human interactions: don't give rich landowners tax breaks. This is baked into the premise of having a high tax. A tax that is effectively not-high is by definition not a high tax, ergo is not the solution I am proposing. If I proposed a solution of "have a tax that is claimed to be high but actually is not," then your response would be valid. But my solution was: have a high land value tax.
Your solution is dismissible by your same logic. "While removing any and all subsidies is well-intended, in practice real-world human interactions dictate that will not occur."
<< My solution does anticipate real-world human interactions: don't give rich landowners tax breaks. This is baked into the premise of having a high tax.
If it fails to address those now ( because those are already high ), what, exactly makes you think, it will work better if we increase those taxes? If anything, increasing those taxes will become an incentive to find ways to mitigate their impact..
The solution to remove those for everyone across the board, but we can't do that. We can't have an even playing field.
Or property taxes should be eliminated because they are subject to abuse, and instead sales tax should be the primary source of income for all governments.
I guess it would be a consumption-based tax. The usual argument against it is that it's regressive: the poorer people spend higher percentage of their income on consumption, and therefore end up with a higher tax burden relative to their income. This can be counterbalanced by e.g. not taxing groceries/food but it becomes a whackamole tax breaks game quickly---should we also exclude fuel/housing/educational expenses/etc.
