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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

> asked registered voters, among other questions, whether they would support a 1-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects in the Bay Area. Seventy-one percent of respondents answered, “Yes.”

facepalm

Please stop with the regressive sales taxes. These things should be paid for in property or progressive income taxes instead of a tax on being poor.

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When everyone feels the pain of a tax, they are all involved.

Any tax that Person A supports but Person B is paying is a predatory tax.

The main reason more citizens don't demand that their government be more efficient is because they aren't paying the bulk of the operating costs.

> Any tax that Person A supports but Person B is paying is a predatory tax.

Why should Person A, who earns 100% of their income through honest labor that benefits society, suffer the same pain of tax as Person B, who got it by the luck of coming through the right birth canal? Or because they own land that was made more valuable because of the government's investment and protection?

Property tax is, at least in California, the sacred lamb.

Prop 13 is. But parcel taxes are extremely common in California. There are many on the ballot every election cycle, and they pass shockingly often.

This usually amounts to $20-$100 per house / apartment / unit per year.

Still regressive because it isn’t income or value dependent, but it is a tax on property.

Here in North Oakland we have these 29 added taxes to my property tax bill:

-COUNTY WIDE GO BOND

-CITY OF OAKLAND 1

-SCHOOL UNIFIED

-SCHOOL COMM COLL

-BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT

-EAST BAY REGIONAL PARK

-MOSQUITO ABATEMENT

-CSA PARAMEDIC

-CSA VECTOR CONTROL

-CITY EMERG MEDICAL

-CITY PARAMEDIC SRV

-CSA LEAD ABATEMENT

-SCHOOL MEASURE G

-PERALTA CCD MEAS B

-OUSD MEASURE N

-OUSD MEASURE G1

-VIOLENCE PREV TAX

-CITY LIBRARY SRV-D

-SFBRA MEASURE AA

-FLOOD BENEFIT 12

-HAZ WASTE PROGRAM

-CSA VECTOR CNTRL B

-MOSQUITO ASSESS 2

-AC TRANSIT MEAS VV

-CITY LIBRARY SERV

-EBMUD WETWEATHER

-EAST BAY TRAIL LLD

-EBRP PARK SAFETY/M

They range from $1.74 for mosquito abatement to $991.28 for City of Oakland. the average is around $100 at quick glance.

Hah -- hello, neighbor!

Indeed I should've said $20-100 EACH, not total. It adds up to lots annually.

I mean, fine, just charge a utilities connection fee on a sliding scale in relation to the market value of the land.

It's in the numbers. A penny increase doesn't sound so bad. So you'd have to break it down to how much cost it would add to the average person.

That's not the point. Regressive in this context means that everyone pays the same percentage, regardless of their means to do so. A simple test is "whose spending will have to increase the most percentage-wise to cover the extra tax?" If the answer is "poor people", then it's regressive.

The average person doesn't matter. If a new tax pushes a borderline low-income person below the poverty line, that's a problem.

Thank you! Can we please think about alternate ways to raise money? How about debt? New privately funded agencies? Refactoring the current budget?

My concern is government too worried about losing its grip on the area. Which stifles progress.

this is not a tax on being poor, this is a tax on everyone. It is also to be used by everyone, so why only property owners should pay?

Because property owners are the ones who directly benefit from the value of their land increasing.

Generally, given a fixed population, I think that improved transportation doesn't increase property values, but rather redistributes the value of property from areas near jobs to areas further away along the improved transportation. For example, starting in the 50's highways were built which allowed people to live outside of the city and commute in. Property values in the suburbs went from very low value farmland to hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre today. As these commuting routes became saturated property value in cities has recovered, since it is less and less possible to commute in a reasonable amount of time.

Agreed, I was mistaking thinking about land values and public transportation within an urban area, not including commuter transit to suburbs.

They don’t benefit until after they sell the property. They pay capital gains on that windfall. The people who buy the high value property also pay taxes.

No property owner benefits from land value increasing until after they have sold said property.

> No property owner benefits from land value increasing until after they have sold said property.

Great, so we can stop worrying about things that might hurt property values?

I don’t know what you mean exactly?

They mean we can stop worrying about those homeowners who oppose an apartment building being built near them on the basis that it reduces property values. Because if the drop in values doesn’t hurt them until they sell then they have no right to complain about property values today when the apartment is built.

> No property owner benefits from land value increasing until after they have sold said property.

People take loans against their assets all the time and having valuable houses makes that a lot easier. Such loans can be used as leverage to buy more property.

Consider a million dollar property in the Bay Area. ( as an example)..property taxes approximate to $12k/year. It costs 9-14k/year per student in the Bay Area depending on the city. With one child, they benefit. With two children, they are still good value for money. But in 12 years, they don’t have kids in public school but they continue paying the property tax. Maybe they will subsidize others’ kids or maybe it will go to infrastructure.

On the other side, someone in an affordable home is getting subsidized by higher value home owners property taxes. If they own the affordable home and the best deal is for the renters. They get the most bang for their rent bucks.

But consider an aging couple with property taxes capped by prop 13, have no more kids in public school and are on a fixed income. What benefit do they gain? There is a more stressed resource pool of law enforcement, $$ for infrastructure improvement, essential services and likely no community benefit like elder day care(in my town, they are converting them to homeless transition centers)...so owning a home is a really bad deal and renting is better.

The only return is the windfall when they sell. But the taxes are also appropriated for the gains. Contrary to popular opinion, home ownership is a burden and not a comfort. It doesnt matter to those who inherit or to those who are in higher income brackets, but those higher income nimbys rightly demand their due and expect a certain quality of life for which they pay dearly.

If productive members of a society are not incentivized to keep producing and supporting the less fortunate, it will be like killing the golden goose instead of just collecting the golden eggs everyday. They will simply leave. Bay Area prosperity bubble will burst sooner than we expect because we treat the productive $$ contributors badly..shaming them for their ‘privilege’. You have to give something back when you are the state with insanely high taxes.

That’s speculative activity. Loans have to be repaid and have interest. It’s not free money.

Home ownership doesn’t always imply assured appreciation of property. Even those with second homes have to pay property taxes and rental income is also taxable.

Many people do NOT take more loans to buy a new home. Home ownership does give a sense of security that the down payment guarantees...it’s 30 years of mortgages and interest. And even the down payment is a result of hard earned or saved $$. People assume that property is a privilege. It’s debt. It’s a higher risk but highly rewarding risk.

> It’s a higher risk but highly rewarding risk.

Sounds like a benefit to me. Debt is a tool that can bring huge benefits to people who know how to use it.

Most people who own homes have used debt to buy them. Almost everyone who owns more than one home has borrowed against equity in homes they already own to buy the others. The ability to do that is a clear benefit of property ownership.

And a lot of them don’t. Debt is not a strategic play for most householders. Maybe when one is young, but most people seek stability when they have kids and as they get older.

You are generalizing. I know more people who are only single home owners. Perhaps you know wealthier or younger people than I do.

Also: you can’t penalize people for the benefit to get into more debt with more taxes. Then it no longer is a benefit.

Those capital gains don’t go to the municipality though, and can’t be used to build schools or infrastructure.

Property taxes get redistributed in the state of California. The way it works now is that property taxes goes to county and then state and it gets redistributed throughout the state. It is no longer true that wealthy towns get more $$ for better schools.

Further, over 45% of California budget is for schools. A lot more than property taxes goes towards public school. The teachers union is very powerful in CA. There are a lot more factors involved. Not a lot comes to infrastructure. Even tax measures and bond measures for infrastructure improvements gets diverted into affordable housing and usually this is high density. High density degrades existing infrastructure as more resources are spread thin for larger number of people and has the opposite effect of improving infrastructure.

Infrastructure should be in place before high density housing measures are put into action. Right now, the opposite is happening..or infrastructure is not happening. It’s just not rational problem solving.

Please explain to me how do I benefit when the taxes I pay to live in my house go up

When those taxes pay for services and amenities that make your city more attractive and it grows you get two broad benefits: network effect, and quality of life. Network effect is largely your property value going up. Quality of life is from things like more goods and services located closer to you as density increases. If you don’t want either of those things you probably don’t want to live in a city.

What about traffic? The more prosperous Bay Area becomes, more traffic woes, more homelessness, more demand for affordable homes and otoh, no infrastructure improvements, no new public transport system, no new schools, congestion everywhere and higher cost of living.

Everything declines with high density. Medium density is better than low density. Networked public transport systems is better with medium density. More housing stock is good to reduce sprawl but the answer isn’t always high density housing and not subsidized housing. Example: senior affordable housing is good..shared housing is good..affordable micro homes is good for single working people. But affordable housing that crams a lot of working adults and children that go to public schools is not really good. Etc.

>> this is not a tax on being poor, this is a tax on everyone.

You don't understand what a regressive tax is.

It is a tax that disproportionately affects the poor, due to their much higher marginal utility of money.

Sure put the tax on those who'd be commuting on this new infrastructure. However for those that live within a few miles of their job, what exactly are they gaining?

It's the same reason Bridges have a toll vs getting funds directly from property / income tax.

You're getting a massively connected area with larger amount of commerce further stoked by the people who take the train.

Not everyone is privileged enough to be able to afford to live close to their job. This is about raising quality of life across the board. People who have the "I've got mine, so fuck you" attitude are a blight on society.

Sounds like it should be funded by Sales Tax / Income tax vs Property Tax.

Property Tax should be about using the land & making improvements to nearby areas. Not about funding things far away.

The big one is an increase in the value of their land. And is this initiative purely about commuting? Maybe the new train will allow people to more easily socialise or receive healthcare or any other part of their non-work life.

Also, trains/buses are not usuualy free in the same way that some bridges have tolls.

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