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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. You can't compare taxes across states if you're only including income taxes but excluding property taxes. Texas property taxes are ~2.5% for me (and they adjust annually), while CA property taxes are (famously) capped at 1% of the purchase price.

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~2.8% for me! And that pie gets bigger every year, even with appraisal protests, my property value is outpacing inflation (9% gains per year). Income taxes are relatively fixed to your salary at least. My property tax (and sales tax) bill grows annually.

Adjusted for current values two properties in different states often end up paying similar amounts of tax. It’s just part of the entire picture.

Don't know why you are being downvoted.

CA: $788,679 [0] * 0.73% [1] = $5757.3567

TX: $315,235 [2] * 1.69% [3] = $5327.4715.

[0]: https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/

[1]: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-property-tax-calcula....

[2]: https://www.zillow.com/tx/home-values/

[3]: https://smartasset.com/taxes/texas-property-tax-calculator#:....

Zillow home value index is not accurate at all in my experience. And Texas does not require property sale prices to be public, unlike most other states.

Presenting a single home index value for all of California or all of Texas is near pointless.

Good luck finding a house in Austin that's 315k paying 1.69% in property taxes.

Ok, lets compare SF and Austin then:

San Fransisco: $1,576,808 [0] * 1.18248499% [1] = $18,645.5179

Austin: $661,337 [2] * 2.2267% [3] = $14,725.991

[0]: https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/

[1]: https://sftreasurer.org/property/secured-property-taxes

[2]: https://www.zillow.com/austin-tx/home-values/

[3]: https://www.homecity.com/blog/austin-property-tax/

I do not understand how this can be true, given the vast differences in government expenditures across the nation, especially due to things like water and energy costs, maintenance costs from freeze/thaw cycles, and the elephant in the room, underfunded government retiree benefits such as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare.

Also, I would much rather pay a higher nominal property tax because my property is worth more than pay a higher nominal property tax because the property tax rate is higher.

The government spending grows to fit available revenues, and available revenues grow to fit whatever the taxpayers can still bear.

>The government spending grows to fit available revenues

This is trivial from the fact that the government is not a for profit entity.

>and available revenues grow to fit whatever the taxpayers can still bear

This is also trivial because taxpayers and voters sufficiently overlap.

However, some governments have borrowed more from the future than other governments, and just like a business with more debt service has less to spend on other expenses and/or has less profit, a government with more debt service has to spend less on infrastructure/services and/or has to increase taxes.

> This is trivial from the fact that the government is not a for profit entity.

This is not so. Government could use the surplus revenues to pay off debt early, or to reduce taxes. It almost never does these things.

Oregon does with the infamous kicker rebate.

But my point is more that governments (ideally) collect taxes based on projected spending (a budget), so of course spending will roughly match up with collection. Although, in reality, governments spend far more than they collect via off the books retirement benefits for government employees.

> Oregon does with the infamous kicker rebate.

Haven’t heard about it before, but this sounds great, not sure why it’s infamous. Sadly, though, things like that overall very rare, hence why I said “almost never”.

> But my point is more that governments (ideally) collect taxes based on projected spending (a budget), so of course spending will roughly match up with collection.

I think it’s the other way around: the budget is planned around expected tax revenues, instead of tax revenues being planned around budget. This is actually a huge difference: when there is a revenue windfall, extra funds are spent on pork or vanity projects, instead of returning them to people who they were taken from.

As an Oregonian, I think the reason it’s infamous is that Oregon schools are terrible and many people blame the kicker for taking surplus budget that could have been spent on schools and giving it back to the taxpayers instead. It also gets a fair amount of criticism for proportionally distributing funds based on how much a person paid in taxes, so the wealthiest get the most money back.

Can’t say how much the kicker really does impact these things, but I can say that when you compare state funded resources between California, Washington and Oregon, Oregon’s usually come out looking worse. For example, if you take a road trip up i5 from Los Angeles to Seattle, you’ll notice that the rest stops in Oregon are far worse than those in California or Washington. It does seem that there’s an austerity in Oregon absent in those two states, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s imposed by the requirement to send back the surplus.

There is basically no significant correlation between school spending and performance. If anything, worse performing schools tend to be better funded on average. Thus, there is no reason to expect that increased school funding will translate to better performance. I hope that it makes you feel slightly better about the surplus tax not going to schools.

As for austerity, given the between-state variation, what money is spent on is way more important than how much of it is available. As it turns out, Oregon actually rakes in more money (per capita) in state and local taxes than Washington, so one should rather expect Washington to be the austere one. In fact, Oregon could send every resident a check for $1k every year, and still have 10% more money available per capita than Washington. That’s why I’m rather skeptical about governments claiming to need more money in order for X not to suck: first I want to hear an answer to “why X sucks less in state Y, which spends less money on X than you?”.

That would result in deflation and deflation would require negative interest rates. Germany had a debt brake before the pandemic and their interest rates were the lowest and even negative on government bonds. The same is true of other countries like Switzerland.

If you want your government to stop the endless debt expansion you're going to need negative interest rates.

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