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Comment by Etrnl_President | Hacker News Reader

Now lower taxes, start picking up poop, and enforcing property rights, and I might move back!

I think we're moving towards a place where lower taxes and enforcing property rights are mutually exclusive

You don't have to lower the taxes, you just have to make the property taxes equal regardless of when you bought the property. While extremely unpopular, this would solve so many problems for California.

Many municipalities have that issue. It's an issue where I live also. Here the county does the reassessments and does so at their own schedule. It's been 12 years since the last one.

But my point is that low property taxes create inequity because they are typically based upon "value to owner" and don't include "cost to society". The largest cost is unaccounted for - the cost to protect property rights. Your property is worth nothing to you if a thug could come and take it away.

That would be the single largest tax break in U.S. history, and all of the benefits would go to the wealthy, who don't need it.

Wouldn't it be a tax increase? The car dealership near me would no longer pay $1000 a year in property tax.

Neither a decrease or increase overall - at least not in PA where reassessments must be revenue neutral. What is does do is create equity in taxation.

Formula should be super simple:

my taxes = total budget * my assessment / total assessments.

But with corruption and spineless politicians ...

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