Where each U.S. state gets its tax revenue from
visualcapitalist.com
visualcapitalist.com
Further, when land taxes are passed down, they focus of physical goods and ignores IP and contract value. This means they are more flatly distributed throughout the population.
Third, many high return activities require almost no land. A stock trader or bank might make millions with the nanowatt of natural resources needed to flip a bit in a database. A plumber might need a lot of natural resources to fix your toilet
We already tax houses, and by comparison stocks are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. There is no excuse.
As I have grown my small business, I have come to an appreciation for how comically lopsided the tax code is to push all of the taxes out of the invest/return economy and into the work/consume economy. It's really quite something. Anything to avoid the right side of the Kuznets Curve!
You may wonder why two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware. Is it because the cost of incorporation is lower than in other states, or because corporate tax rates are lower? Those are factors, but they are not the primary reason. The primary reason is risk avoidance, and in particular legal risk avoidance.
Delaware benefits from a flywheel effect: Because so many companies are incorporated in the state, its Chancery Court has a more developed set of case law than other states, and so outcomes of lawsuits involving corporations are more predictable -- which makes it an even more attractive place to incorporate, which continues the flywheel effect.
The down side is that the state is incredibly dependent on corporate licensing fees and escheatment. States like Nevada have, in recent years, been competing against Delaware as a corporate haven, and if we start to see a significant migration, we'll be in a real pickle, because the state imposes no sales tax and has relatively low property taxes.
but the parent poster is correct: it is unambiguous and well litigated in its benefits and downsides.
even if the benefits are only mild, it makes it easy to map out and control the legal risks.
A quick online search returns mostly business related articles so I guess it's some corporate analogy.
I'd rather call it a positive feedback loop.
If we are talking about a flywheel as an energy storage, low friction is a key component of its ability to store energy as a buffer. If this was not the case, the flywheel would lose its energy quickly on its own and the buffer would be gone.
> People love to use it to describe a forever growing thing, when it’s actually just a buffer.
A thing has other characteristics other than its intended purpose. Your assumption that you need to use intended purpose for a successful analogy is false.
Not being nitty, just didn't follow how your point connected and wanted to make sure I understood it.
But we might say it does not feel very humane
- increases in other taxes/other income sources
- decreases in services
- public debt
As someone who shares your view that housing shouldn't be purely market-driven, IMO it's especially important to consider the other side of the equation, because some people invest a lot of time, effort and money to prevent the first option.
One "obvious" income source would be to hire more tax collectors and let them focus on the largest conglomerates, but not like that's ever gonna happen.
This means the supply of 1-4 unit homes will go down over time for those who want to rent.
- NH gets nearly 2/3 of its revenue from property taxes
- OR raises more of its revenue than CA in income tax
- TN/AZ are a close 2nd/3rd to WA in sales tax revenue
This is an interesting chart, but it really is showing one policy dimension - choice of tax base.
- NH gets nearly 2/3 of its revenue from property taxes
[1] https://reason.org/commentary/ranking-the-states-most-and-le...
And pet peeve, personal income tax and corporate income tax are almost the same thing. With few exceptions the individual person does not pay their income tax, the corporation does, and for those exceptions the individual is the corporation. Income tax is really a sales tax on a corporation biggest expense, it's payroll.
Some sites these days won't show anything at all without Javascript, so I actually give the site kudos for working well with no Javascript.
Evidently Javascript causes cancer.
A tax on a home not deriving income does not fit any normal person's definition of a wealth tax.
People determined not wealthy enough to get a mortgage do not pay property taxes on a house they are not wealthy enough to own.
Those wealthy enough to own a house pay property taxes; ergo wealth tax.
Over the years different explanations were written down as legal justifications "why it's different than this other very similar scenario" but people of the past were just making something up to not look hypocritical; someone with the means is taxed more for the privilege is how it goes. Poor people don't pay taxes.
Poor people (typically) don't pay income taxes.
This is why it's worth knowing the difference between progressive and regressive taxes.
It's like scaffolding out the Windows pipes screensaver in your head; endless bends and bends while no pipes actually exist. There is no spoon; it's just primates parroting the bird song they have been whistling since youth.
Many taxes have exemptions. You get a "personal exemption" on your income tax. You don't pay tax on 100% of social security income because of another exemption.
A "property tax" is a wealth tax that simply has exemptions for all of your wealth stored in stocks/bonds/anything-that-isn't-real-estate.
It's not though, it's levied on the assessed value of the house regardless of the stored value. A fully paid off house and a mortgage a month old at 90% LTV have the same property taxes if they are assessed at the same price. It would have been disingenuous to tell everyone who was underwater on their mortgages after the housing collapse in 2008 that they had so much wealth in the their houses based on the fact that they still had to pay property taxes.
It's fundamentally a tax on wealthier people among a community.
We really going to sit here in 2026 and pretend the people who wrote down all these rhetorical circumlocutions weren't just making up language to justify their supposed expertise/their social moat? The entire American system is rich families manipulating the legal system to screw have nots. Whole lot of have nots defend a system that doesn't care they exist.
Strip away the ornamental language of the law and just see the ground truth; a person with means to buy the house pays a tax on it all. A poor person never pays a tax because they never own a home.
What is this? Why does everyone feel like they stepped out of the middle ages where dark tongues still exist and the ornate incantations of superstitious people still rule?
It doesn't need to be logically as complicated and intentionally obscured (in my opinion legalese has been to manipulate the illiterate which were the majority back in the day).
Such social conservatism is holding society back.
Like side by side my posts and tax code ... the tax code would look less verbose?
Legal obfuscation often conjured back in the day by local rich politicians and a judge who bbq on weekends, colluded to convince an innumerate illiterate local they best accept just being screwed by the local political feifdom...is somehow preferable to defining our own social norms; history makes it clear of course the people of the past had it all correct!
Functional illiteracy in the raw; no ability to reason outside the tropes of your childhood education.
Without a new JS framework or devops tool to babble about and leverage as a social moat in the job market this forum is no different than Reddit and X; incurious worker bees dancing like monkeys for coin jangling around grandpa billionaires pocket.
At least it closes the loop hole where you borrow against your stock and never pay taxes on it because you never sold it.
Buy borrow die also leads to massive estate taxes which is why billionaires use trusts instead. Buy borrow die is best for people with around $50 mil in assets because they dont have any estate tax.
If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield. If you have $4B of stock they might let you borrow $1B for what would be ~4-4.5% using that stock as collateral. You can theoretically take out a margin loan for up to 100% of the stock held in an account, but that’s risky due to margin calls.
The idea is to let the cost basis step up to the price of the asset at your death which will eliminate the capital gains that would’ve been owed. Then your heirs sell a portion of the stock to pay off the loan and keep the rest.
People bring up a loophole that does exist, and assume that everyone uses it. Welp, like most of these "1%" discourse, its pretty damn rare.
https://taxprofblog.aals.org/2026/06/16/fox-and-liscow-the-r...
> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.
> Buy-borrow-die is a real loophole, and in absolute terms the rich borrow a lot...
Also, not all states apply property taxes the same. In my state, my house is assessed often by the government and then my taxes rise based on the value of my house.
Property tax is a tax on specific property (usually we are talking about real property, but I've paid e.g. property tax on a car). It is usually irrespective of wealth.
Someone who buys a house with cash and their neighbor who is underwater on their mortgage and at risk of insolvency will pay the same tax.
Note also that you rarely see property taxes on e.g. valuable jewelry because unlike real property and cars, both of which have ownership centrally registered, jewelry is not centrally registered.
Another major difference is that houses are both harder to hide and easier to value than many other forms of wealth.
Header large image, small pointless article, see also navigation. Sure nothing exceptional, but also, nothing offensive, looks like every other "news site" I have seen.