[stevoo]

And what would you'r solution be? Take from them the houses they worked their whole lives to acquire and put them in elderly homes? They have paid their share to society by providing the taxes for 65+ years that they have worked and brought us where we are today. Those homes are not vanished from the market. They will be inherited by their children and so on. Land taxation is by my opinion inherently bad for that specific reason ( if they have only one piece of land )

The problem is that we are pilling into cities where land is minimal and thus the market works in supply and demand.

Hopefully as years pass, where remote work is more and more accessible you can be owning your own 1 euro or whatever home in any area and not worry about limited land.

[RHSeeger]

I really don't understand this argument. Land taxes are supposed to pay for the various services in the area (schools, roads, etc). You don't pay your fair share and be done, you pay every year because those services cost money every year. If, at some point, you can no longer afford those costs (excluding those situations where social welfare safety nets are supposed to help), you move somewhere else. You don't get to keep taking advantage those services without paying for them just because you've been there for a long time.

[corty]

In Germany thats what income tax is for. The municipality receives the money and funds local infrastructure from it. I think the rest of Europe is at least similar in this regard.

One can argue about which system is better, but taxing elderly people out of their homes would never fly politically over here.

[dragandj]

... and that's why we have families who are on the verge of welfare not selling their expensive (additional) properties, waiting them to appreciate even more in value, dreaming of selling them somewhere in future and making their children set for life, while working class people have to pay 50% of their already heavily taxed wages for rent...

[luckylion]

> In Germany thats what income tax is for.

No. The main funding for local communities are property tax ("Grundsteuer") and business tax ("Gewerbesteuer"), income tax share only accounts for about a third. The height of both are also set on the local level the community has a very direct way to change the available money.

[geff82]

And Grundsteuer is quite cheap compared to property taxes in North America.

[ipnon]

This is known as the Poor Widow fallacy.

edit: https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html

edit: A solution to this problem is to allow seniors to defer payment of the land value tax until the next purchase of the land, at which point the next buyer will receive the deferred tax burden.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Copying your URL here and adding the scheme so it renders as a link:

https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html