[spikengineer]

I am neither an expert nor familiar with US constitutional law, but in most other countries the federal power trumps the power of any states/provinces and is not limited by a single clause and helps simplify and remove any disparities in taxation policy. As far as property taxes are concerned, most countries retain the policy to keep the local councils empowered to decide tax rates albeit "within the rate limits and fairness criteria imposed by the states and federal governments". In my country property taxes cannot be made zero/low or made exceptionally high by a showoff city council trying to get reelected for whatever reason as this causes unnecessary migration between cities/towns for no practical reason other than to skirt taxes with no practical systemic benefit to the populace at whole.

[visualradio]

In the U.S. politicians were more concerned with the opposite, that low property taxes would be more likely to cause loss of population and emigration than high property taxes. At the time of the revolution the U.S. colonies were relying on revenue from land tax, property tax, property income tax, and public banking rather than sales tax and were rapidly growing in population due to immigration from European countries where most of the large landholders were exempt from property taxes. Early America had large quantities of land and few workers relative to Europe. In order to industrialize Franklin and founders associated with Democratic-Republican party thought it was first necessary to increase population and maximize rural agricultural productivity, which from reading the French economists they thought would be stimulated by some form of direct tax and hindered by indirect tax.