[tzs]

The nice thing about income taxes is that when your income increases, which increases the amount of tax you owe, your ability to afford that tax also goes up due to that income increase.

With property taxes you don't have that coupling between changes in income and changes in the tax. That can make a property tax way more painful.

[epistasis]

If your income tax goes up a lot, you have a ton more wealth. Which means that a small downsizing to match the same tax level leaves you with a bunch of cash.

That's exactly what should happen in a productive economy: big cash payments to give up underutilized land to somebody who can make better use of it.

People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.

[tzs]

> People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property

Where are you getting that from?

In most cases when granny sells her house and moves due to high taxes the buyer will be a single family that will live in the house. In the vast majority of cases that family will have less than half a dozen people, and in the vast majority of cases they will not have been homeless before.

[stogot]

> People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.

That’s a distasteful and predatory way to speak of someone who rightfully bought her property, possibly a widow, and just wants to live in peace versus having someone (business or gov) try to break the rules to take her property.

[epistasis]

It is far more distasteful and predatory to hide behind widows with a fundamentally unfair system. Whoever wants to take away the opportunity of others, let them pay. It's not hard.

It's far more distasteful to ignore the needs of everyone to give a very minor convenience to somebody with a lot of wealth.

Winston Churchill on this sort of old and wrong political argument about widows:

https://savingcommunities.org/docs/churchill.winston/budgetr...

[mrkstu]

Except the lowest income classes don’t own property and pay no property taxes directly. Considering renters also pay less in Texas than Cali, it seems a pretty un-regressive regime.