Full Transcript for Can We Replace the Property Tax?

TRANSCRIPT 🔗

WEBVTT 00:00:00.050 --> 00:00:03.379 Hello and welcome to the Deduction Attacks Foundation podcast. 00:00:03.379 --> 00:00:11.300 I'm your host, Kyle Hulehan, and today we are joined by Jared Walczak, vice President of State Projects here at the Tax Foundation. 00:00:11.689 --> 00:00:15.380 Now, today we're gonna talk about the property taxes and. 00:00:15.548 --> 00:00:28.057 To frame this sort of whole discussion, I wanna set us up here with, what if I told you that eliminating the property taxes, which is something that, everyone would love to do could actually make communities worse off? 00:00:28.237 --> 00:00:34.658 That's sort of the thesis for today's podcast and what we're trying to dive into and, and understand about this. 00:00:34.718 --> 00:00:47.618 Um, so Jared, as we're we're looking at this, obviously people hate the property tax, you know, why could repealing the property attacks actually make people worse off? 00:00:47.618 --> 00:00:48.427 thanks for having me. 00:00:48.607 --> 00:00:51.968 And you're right, of course, that the property tax is an unpopular tax. 00:00:51.997 --> 00:00:53.468 Uh, economists tend to like it. 00:00:53.527 --> 00:00:56.287 Uh, most people, most taxpayers do not. 00:00:56.557 --> 00:00:58.207 Partly that's because they feel it. 00:00:58.207 --> 00:00:58.567 Right. 00:00:58.628 --> 00:00:59.378 You know, if you look. 00:00:59.552 --> 00:01:03.122 At what you owe in property taxes, you actually know what that amount is. 00:01:03.122 --> 00:01:03.902 Do you get a bill? 00:01:03.902 --> 00:01:07.832 You, you know, you pay it maybe a couple of times a year, once a year, twice a year. 00:01:08.222 --> 00:01:11.102 Uh, you don't know what you paid in sales taxes last year. 00:01:11.102 --> 00:01:14.852 A lot of people don't even know what they paid in income to taxes last year. 00:01:15.093 --> 00:01:17.597 This is a big lump sum of money. 00:01:17.798 --> 00:01:18.998 People really dislike it. 00:01:18.998 --> 00:01:21.158 And then people have philosophical objections as well. 00:01:21.158 --> 00:01:29.858 And I take those seriously, although I don't necessarily share some of them, but certainly this is an unpopular tax, but it's also a really important tax. 00:01:29.977 --> 00:01:33.397 It's 70% of local tax revenue nationwide. 00:01:33.427 --> 00:01:36.487 In some states it's as high as 95%. 00:01:36.847 --> 00:01:40.388 So if you're going to eliminate the property tax, you need a replacement. 00:01:40.447 --> 00:01:50.587 Multiple replacements, and the reality is that anything we choose to replace the property tax with is likely to be worse and worse along multiple vectors. 00:01:51.007 --> 00:01:58.778 It's worse economically in the sense that any replacement tax is going to create more economic distortions. 00:01:58.778 --> 00:02:03.817 It's going to hurt economic growth compared to the property tax, which is relatively efficient economically. 00:02:04.018 --> 00:02:10.828 It's worse for communities because many of the replacements, uh, just don't work very well in their communities. 00:02:10.858 --> 00:02:24.987 If, you know, we'll go into some of this, I'm sure, but if we're replacing this with local tax authority, sometimes there really isn't another local tax that could suffice if we're replacing it with state tax authority and we're distributing that revenue from the state. 00:02:25.342 --> 00:02:33.592 All kinds of challenges with how the state chooses to allocate that revenue and what that does and what incentives it creates at the local level. 00:02:33.592 --> 00:02:41.062 There's a reason why every state has property taxes at the local level and why no state has ever repealed property taxes. 00:02:41.092 --> 00:02:43.312 I know that's very much being discussed right now. 00:02:43.402 --> 00:02:47.812 It's a discussion that we need to take seriously, but there are good reasons why it hasn't happened yet. 00:02:48.263 --> 00:02:56.587 So to dive a little further into that, given how much the governments rely on property taxes, what actually breaks when we try to replace them? 00:02:56.788 --> 00:02:58.078 A lot of things potentially break. 00:02:58.108 --> 00:03:01.707 I mean, obviously if we don't replace the revenue, everything breaks. 00:03:01.707 --> 00:03:02.573 I mean, local governments. 00:03:03.013 --> 00:03:05.712 Fund a significant share of local roads. 00:03:05.712 --> 00:03:09.883 They often have obligations for local schools, or at least a major portion of that. 00:03:10.272 --> 00:03:14.953 Uh, police, fire, uh, local utilities in some cases. 00:03:14.983 --> 00:03:22.902 Uh, all the things that you rely on at your local level from parks to waste disposal, local taxes fund a substantial share of this. 00:03:22.902 --> 00:03:24.462 So we need that revenue. 00:03:24.478 --> 00:03:28.527 We can always have the debate about is local government funded at the right level? 00:03:28.527 --> 00:03:29.818 Could they be more efficient? 00:03:29.818 --> 00:03:36.448 But there's no question that they need a substantial amount of revenue, and the property tax is the way that they're getting a lot of that right now. 00:03:36.777 --> 00:03:40.437 So it has to be replaced, at least substantially replaced. 00:03:40.638 --> 00:03:46.487 And what breaks essentially is the ability to generate it from some other source. 00:03:46.698 --> 00:03:47.418 If we. 00:03:47.617 --> 00:03:51.548 Provided local sales tax authority in lieu of local property tax authority. 00:03:51.758 --> 00:04:00.487 That may work in an area with high retail concentration, where there's lots of shops, lots of stores, um, it doesn't really work in a bedroom community. 00:04:00.967 --> 00:04:03.187 It doesn't really work in an agricultural area. 00:04:03.367 --> 00:04:05.842 There's just really not a sales tax rate that you can set. 00:04:06.323 --> 00:04:09.562 That's even remotely reasonable, that would generate enough revenue. 00:04:09.802 --> 00:04:19.403 And if you

Load full transcript

have a highly unreasonable sales tax rate, well people are probably gonna just drive across the border to a county that has a slightly more reasonable one, or maybe to a state that has a more reasonable one. 00:04:19.612 --> 00:04:23.692 You're going to see that sort of casual evasion of the sales tax. 00:04:23.963 --> 00:04:35.213 Uh, same goes for local income taxes, and if you put it on the state, then not only are you going to have really high taxes in some other category, really high income taxes or really high sales taxes, but. 00:04:35.583 --> 00:04:49.173 As I'd like to get into with you throughout this, uh, you're gonna see some real distortions and some real perverse incentives that are created around distributing and allocating that revenue to local governments. 00:04:49.577 --> 00:05:04.398 And, and real quick just to follow up on this, for our audience, have you seen, or is there anything in your mind that we've done here at the Tax Foundation or worked on that kind of backs up the idea that behavior will change based on certain tax rules, like the things that you mentioned right there? 00:05:04.598 --> 00:05:10.867 Well, there's a broad literature on the way that people respond to tax changes, and you can respond in a lot of ways. 00:05:10.898 --> 00:05:21.848 So if you have massive sales tax differentials with, uh, a county border or a state border, you are certainly going to see people crossing state lines to purchase things in a lower tax. 00:05:22.913 --> 00:05:28.223 Uh, businesses can do less of this because they're going to have to pay the use tax regardless at the local rate. 00:05:28.463 --> 00:05:38.124 Although you may see them simply shift their actual operations in response to incredibly high sales taxes on their business inputs, their intermediate purchases rather than their final sales. 00:05:38.454 --> 00:05:44.064 Uh, you know, with income taxes, you will see people move somewhere else. 00:05:44.363 --> 00:05:49.728 You take examples like, say, Washington, Oregon, across that border, Oregon has no sales tax. 00:05:49.928 --> 00:05:51.699 Washington has no income tax. 00:05:51.939 --> 00:06:02.918 There's a lot of population right on that band of living in Washington and purchasing things in Oregon because they're taking advantage of those tax differentials. 00:06:03.129 --> 00:06:15.608 We also, just on a more general basis, see people moving to lower tax jurisdictions, setting up their businesses in those places, and they respond particularly on income taxes, far less on property taxes. 00:06:15.639 --> 00:06:19.088 So if, for instance, the income tax had to raise. 00:06:19.298 --> 00:06:23.228 Substantially to offset a property tax reduction or elimination. 00:06:23.468 --> 00:06:31.598 You'd see some behavioral effects there where you'd actually have migration and you'd have changes in business locations and business activity in response to that. 00:06:32.069 --> 00:06:45.149 Yeah, so you do a really great job of

discussing this in your paper, which everyone needs to go on tax foundation.org and check out your work there., So why do we see, uh, with some of these alternatives, they, they don't seem practical. 00:06:45.149 --> 00:06:54.658 You know, you give this awesome example in the paper about, um, Florida statewide sales tax needing to jump from 7% to 15%. 00:06:54.959 --> 00:06:57.809 You know, why does it such a massive jump? 00:06:57.899 --> 00:06:59.244 You, could you break that down for us? 00:06:59.444 --> 00:07:02.053 The property tax is a really significant source of revenue. 00:07:02.084 --> 00:07:05.564 I mean, in Florida it raise is about$56 billion a year. 00:07:05.564 --> 00:07:09.613 It's projected to raise about 60 billion in the next year or so. 00:07:09.824 --> 00:07:12.944 You need to replace that revenue and that is more. 00:07:13.149 --> 00:07:15.369 Then the state currently raises from its sales tax. 00:07:15.369 --> 00:07:17.288 So the state has a 6% sales tax. 00:07:17.588 --> 00:07:28.149 You add in the local taxes that already exist and it gets to a hair over 7% on average, and you need to add, uh, another 8%. 00:07:28.348 --> 00:07:35.249 top of that to be able to offset the property tax collections that are currently in place. 00:07:35.459 --> 00:07:36.538 So you have two choices here. 00:07:36.658 --> 00:07:42.449 You could put in about a 15% state sales tax and then allocate revenue back to localities. 00:07:42.824 --> 00:07:50.863 Or you could tell the localities, Hey, you can raise your sales taxes in your local jurisdiction to whatever rate you need to replace the property tax revenue. 00:07:51.064 --> 00:07:54.574 That latter option really, really doesn't work. 00:07:54.783 --> 00:08:03.033 Uh, we mapped out, this is in the paper what the replacement sales tax rate would be, all in current rates, plus the new rates in every county in Florida. 00:08:03.454 --> 00:08:09.303 And you can find one tiny little county that basically has almost no population, but has a big truck stop. 00:08:09.519 --> 00:08:09.819 In it. 00:08:09.968 --> 00:08:13.059 Lots of, uh, you know, lots of people coming through and spending money. 00:08:13.329 --> 00:08:15.249 They would only need like a 9.8% rate. 00:08:15.249 --> 00:08:16.389 That's doable. 00:08:16.418 --> 00:08:21.129 I mean, there's plenty of jurisdictions in the South that have rates that are around 9.8%. 00:08:21.608 --> 00:08:23.694 another jurisdiction that needs a 35% rate. 00:08:23.894 --> 00:08:24.853 That's just not doable. 00:08:24.884 --> 00:08:29.233 No one can have a 35% sales tax rate, and of course there's a lot in between. 00:08:29.384 --> 00:08:40.585 There are a lot of other jurisdictions that would have high sales tax rates because they're bedroom communities, or they're rural or they just don't have that retail concentration. 00:08:40.855 --> 00:08:47.485 Everyone would get some sales tax, but in many cases there's just not enough locally to replace the property

tax. 00:08:47.485 --> 00:08:51.534 in the paper you discuss, uh, an example with Ohio on income taxes. 00:08:51.534 --> 00:08:52.794 Could you break that down for us? 00:08:52.794 --> 00:08:54.715 I think that's a good example for our listeners 00:08:54.995 --> 00:08:58.054 Yeah, so in Ohio, again, you have a choice. 00:08:58.054 --> 00:09:03.754 You can have a much higher statewide income tax, or you could have local income taxes. 00:09:03.754 --> 00:09:06.725 And Ohio already has local income tax authority. 00:09:06.725 --> 00:09:11.975 They're one of the few states that significantly relies on local income taxes. 00:09:12.365 --> 00:09:12.904 So. 00:09:13.289 --> 00:09:23.250 If you were to have a statewide tax, Ohio is phasing down towards a flat 2.75% income tax, which will be really low at the state level. 00:09:23.250 --> 00:09:24.299 They still have the locals. 00:09:24.720 --> 00:09:32.580 If you were to replace the sales tax, you would need to bring that to a 12.6% flat tax. 00:09:33.559 --> 00:09:36.830 would be paying 12.6% on all of their income. 00:09:37.039 --> 00:09:42.049 That's pretty close to the top rate in California on income over$1 million. 00:09:42.049 --> 00:09:43.129 And this would be in Ohio. 00:09:43.490 --> 00:09:45.259 Uh, I just don't think that's viable. 00:09:45.500 --> 00:09:49.519 And it would be even more challenging if you were to do this with local tax authority. 00:09:49.789 --> 00:10:02.554 There you would see rates ranging from 9.75% to about 27%, and some of those highest rates are actually right along the Ohio River on the border with West Virginia, along the West Virginia panhandle. 00:10:02.945 --> 00:10:05.345 So you could just drive across the border to West Virginia. 00:10:05.345 --> 00:10:06.154 You could live there. 00:10:06.365 --> 00:10:09.934 Um, even if your job was in Ohio, you could live in West Virginia. 00:10:09.934 --> 00:10:11.554 And I'm sure you would see some of that. 00:10:11.735 --> 00:10:19.475 I'm sure just generally you'd see people leaving the state because it's just not viable to have taxes on income at these levels. 00:10:19.684 --> 00:10:20.975 Uh, there's reasons why we. 00:10:21.715 --> 00:10:24.294 Typically have multiple taxes in a jurisdiction. 00:10:24.355 --> 00:10:30.085 Um, and doubling down on income taxes like this just doesn't seem like a realistic solution. 00:10:30.284 --> 00:10:36.284 So then what new risks emerge when states take over some of that local funding? 00:10:36.284 --> 00:10:40.215 Especially for, for fairness, growth, and, and community control. 00:10:40.414 --> 00:10:48.250 Yeah, there are a lot of problems when the state assumes this authority because they need to, in some way decide how to. 00:10:48.615 --> 00:10:50.504 Return this money to the local governments. 00:10:50.705 --> 00:10:59.914 they could just take the final year of tax collections in any jurisdiction and use that as the baseline and provide that revenue to them in perpetuity, probably with some adjustment. 00:11:00.304 --> 00:11:19.368 What that does, of course, is reward the jurisdictions that had the highest tax rates in the past because you have some areas, often more affluent areas that have chosen to have relatively high property tax rates, but they also get the services that are associated with being a more highly funded jurisdiction you shift this to state authority. 00:11:19.607 --> 00:11:22.457 Those places continue to get all of the revenue. 00:11:23.042 --> 00:11:25.172 having higher taxes, but they're not paying more. 00:11:25.201 --> 00:11:25.501 Now. 00:11:25.501 --> 00:11:27.062 Everyone has that cost. 00:11:27.062 --> 00:11:29.851 Everyone is bearing the cost of subsidizing them. 00:11:30.302 --> 00:11:35.522 That's probably not going to be very attractive to all of the jurisdictions that historically had lower taxes. 00:11:35.721 --> 00:11:45.476 The flip side, of course, is if you choose some other way to allocate this, if you choose some other formula based on need or population or something that's not about what. 00:11:46.355 --> 00:11:47.436 used to be raised. 00:11:47.916 --> 00:11:54.875 Now you have these dramatic gaps where a jurisdiction that used to get a certain amount might be getting dramatically less. 00:11:54.875 --> 00:11:59.316 Another place might be getting dramatically more because of this new funding formula. 00:11:59.586 --> 00:12:01.625 Uh, that's going to create some crises too. 00:12:01.775 --> 00:12:05.196 Uh, you know, if suddenly you're getting 30% less revenue. 00:12:05.586 --> 00:12:06.846 What are you going to do with that? 00:12:06.846 --> 00:12:08.105 That's a real issue. 00:12:08.495 --> 00:12:11.436 Um, and then the question is, what do we do going forward? 00:12:11.676 --> 00:12:22.176 We can't use property values as a determinant of the allocation in future years because who is going to be assessing properties without a property tax? 00:12:22.385 --> 00:12:23.556 So we have to use something else. 00:12:23.765 --> 00:12:25.265 We could do an inflation adjustment. 00:12:25.265 --> 00:12:27.035 We could do inflation in population. 00:12:27.035 --> 00:12:32.015 There's a variety of things that we can do, but all of them are potentially deeply flawed. 00:12:32.216 --> 00:12:39.265 Essentially we're in some ways locking in the system as it existed when we eliminate the property tax. 00:12:39.655 --> 00:12:47.696 A jurisdiction that grows rapidly gets not just new population, but new investment and requires new services to be provided to them. 00:12:48.145 --> 00:12:58.556 Might not get the increases associated with that when the state is providing this by formula that they would, if they were generating new property tax revenue from all that new activity. 00:12:58.946 --> 00:12:59.755 So now. 00:12:59.956 --> 00:13:01.635 The dollars get spread thin. 00:13:01.905 --> 00:13:08.596 The more you grow, the faster you grow, the fewer dollars per capita you're getting, that

actually encourages you to shrink. 00:13:08.775 --> 00:13:18.645 Instead of promoting economic dynamism, instead of saying, growth allows us to either have more revenue or to lower property tax rates and make the place more competitive. 00:13:18.885 --> 00:13:22.995 Now you're saying growth means that each dollar. 00:13:23.394 --> 00:13:29.094 cover as many people that like that every person is getting less than they used to. 00:13:29.364 --> 00:13:31.823 That encourages you to shrink rather than to grow. 00:13:31.823 --> 00:13:34.369 That's the exact opposite of what you would want to see. 00:13:34.469 --> 00:13:40.219 Well, it sounds like what you're saying is this will increase complexity quite a bit. 00:13:40.578 --> 00:13:46.249 What do you think maybe people are, are misunderstanding about the, the value of the property tax? 00:13:47.028 --> 00:13:50.508 Despite its unpopularity, the property tax is a pretty good tax. 00:13:50.687 --> 00:14:01.788 It's closer than most taxes to passing what we call the benefits test, where you are paying more in proportion to receiving greater value, uh, in local services. 00:14:01.788 --> 00:14:07.998 If you have a more expensive property, the value of the roads and the schools and everything else actually is worth more to you. 00:14:08.177 --> 00:14:09.437 They also have a feedback effect. 00:14:09.437 --> 00:14:13.427 Better schools mean your property's worth more, uh, so it's not a perfect tax. 00:14:13.628 --> 00:14:22.447 it's pretty good and it's very economically efficient compared to other taxes because there are fewer responses, economic responses to the property tax. 00:14:22.447 --> 00:14:29.977 The land's not going anywhere, so you can't pick up and move it in the same way that you can, a person or a job or a capital investment. 00:14:30.307 --> 00:14:31.087 So. 00:14:31.288 --> 00:14:34.168 It's good in that it doesn't distort behavior as much. 00:14:34.197 --> 00:14:36.717 Again, not perfect, but we're in the realm of taxes. 00:14:36.717 --> 00:14:37.587 Nothing is perfect. 00:14:38.208 --> 00:14:42.288 we shift to is going to create more economic drag. 00:14:42.288 --> 00:14:45.499 It's going to reduce economic growth and output. 00:14:45.859 --> 00:14:56.058 It's also going to require these really hard choices about where the revenue comes from, how high we want another tax to go, and how much shifting. 00:14:56.318 --> 00:15:07.658 We're willing to allow if everyone is paying more in income taxes or more in sales taxes, and then it's transferred through the property tax, that means radically different distributions. 00:15:07.899 --> 00:15:13.178 It's not like you as an individ individual, pay more in income tax, pay less in property tax than it's a wash. 00:15:13.479 --> 00:15:18.399 You may be paying more in income tax while your jurisdiction because you know either. 00:15:18.599 --> 00:15:23.188 had lower property taxes to begin with, or the new formula leads to a lower allocation. 00:15:23.578 --> 00:15:27.568 You're paying way more in income taxes than you're getting in property tax replacement revenue. 00:15:27.778 --> 00:15:31.109 Um, you know more than you were paying in property tax previously. 00:15:31.109 --> 00:15:32.609 Someone else might have the opposite. 00:15:32.639 --> 00:15:37.282 They may love this, but of people are going to find they're paying more. 00:15:37.481 --> 00:15:38.591 Some people would pay less. 00:15:38.802 --> 00:15:44.052 A lot of jurisdictions are going to find that they're cash strapped, that they're not getting the revenue. 00:15:44.052 --> 00:15:56.042 They thought while others might be awash with cash, even though they're shrinking in population, which is not where presumably we want to, you know, have this additional, you know, revenue just fundamentally, it's really hard to plan around. 00:15:56.042 --> 00:15:57.631 There's a lot of complexity to it. 00:15:57.631 --> 00:16:03.662 Any choice the state makes, potentially changes behavior in very undesirable ways. 00:16:03.751 --> 00:16:05.432 Things that just don't make a lot of sense. 00:16:05.631 --> 00:16:13.552 So why do you feel like some of these campaigns to repeal the property tax maybe don't? 00:16:13.701 --> 00:16:14.091 Uh. 00:16:14.292 --> 00:16:18.672 Live up to their expectations or, or what voters should want. 00:16:18.672 --> 00:16:21.552 Maybe they're not detailed enough or they don't provide enough clarity. 00:16:22.198 --> 00:16:25.168 So again, property tax repeal is popular. 00:16:25.259 --> 00:16:29.668 If you simply lead with that, wouldn't it be great if we eliminated your property taxes? 00:16:29.668 --> 00:16:31.769 I think a lot of people are going to sign up for that. 00:16:31.769 --> 00:16:36.658 They're gonna say, yeah, that sounds great, and what a lot of the proposals are missing. 00:16:36.904 --> 00:16:38.764 A serious discussion of replacement revenue. 00:16:39.081 --> 00:16:43.500 fact, many of the ballot measures that have been proposed even have that. 00:16:43.711 --> 00:16:53.221 They simply say the property tax will be repealed, and then it's incumbent upon the legislature once it's gone to figure out what the replacement revenue is. 00:16:53.421 --> 00:16:54.650 And I think that's backwards. 00:16:54.831 --> 00:17:08.780 I don't think you can have a serious discussion about this without talking about what the replacements are going to be and whether they're better or worse, and I really don't think that it's acceptable to have a situation where this revenue stream is just eliminated. 00:17:09.070 --> 00:17:13.780 And then after the fact, the legislature has to rush in and find something else. 00:17:13.780 --> 00:17:16.060 Again, there's a reason that no one's done this. 00:17:16.090 --> 00:17:23.681 It's really, really hard and we can have a discussion and a debate around whether there is a better alternative. 00:17:23.681 --> 00:17:24.851 I don't believe there is. 00:17:24.851 --> 00:17:27.431 I

think the economic evidence is pretty clear. 00:17:27.641 --> 00:17:29.050 I think the alternatives. 00:17:29.115 --> 00:17:32.776 Speak for themselves when you really look at them, and that's what this paper is meant to do. 00:17:32.776 --> 00:17:42.526 We take six states where there's been a serious discussion about property tax elimination, and we show all these different ideas about how you might replace the revenue and what happens with that. 00:17:42.526 --> 00:17:43.996 How the distributions change. 00:17:43.996 --> 00:17:45.316 How the tax rates change. 00:17:45.675 --> 00:17:51.435 And I think people can look at that and say, maybe that's not what we wanted, but they're not being given that opportunity. 00:17:51.855 --> 00:17:57.135 Some of the ballot measures that are out there, and I worry about a situation where voters say, yeah, absolutely. 00:17:57.135 --> 00:17:58.516 Get rid of my property taxes. 00:17:58.726 --> 00:18:05.836 And then the legislature goes into session and has to come up with a replacement for potentially billions and billions of dollars of revenue overnight. 00:18:05.836 --> 00:18:07.576 Do we think that's going to work well? 00:18:07.905 --> 00:18:10.455 Do we think people are going to be happy with the results? 00:18:10.756 --> 00:18:17.266 And then what does happen when you are one of those loser jurisdictions that's down 30 or 40 or 50% in your revenue? 00:18:17.465 --> 00:18:18.546 What do you do now? 00:18:18.990 --> 00:18:20.310 Uh, what does that look like? 00:18:20.310 --> 00:18:21.661 And do we have another crisis? 00:18:21.661 --> 00:18:24.181 The legislature has to respond to the following year. 00:18:24.381 --> 00:18:30.198 there's A through line here with, uh, politics and sort of the popular. 00:18:30.528 --> 00:18:32.417 What's a popular idea and what's good policy? 00:18:32.417 --> 00:18:40.847 We've had president Trump propose all the no tax ons, and those things are very complicated and complex and, but they sound really nice and, and it sounds nice. 00:18:40.847 --> 00:18:43.188 It sounds like, oh cool, we're gonna eliminate the property tax. 00:18:43.188 --> 00:18:43.728 This would be great. 00:18:43.968 --> 00:18:45.077 But actually it's. 00:18:45.413 --> 00:18:48.923 Really harmful for us, and it doesn't benefit us in the way we'd like. 00:18:48.923 --> 00:18:52.103 It's a nice tagline, but it, it doesn't actually do much for us. 00:18:52.553 --> 00:19:06.232 Um, and, and so right now I, I'd wanna switch real quick into, I made this little lightning round because there are things I've heard my friends say, and I just kind of wanted to do like a myth or fact with you real quick. 00:19:06.623 --> 00:19:08.603 Um, and so we'll lightning around this. 00:19:08.603 --> 00:19:10.042 I'll give you a quick second to respond. 00:19:10.373 --> 00:19:10.823 So, is this. 00:19:11.022 --> 00:19:12.163 Is this true or false? 00:19:12.163 --> 00:19:13.153 Is it myth or fact? 00:19:13.482 --> 00:19:17.430 Uh, sales taxes are more pro-growth, so just switch. 00:19:17.630 --> 00:19:18.950 Well, in fact, they're not. 00:19:18.980 --> 00:19:23.720 Um, sales taxes are more pro-growth than income taxes, but less pro-growth than property taxes. 00:19:23.720 --> 00:19:30.170 So doubling down on the sales tax to the exclusion of the property tax is actually less pro-growth. 00:19:30.174 --> 00:19:34.519 And part of that's just the way we design sales taxes in this country where they're taxing a lot of. 00:19:34.720 --> 00:19:35.650 multiple times over. 00:19:35.710 --> 00:19:42.190 If we had a better sales tax, the difference wouldn't be quite as much, but no, uh, the answer is no. 00:19:42.279 --> 00:19:43.119 Um, false. 00:19:43.180 --> 00:19:49.539 This would actually make the tax code less competitive if we shifted away from property taxes, even to sales taxes. 00:19:49.750 --> 00:19:52.150 But it's even worse if we shifted into income taxes. 00:19:52.349 --> 00:19:56.450 So myth or fact, renters don't pay property taxes taxes. 00:19:56.559 --> 00:19:57.279 Essentially myth. 00:19:57.579 --> 00:19:59.890 Uh, they don't obviously write a check. 00:20:00.160 --> 00:20:04.569 Uh, renters are not remitting property taxes to the local jurisdiction. 00:20:04.569 --> 00:20:17.799 The landlord is, but you know, there's a large literature on this and there are some disagreements on the exact amount that the renters bear, but everyone agrees that a very substantial portion of the property tax shows up. 00:20:18.000 --> 00:20:24.869 In your rent payment, and you can even see this when property taxes go up, that rent prices increase faster. 00:20:24.930 --> 00:20:26.789 Um, it can take a couple of years. 00:20:26.789 --> 00:20:38.279 Again, it's not always perfectly one-to-one, but over time, most, if not all of the cost of the property tax is born by the renter themselves. 00:20:38.480 --> 00:20:44.119 Sometimes there's these proposals that just provide relief to homeowners and that really leaves renters out. 00:20:44.299 --> 00:21:12.255 And some states even make it worse by taxing commercial property at higher effective rates and often classing, rental units as commercial property, which means that of the lower income individuals who are renting are bearing higher property taxes than the owners of homes, um, but certainly everyone's paying property taxes if we eliminated the property tax, that provides relief for everyone there. 00:21:12.255 --> 00:21:16.339 But it also, of course, means a vast array of new taxes that everyone will be paying as well. 00:21:16.736 --> 00:21:25.381 So as we're wrapping up here, Jared, uh, why is the property tax despite being so unpopular, as we've talked about the most stable, fair and growth friendly option that we have? 00:21:25.580 --> 00:21:30.560 The property tax, as we've discussed, is on largely fixed immovable assets. 00:21:30.621 --> 00:21:31.310 You cannot move your. 00:21:31.740 --> 00:21:32.221 Land. 00:21:32.371 -->

00:21:34.290 Um, you can choose where to build structures. 00:21:34.290 --> 00:21:41.671 You can choose some of these things, but the fact that it's a fairly fixed asset means that there will be fewer behavioral responses to it. 00:21:41.941 --> 00:21:47.280 Also, the fact that, as we've discussed, it better passes the benefit test means that. 00:21:47.480 --> 00:21:56.810 You're getting more for your money when you're paying more, uh, in a way that's not always true of the sales tax or the income tax, and therefore you're more willing, you may not like it. 00:21:56.961 --> 00:21:59.421 I mean, none, none of us really likes paying taxes. 00:21:59.421 --> 00:22:08.090 But when you look at the alternatives, you may find that your willingness to pay that as higher, even if you do complain about it, um, you know, certainly we see that with businesses. 00:22:08.090 --> 00:22:10.340 We see it with a lot of individuals where they locate. 00:22:10.340 --> 00:22:13.131 This is what, you know, economists call revealed preference. 00:22:13.191 --> 00:22:21.330 Um, you know, because you have your revealed preference of you actually do as opposed to your stated preference of what you dislike. 00:22:21.330 --> 00:22:23.671 You can say, I don't like property taxes. 00:22:23.671 --> 00:22:24.810 I don't want to pay them. 00:22:24.990 --> 00:22:35.280 Your revealed preference is sometimes you're not going to the lowest property tax jurisdiction in the same way that you might go to a lower tax regime for income taxes because of what the property tax is doing. 00:22:35.760 --> 00:22:37.020 And then finally. 00:22:37.401 --> 00:22:41.361 There is a local responsiveness to this tax that you don't have with others. 00:22:41.780 --> 00:22:44.421 When you don't like that your property taxes have risen. 00:22:44.691 --> 00:22:53.540 You can go to city council, you can go to your county board of supervisors or commissioners or whatever you have, and you can complain about this and you may have a real impact on them. 00:22:53.740 --> 00:23:01.060 If the state takes over this authority with a higher income tax or a higher sales tax and they allocate this, it's going to be way harder. 00:23:01.435 --> 00:23:18.655 For you to petition on this and even if you would be willing to accept lower government services or if even if your local government really cares about efficiencies and they want to be better with their money, they can't control what comes to them or what taxes are imposed on you to do this. 00:23:18.655 --> 00:23:24.316 So that local responsiveness piece is important and is fundamentally missing if we move away from the property tax. 00:23:24.516 --> 00:23:32.286 All right, well, before we sign off, if you have any burning questions on tax, you can send them our way or drop a comment on YouTube. 00:23:32.286 --> 00:23:35.526 You can email us at podcast@taxfoundation.org. 00:23:35.766 --> 00:23:38.586 You can slide into our dms at Deduction Pod on Twitter. 00:23:38.786 --> 00:23:41.276 Thank you so much for listening, and thank you, Jared, for being here today. 00:23:41.476 --> 00:23:41.865 Thank you.

Edit transcript