Don't try to lower taxes, try to switch to a land-value tax.

Our property tax system is ridiculously complicated, but at least in one respect it makes more sense than yours: appraisals are supposed to be objective, and go up as they go up. (Lots of people are looking at 30%+ increases this year) but local property taxes increases are capped.

Under your system, in an inflationary period, appraisals are going to progressively more divorced from reality.

Without looking at my bill, I kind of think your property taxes might be higher than ours, and ours include some things we separately voted in: to build a great new library, buy some open space, rebuild a bunch of schools, and other stuff.

The value question is always hard to answer. Most of the city budget is personnel costs, right? Are they overpaying, compared to what people with the required skills could be making doing something else (including working in one of the bigger cities)? Could they actually provide the necessary services with fewer people? Here, lots of people go around grousing about the cost of city government -- because our taxes are too high -- but when you start asking about how to reduce the budget, you end up with a lot of incoherent hand waving.

So what are the main services the city provides? I'm guessing the main ones are roads, police, fire, parks, business licensure?

Because we've been in the same house for years, we pay lower property taxes than our neighbors with similar houses. The system works.

Not fairly or anything. But it works.

California system is actually progressive enough that the total tax burden for the bottom 60% of the population is significantly lower than Texas's, but of course rent burden more than outweighs that.

I think the comparison stat about overall tax burden is mostly driven by how much we tax the rich.

Bottom 20%: in CA pay 10.5% of income, TX 9.4%
Second 20%: CA 9.4%, TX 10.9%
Middle 20%: CA 8.3%, TX 9.7%
75-95%: CA 9.0%, TX 8.6%
96-99%: CA 9.9%, CA 5.4%
Top 1%: CA 12.4%, TX 3.1%

(I suspect Prop 13 is why the sag in the middle 20% for CA.)

4: I discovered a great zinger Justice Stevens gave to that aspect when Prop 13 came before the Supreme Court. (He was the lone dissenter saying it was so arbitrary as to not have rational-basis justification.)

No doubt there are some early purchasers living on fixed or limited incomes who could not afford to pay higher taxes and still maintain their homes. California has enacted special legislation to respond to their plight. Those concerns cannot provide an adequate justification for Proposition 13. A state-wide, across-the-board tax windfall for all property owners and their descendants is no more a "rational" means for protecting this small subgroup than a blanket tax exemption for all taxpayers named Smith would be a rational means to protect a particular taxpayer named Smith who demonstrated difficulty paying her tax bill.

I like me better than I like my neighbors. That seems rational enough.

6.3 CA is really sneaky about socking it to the 96-99% bracket.

But how do you measure the value of what community members get from a local government?

You mention schools a bit. How about police and emergency services? Libraries? Those are locally funded in most of the country as well, I think. I can buy that Texans don't use or care about public parks much, considering how cheap land is out there. (Compared to where I am, of course.) But police, schools, and libraries seem like they should be relevant to a lot of people.

As for the actual lines in the OP phrased as questions: I'd say they don't matter. Or rather, I'd advise you, when the topic comes up in real life and someone complains about how high your city/county taxes are, to change the subject from the total bill to how regressive it is. If your UMC neighbor feels that their taxes should be lower, I don't see any harm in agreeing with them as long as the difference is made up by raising taxes on someone richer somehow as opposed to cutting services further. If there's nothing you/they can do about that at the local level, well, maybe talk about local politics less and state politics more? It seems marginally more likely to do good, I guess.

I can easily imagine that the kind of person who bought a $189K home in 2015 is very stressed out by having to pay $587.50 a month to the tax collector in 2023.

I can't. Maybe that's because for me my tax bill is part of my mortgage payment and therefore easy to ignore. Reminds me of discussions we've had about how Republicans try to make paying taxes as inconvenient as possible, although this particular detail may not be a result of those policies. Or because paying $189K for a home in 2015 seems bizarrely low. (I'm pretty sure we've had some parts of this discussion before. But for whatever it's worth this is not just based on my experience where I live now but where I used to live as well.)

I think a better way than "imagine what it would cost you to buy an eight-lane road on the open market" is probably "well, here's where the money goes, which 25% do you want to cut? Close all the libraries, let the roads decay, or just sack all the police?"

This is a useful reality check. So even though someone is precarious financially and stressed out about that, if they've made choices (like OWNING A HOME this is what I can't get past) then they should plan for this level of taxes.

I mean, seniors on fixed incomes do get COLAS. Is it reasonable to say that a senior citizen alone in a spacious house should consider letting a grandkid move in for some extra rent money? or is that a scarcity mindset that a healthy society wouldn't expect?

Old people with money are ruining everything else. Why not this?

Everyone always complains about taxes, but local property taxes in particular are tied directly to service levels in a way that makes the tradeoffs clearer than with some other types. The mill rate is typically set each year by the local government based on its approved budget. In theory it would be easy to lower these taxes just by cutting out services during the budget discussion, but of course the services local government provides are typically the ones people value most and are least willing to cut. This is quite unlike state and federal level sales and income taxes, which are set at arbitrary levels that are intended to raise the desired level of revenue but not directly tied to spending in the same way.

Our own local property taxes are pretty high, and people complain about that (although heebie's actually seem to be higher, if I'm reading her figures correctly?). We don't have a state income or sales tax, though, so the overall tax burden to residents is quite low, usually the lowest in the country. The city put out an interesting discussion of this a while back.

Old people here pay fuckall and complain about it.

Here are our latest mill rates. The total for the main part of the city is 17.03, including the school district portion. heebie's rates total about 20.49 per mill.

We have a 3% wage tax. Not income, just wages. Fucking coupon clippers pay nothing but property taxes.

Still, better than the suburbanites complaining about everything.

Taxachusetts has high property taxes, but local budgets can only go up so much, so if property values go up a lot, the rate will go down. If your property in a specific neighborhood is relatively more desirable, yours will go up a fair amount. 1980's referendum revolt. In a period of high inflation, town budgets will suffer. And we have low rates of state aid to education compared to comparable states.

But with the millionaire's tax, hopefully some of that will change.

Knecht's town next door had to do an override, because they have had major cost overruns on a new school. I believe that they were exempting. The first 2 or 3 hundred thousand of assessed value from taxes in an effort to make it more progressive within the town.

In my ward, voters want low taxes and a new pool. Somethings gotta give.

Have you considered striking oil?

My thought was to turn the old reservoir into a swimming hole but I guess there are reasons that would be a bad idea.

You can pee in a swimming hole, so you don't need restrooms.

It's helpful that the school taxes are out of the discussion, because schools are so politicized. The city budget IME is so straightforward that it should be realistic to start at the top (biggest items likely being cops/public safety, streets/public works, and sanitation) and say "Which of these do you want less of? Because if you don't make deep cuts up here, you have to completely eliminate everything else to make a difference."

Drum had a related piece on the Federal budget, which notes that even big, painful cuts to discretionary don't mean shit relative to the deficit, so the only places to move the dial are entitlements or raising taxes. That's not exactly the discussion you're having, but the reality is that your notional interlocutors want to dramatically reduce taxation (taking the city portion from $173 to $165--5%--would mean a 1.5% reduction in property taxes, which isn't shit, which means they imagine a 20% reduction in city taxes, or more) while pretending it wouldn't utterly dismantle local services.

Actually, that parenthetical is probably where you need to redirect the discussion: "To reduce property taxes by just 5% (which isn't much), you'd have to cut city taxes by almost 20%. Do you think the city can remain safe with 20% fewer cops and firefighters? Do you want to cut park maintenance by 20% and have broken swings and trash everywhere? And all that gets you is a tax reduction so small most people will hardly notice. $30/month isn't much to pay to reduce crimes/prevent fires/keep parks open, safe, and clean."

More broadly, this is the whole, stupid waste/fraud/abuse, foreign aid mindset that imagines that taxes are high because there's some imaginary, huge use that nobody really wants. There might be a couple percent worth of belt-tightening that you could do without anybody noticing too much, but of course you also wouldn't notice the tax reduction too much.

Which is why I said in 26.1 that you need to start with the big municipal costs: if you can't identify a concrete, 20% reduction in public safety, then you're not getting anywhere with the rest of the budget. Refuse to be pushed into discussing small, possibly controversial or niche programs, because cutting out the bookmobile isn't going to reduce anyone's taxes by more than a rounding error.

BTW, I'd argue that, big picture, belt-tightening is usually false economy, because what it tends to mean is cutting wages below competitive levels and making jobs less pleasant (by eliminating tiny perks), which just means that you spend 5% less and get 10% worse services.

Obviously if you're paying 20% above median salaries in a place with median conditions, then you've got somewhere to cut. But it's pretty rare to be that far out of whack.

Our property taxes are regressive in that some close-in cities with large industrial bases have lower tax rates, but property is so expensive that only rich people can afford to move there, so they pay lower property taxes. Long term owners I guess have a CA-like situation.
We're paying $3200 a year on a property assessed at $1M, and if that's an accurate market value, 50% of that is appreciation. Probably $1M is an overestimate of the market value, maybe $800k is more realistic, which is still a low rate at $3200/yr.
So obviously your solution is to get lots of universities and tech companies to move in, but without needing to give them tax incentives.

The water-sewer bill is what I hear most complaints about. It turns out people don't want to pay money to not pollute someone else's water.

29 means I pay way too much property taxes.

Or way too little for my house.

My take-aways from this discussion are: I still don't understand mills, and my taxes are a lot higher compared to everyone else's! (We bought roughly the house heebie is contemplating on a similar timeline, and our taxes ARE a little more than $500/month.) The city we live in (and not the lower tax, white flight on small scale nearby towns) does provide lots of services, but they're mostly geared at lower income residents. So, I've been trying to get the city to address a dying, rotting tree before it falls on the house for over a year now, but the library is REALLY nice, roads are being repaved, bike lanes added, parks are well-maintained and have really pretty landscaping, and there seem to be a lot of functional social services. Seems like a reasonable trade, assuming the tree falls towards the street.

Yeah. That's the ballpark we're in for taxes too.

"dark satanic mill rates"

We pay $5k on an assessed value of $216k (after homestead exemption). Possibly getting fucked? Although the market value has to be close to a half million, especially since we finally replaced the roof and painted the about-to-rot wood.

At the same time our city is just giving money away so in theory our taxes could be even lower. I support the program and I think the cranks who want to cut taxes no matter the situation don't get much traction because rates are already pretty low.

Argument following a minute of googling: your town seems to get 45% of its revenue from the property tax. Of the total budget, 10% is debt service, which won't be cut at all if the budget gets cut (there are other items n this category but I have limited patience). Assume that almost all of any sudden budget cut will be covered by laying people off. So a 20% property tax cut means 10% of employees will be laid off. Since a 10% cut isn't enough to justify cutting management, substantially all layoffs will be the people who do the work.

The town has about 175 police and 160 firefighters/EMS.

For your exemplar taxpayer, a 20% property tax cut would be $34/month, or about $1/day. Would you rather pay current taxes and current levels of police and fire, or save $1/day and have 18 fewer police and 16 fewer EMS people?

(You can also talk about 10% less frequent cutting the grass on the Little League field, 10% more time between road resurfacing, 10% longer wait for the inspector to approve you new construction, etc.)

Status quo bias though- if you ask people if getting back $1 a day is worth losing 34 first responders they might say no, but probably would also say getting another 34 for an extra $1 is also not worth it. Everything is exactly as it should be!

Actually, I have another question. Let's assume the bottom quintile in Texas does not own property. They're paying 6.25% in sales tax to the state, and 2% in sales tax to the city. How is their tax burden 13% of their income?

Is the idea that a significant number of cities have another 6.75% in sales tax? Or that a significant number of extremely poor people own homes? I feel like I'm not thinking clearly about this.

raising taxes on the wealthy is off the table

Many are tasked with coming up with solutions to problems where the first decision is to rule out strategies that might actually work.

I just looked -- last year a bit over 500/mo on a house that last year they thought was worth nearly 500k. Of the total, 34.8% is city. That'll shrink a little for 2023, because city mills are capped and state education mills are not.

We don't have a sales tax at all.

The principal debate is how we can collect money from the millions of tourists who visit every year, without taxing ourselves at the same time, and apply that money to offset property taxes. In cities where we have lots of services -- tourists get a lot of value from that -- and a lot of tourists, this is a big deal. Places with not much in services and not much in tourists, that is, a lot of places that are represented by the majority in the legislature, they just think the big cities are spendthrifts.

In my feed today was a friends picture from his current trip to far eastern Montana: a ranch gate with an arch saying 'we don't call 911' and a rifle under the writing. OK, yes, I suppose that means that if grandma falls and breaks her hip, they're going to shoot her, rather than call an ambulance. On the other hand, help could be an hour away, and so cutting law enforcement in the cities (which these people hate visiting, even just for the retail) doesn't sound like such a burden.

It's always Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen out in the Far East: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE&t=1s

40. Part of their rent pays property tax, don't know how numbers stack up.

your town seems to get 45% of its revenue from the property tax.

No, it's way worse than this. The budget is ~320 million. The property tax brings in 37 million, and the sales tax brings in 42 million. There's separate billing for water, wastewater, trash/recycling, and a community enhancement fee. So the property tax itself is only 11% of the budget.

I think 43 is right. Usually tax rate includes imputed property tax paid in rent.

I suppose that means that if grandma falls and breaks her hip, they're going to shoot her, rather than call an ambulance

Has duct tape and baling wire fallen out of fashion?

I don't know if that makes it better or worse. Also it makes me think I should have added in the fees for those individual services into the conversation.

The average rates for those four services are $143.15/month.

43/45: I understand that, but if you're calculating how tax-burdened different residents are, it seems disingenuous to estimate how taxes are passed on to other people via goods, services or living arrangements.

I mean, are they subtracting that tax burden from the computations they apply to compute the burden that landlords feel?

Probably? Normally the landlord would pay income tax on the rental income, but, you know, Texas.

I think 38.last isn't quite right. I wouldn't care a bit about 10% less frequent Little League field maintenance, and our roads get pretty awful before they get worked on (Whitmer ran for governor with the slogan "Fix the damn roads!" to give you an idea). I think it's hard to imagine what 10% worse looks like in a lot of those cases but easy to imagine $1000 off my taxes. I can at least imagine how much it would suck if the city cut 10% headcount, but I think the numbers in 38.middle is a much easier argument to grasp. That said, I'm not generally mad about taxes so I'm not the target audience.

In New Jersey, apparently public officials get paid in gold bars. But by Egyptians instead of locals.

Boston property taxes are about 1% of assessed value, but at least my place is assessed at a mere 60% of what we paid for it. And we probably overpaid a bit, but not by nearly enough to make the assessment reasonable. So I don't feel like I pay much in property taxes, all things considered.

Houses are usually only a couple of hundred thousand dollars anyway.

Oh, 44 is very clarifying. Although it seems like there's still $200M unaccounted for: 320-37-42-31=210. 31M is estimated from the ratio of $173 to $143.

Anyway, that really does change everything, because property tax is only 11.5% of the budget, so a pretty steep tax reduction is a pretty small budget reduction.

OTOH, it's the only remotely progressive part of the system. TBH, I'd just lean into a class war frame: 50% of property taxes are pid by the top 20% of households (or whatever the numbers are), so if you cut taxes in half, services for all will get cut, but most of the savings go to the wealthiest portion.

I'm not sure that's always super-effective as campaign rhetoric, but I actually think one-on-one it's clarifying. Honest interlocutor thinks "if I cut my city tax bill in half, services go down 5%, and I can live with that." But if you can switch that to "$20M of budget cuts gets returned to 5000 households, but everyone sees that service cut," it makes a little clearer who benefits relatively.

Since analogies aren't banned IRL, here's one: In exchange for a tax cut, everyone gets a thumb smashed with a hammer, but some people get $5 in tax cut, some people get $75, and some people get $350. But everyone gets smashed.

48: For the most part, rents are determined by market, not landlord costs. Your town isn't an island, so rents are competitive with other towns with other millages. If you cut taxes, nobody's getting a rent drop. The only time you might would be in event of oversupply of rentable units, in which case landlords would be eager to court tenants at cost plus. But that's a pretty rare condition, especially across a mid-sized municipality.

53 is painful.

It's out of date, mostly. If that helps.

We're paying for the fun: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/21/montana-college-town-ranks-no-1-as-the-most-fun-city-for-young-people.html

I had no idea what our property tax (county only) was because it's bundled into the mortgage payment, but apparently we pay $2,692/yr on an assessed value of $65k. No idea where the assessed value comes from; market is probably $360k now. Our state income tax rate tops out at 6.6% and there's no sales tax. The school system is terrible, though.

33.

1792 Coinage Act:
And be it further enacted, That the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars or units, dismes or tenths, cents or hundredths, and milles or thousandths, a disme being a tenth part of a dollar, a cent the hundredth part of a dollar, a mille the thousandths part of a dollar

Dollars, dimes, cents, and mills in current law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5101

35 is great.

I don't see why 55 is arguing with me. I agree!

Your options are getting a puppy or getting a house for a couple hundred thousand dollars, you can't have both!

Wait. We were the wolf?

29: Your city is the cheapest rate in the who,e state, quite a bit cheaper than Boston. Mine is assssed closer to 600, and we pay $10,500 although I think the taxes have gone up a fair amount in the past 5 years. ($1800 since 2019). There are a lot of people in bigger houses here who pay 20-30 k. And I am sure that next door is more, though their rate is somewhat lower, because the valuations are higher.

People miss the SALT deduction. People in NJ probably miss it more.

63: We are picking up our new puppy today (a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever "Toller") which we are able to get, because we have a house now.

My town has high taxes relative to the rest of the state, as does this whole area- twice what a similar property would pay on the north shore. Our town services are pretty great though.

My thmbsuck thought on the prospects of Heebieville was that you should pursue non-tax revenues, starting with charging non-residents for access to your numerous (intermittently) well-watered parks.

Our parks could charge people to hunt deer.

67: Wait, were you literally listening to the city council meeting too?

No. A while back you posted about development models for Heebieville and I looked at the map.

Charging other people to get into your parks seems tricky to implement.

Yay puppies!
(Yggles said something about taxing dogs which might have been a joke but would be the last straw for me to stop reading him)

Also that millpond thing. I like looking at maps.

Fences, turnstiles, smartcards and/or app, vending machines. Trivial.

Kind of cluttered, but this is a nice map. I'm trying to decide if I should go hike there or if I'm too out of practice for that steep of trail.

There's no tunstile, but I've heard that if you don't park in the right place, a porcupine will eat the hoses on your car.

75 was also me.

It's going to depend on the weather as I don't think I'll have time before Veteran's Day weekend. If the forecast lows are too much below freezing, I don't want to deal with it. You can stay warm while sleeping, but getting up to pee is an ordeal.

71: they'd charge for parking and give residents permits.

And residents wouldn't know to get permits and would get ticketed or pay for parking and everyone would argue forever about whether it was a success or a failure.

Why couldn't people just use public transportation?

dismes

OK, wait. The circonflexe accent indicates a dropped silent s in the middle of a word-- hostel becomes hôtel, fenstre becomes fenêtre. So when this gets pointed out to the mint, it'll be necessary to alter the informative text on the US coin to "one dîme." Given the timing, I'll wait until after the shutdown to notify the mint.

81: Because this is America, Moby.

Texas is a whole 'nother country.

Fascinated to learn about milles and dismes. So should it correctly be pronounced "deem" rather than rhyming with time and lime?

||

bleg! i am unexpectedly in chicago & at loose ends tomorrow, staying downtown on the north side of the river. which museum should i go to? where to eat/drink/walk and otherwise disport myself? huge thanks in advance!!!

|>

Honestly, the deep dish pizza isn't that great. That's all I remember about the food. The art museum that Ferris Bueller went to isn't bad.

86: The architecture boat tours are appropriately hyped.

Isn't that the one that Dave Matthews pooped on?

They are legion. He can't poop on all of them.

It's a band. There are backups.

88: lol on one as i type!

Be careful going under bridges.

86. Pho 888 on Argyle or the mushroom soup at Staropolska in Logan square are your best soup bets. Good tacos (and other Mexican) with nice architecture in Pilsen. There are a few small private galleries on Superior, near Armendariz gallery. There's a very good tiny Belgian bakery near you, called Hendrickx.

If you like architecture, Monadnock building is worth it. No idea about weekend hours.

thank you lw!

Andersonville and Logan square are both nice walking neighborhoods. The Chicago History museum in Lincoln Park is nice if you're interested in Chicago history.

Art Institute has a great collection, an obvious choice and a good one if you've never been there, as Moby said. Choose where to start as with any big museum. I like their Asian art collection.

It's a great biking city- download the divvy app if you're up for that. Cartesian flat streets, the residential side streets next to thoroughfares usually work. Cruising around that way always leaves me feeling good, though be wary on Milwaukee if you head to Logan Square

Oh, live jazz North side at the Green Mill on Lawrence.

Agree on the Art Institute. Their specialty is Impressionism, but their Modern/Contemporary wing is nice, too. The weather's really lovely, so it seems a shame to be indoors all day - if you don't mind a trek to a nearby suburb, Frank Lloyd Wright architecture walking tours in Oak Park are fun (the one including the studio is my favorite). Lunch at Noodle Bird in Logan Square if you follow lw's suggestion on neighborhood. Lakeview is also a nice neighborhood, closer to where you're staying. The Wrightwood gallery is usually nice to visit, although their website doesn't seem to have a current exhibit so not quite sure what you'll find, but that and coffee at Intelligentsia nearby is a nice way to spend a few hours.

86: good recommendations so far; you are also near the International Museum of Surgical Science

"That's where my watch was" Hall is not to be missed.

If it's a nice day the architecture history boat tour is great. Interesting history, fun boat ride, boozy Arnold Palmers.

https://www.architecture.org/tours/detail/chicago-architecture-center-river-cruise-aboard-chicago-s-first-lady/

Arnold Palmer let the trees at his car dealership block signs for neighborhood businesses.

Also, a boozy Arnold Palmer is a John Daly.

Anyway, Latrobe is a thing and it has its views on Arnold Palmer.

Latrobe is a place, not a thing.

This just came up in my twitter feed, I haven't done it but the person who posted knows her buildings. Logan square Am and uptown PM Sunday
https://www.brickofchicago.com/tours

82: See however wiki: "Some circumflexes appear for no known reason. It is thought to give words an air of prestige, like a crown (thus suprême and voûte)."

Rue and lament the bewigged dilettantes who preferred "the old orthography that diſtinguiſhes men of Letters from the Ignorant and from ſimple women"...

72: we do have to get a license, but it's not much. A little more while she's unspayed. Not sure how long the vet will want to wait, but I think it's longer now - at least a year, rather than 6 months.

75: I did that trail in 1980. it was pretty nice, but one I recall thinking one part had some unnecessary ups and downs. Had one very nice campsite on a dry patch in a boggy part of the plateau.

I just bought an Ursack so I don't have to pretend I can hang a bear bag correctly .

the bricks of chicago guy is great, took the uptown tour & also had a v nice meal in a oaxacan restaurant on sheridan. many thanks to all for great recs! off to toronto.

Hey, wave at Newt for me while you're there.

How does Menendez get replaced?

114: The governor (a Democrat) appoints a replacement to serve the remaining term.

113 - with pleasure!

!uoyknaht

It's totally wild that Democrats can't unite on a message that people under serious federal indictment aren't suitable candidates for office.

Andy Kim seems like a great choice to take his place. He was one the only delegation members not to sign on to Menendez's letter against NYC congestion pricing. Granted he may have more leeway to do so since he's not in the greater NYC area, but it still bespeaks good instincts.

Plus obviously being willing to stick his neck out and say Menendez must go.

further to 113/116, wish i'd thought to bring homemade jam & ginger-chili pickle for newt as well! ❤️

How does Menendez get replaced?

Losing an election to a Republican seems the most likely route.

The democrats may yet unite against Menendez.

All the New Jersey voters I know were pissed that Menendez wasn't primaried last time, and since then he's been working on his gold bar collection. He may retire and endorse his some, now a first If he doesn't retire (he's almost 70), he'll probably lose the primary to Andy Kim, or maybe Mikey Sherrill or the odious Josh Gottheimer if either/both run. He may retire and endorse his son, now a first term Congressman, for the seat.

Fun fact: Andy Kim's House seat is split between NYC and Philly media markets, so it's the most expensive in the U.S. Consequently he hasn't advertised on tv much, doesn't get much newspaper coverage, and is pretty much unknown in the Northern end of the state where most of the people are.

Also, If Kim wins, NJ will have two Senators who were Rhodes scholars.

If Menendez falls and his son advances no further, it would be a welcome example of the trend in the last generation of the country not letting political dynasties get out of hand, usually choking off after two or three names. George P Bush didn't advance; neither did Joe Kennedy III. I don't think any Udalls hold elective office anymore, even the Arizona Republican state rep; no Romneys are taking up the banner.

Oh, and of course the Cuomos.

Sounds like an opportunity for Chelsea-mentum!

118, 123: As of right now, I believe they're up to 16 Dem Senators calling for Menendez to resign; looks like it took a couple days but the dam is crumbling.

«More broadly, this is the whole, stupid waste/fraud/abuse, foreign aid mindset that imagines that taxes are high because there's some imaginary, huge use that nobody really wants.»

Most people don't understand the right-wing mindset, which is all about making money by buying low and selling high, and bargaining hard. I'll explain.

Suppose that having local services means a flat tax rate of 10% of income per year, and the average cost per resident is $5,000 per yet, and the average resident income is $50,000 per year.

That means that someone earning $50,000 per year gets a fair price for the local services, but someone earning $20,000 per year pays only $2,000 for exactly the same services, and someone earning $100,000 per years pays $10,000 for those services. Obviously the someone earning $100,000 per year will be outraged that they are paying for the same product twice as much as those earning $50,000 per year, and those earning $50,000 per year are outraged that they are paying for the same product more than twice those earning $20,000 per year.

Both those earning $50,000 per year and those earning $200,000 per year would want the cost of local services (and state services, and federal services) to be a flat *amount*, $5,000 per year regardless of income, which is Thatcher did in England 40 years ago (and was not popular).

Why should people pay wildly different amounts depending on their income for exactly the same product? Isn't that discrimination and exploitation?

There is a very good answer to that, which is not the usual "ability to pay", but I have never seen a "leftist" give that answer.

128: I have no idea what "good answer" you're driving at, or what is wrong with the answer "ability to pay". "It's fair to pay what you can afford based on your means" has been an accepted principle since at least the American Revolution when most states replaced colonial head taxes with proportional property taxes. Public services are fundamentally not a market good; what is a fair price is socially negotiated, if "price" is even the right word, and "price discrimination by income" is what most people would call simple economic fairness.

Another justification, if it were necessary, would be that those earning $200,000 per year have been able to make that much thanks in large part to the general prosperity created by public services. Like Obama said, the entrepreneur didn't build his own roads.

«"It's fair to pay what you can afford based on your means" has been an accepted principle since at least the American Revolution when most states replaced colonial head taxes with proportional property taxes.»

So you have decided, but in as far as I know it has not been accepted by many conservatives. Even those who accept it do not accept it for everything in every scale, for example cars or holidays or housing or food or water or health care or pensions, all of which to someone are "human rights".

«Public services are fundamentally not a market good»

For a conservatives any product for which they can get a price quote on the "free markets" is not a public good. They can get quotes for collecting garbage, unemployment insurance, pension annuities, schooling, health care, security guards, ...

At this point "lefties" have two choices:

* They know that they have the right to decide what is and isn't a public good, and they have also decided that the same public goods can be charged 10 times or 100 times different prices to those they decide which prices to charge, which is not necessarily based on affordability.

* They try to understand why middle and upper classes conservatives think, sometimes genuinely, that they are being brutally discriminated and exploited, accept that understanding, and find arguments to show that income-related pricing for at least some things is actually a good deal.

So you have decided, but in as far as I know it has not been accepted by many conservatives.

Huh? They accept it every time they propose a flat tax! They don't agree with it scaling up as a rate with income or means, but it's still fairly radical to say everyone should pay the same amount.

I think that taking seriously the chaff that conservatives toss out ahead of their attacks on the public sector is pointless. It's the emotional part ("I got mine") that matters.

Quite. "How do we convince hardcore conservatives of the truth/justice of our position?" is a mug's game.

I mean, I come from middle-class and upper-middle conservatives. Thirty years ago, very few of them believed they were being exploited or discriminated against unless they fell on hard times. Well-off men who whined about shit were openly looked down upon as unreliable (and effeminate, which was a big problem because they were sexist).

I would write a book "What the fuck happened to white people?" if I had at good ideas. But I'm just baffled.

There is a very good answer to that, which is not the usual "ability to pay", but I have never seen a "leftist" give that answer.

Troll alert.

136: agreed. In fact, the user name seems familiar from Crooked Timber.

«I come from middle-class and upper-middle conservatives. Thirty years ago, very few of them believed they were being exploited or discriminated against unless they fell on hard times.»

Then there is book "The revolt of the elites" that explains that they got fed up of that, of having to pay 10x 100x times more than other people for the same public services, etc.

My point here is that those who wonder why conservatives complain that taxes are too high don't seem to realize that many conservatives look at *the amount* of tax they pay, compared to other people, not the *percentage* of income they pay. They think that taxes are poor value for money for them, and too good value for money for others.

«They accept it every time they propose a flat tax! They don't agree with it scaling up as a rate with income or means, but it's still fairly radical to say everyone should pay the same amount.»

Yet Thatcher in the UK already in the 1980s wanted to switch local government taxation to a fixed-amount head tax shows that even flat *rate* taxation (which was the previous regime for local government taxation) is considered oppressive by many conservatives, even if they surely prefer it to progressive *rate* taxation, and that's why as an intermediate step they want replace progressive rates with flat rates (on consumption, so they can get untaxed income out of the USA and spend it abroad). Also many conservative local governments want to switch more and more revenue from hated property taxes to fees.

When conservatives remind people that "The top one percent of income earners actually pay about 40 percent of all the [federal income] taxes [...]The bottom 50 percent pays 3 percent " https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1101236852374167553 they are making an argument about the amount each taxpayer pays, not the rate they pay.

«I come from middle-class and upper-middle conservatives. Thirty years ago, very few of them believed they were being exploited or discriminated against unless they fell on hard times.»

In Gore-Vidals's "History of the national security state" (page 4) he writes:

"My real political education began when I made money only to have it confiscated by a military machine. This confiscation of one's hard-earned money did not drive me into the right wing, as it did Ronald Reagan, who was as indignant as I but chose to blame it all on a vague nemesis called 'big government.' I started to turn left. If the government was going to take so much of our money, then let the government give us health care, education, and all those other things first-world countries provide their taxpayers."

Ronald Reagan was originally a social-democratic labor union organizer but when he went from being a low paid wannabe to a highly paid second-tier actor he found that he was getting the same state services but was paying 10-100 times more for them than he did previously, so he became a "low tax" activist. Note loaded words like "confiscation of one's hard earned money" and "as indignant as I" and "take so much of our money". Probably some people did not mind, but some others thought that FDR's "New Deal", social security and progressive rate (or even flat rate...) taxes were "communism".

If someone won't accept a) the declining marginal utility of money or b) the fact that public services are more valuable to richer people (as they are necessary for them to make the money they make), then there's not much to say. And I don't believe it's the unfairness that really bothers them, but the fact that they have to pay anything at all. If they got what they wanted, it wouldn't be long before one of their pet think tanks developed a rationale for why they shouldn't even have to pay the service fees.

Troll!

140 You're talking about actual conservatives, not the ones imagined by the academic right.

Our fire department is funded by property taxes. Yes, we all get the same fire protection, but we're only getting the same value in the way that the law prevents rich and poor alike from living under bridges.