You mean like property taxes?
Good point.
But, I meant if there was a desire, which apparently there is, to levy additional taxes there could be a 1% tax on the purchase price of any home over 4000 square feet, or over 300% the average home price in the area, for example. Something that says mansion, rather than starter home.
Yes, yes, we know all about your chronic poverty-stricken state. None of which is relevant to the discussion. Unless you are somehow arguing that because you can’t afford a house, no one should be able to. And the ones that can afford a house should be punished for their presumption
Consider this – is the tax indexed for inflation? The million dollar house of today was the $300,000.00 house of a very few years ago. When I was growing up, a 100K house * was * a mansion. Now, it would be a crack house. Million dollar houses around here have the benefit of not being fixer uppers, but they’re generally nothing remarkable.
So someday when your minimum wage job is paying $100K/year, you might very well find yourself shedding some tears.
Unlike Even Sven who is relatively footloose and fancy free, people don’t often have easy choices in where they choose to live. As we all know, jobs are hard to find. Very few people find commuting multiple hours per day to be a desirable solution. People with kids actually care about the school systems and the neighborhoods. So yeah, some people are going to be forced into the luxury house bracket and they will feel the sting of even a 1% luxury tax. (Actually, the rest of us will probably feel it too, because I assume that it’s going to be mostly rolled into the mortgage and therefore eligible for tax deduction which means less money going to the Feds and more the states that enact this legislation.)
Seems like a stupid tax, and I’d like to see the rationale for passing it. As far as I can tell, there’s no pressing social benefit to preventing people from living in really nice houses if they can afford it.
“It’s very odd that you look at paying a tax of $100,000 as “savings” of $250,000. If I walk up to you on the street with a gun and pistol whip you, did I “save” you from being shot? After all, getting pistol whipped is much prefereble to getting shot, right? So, I really would be doing you a favor”
In time, living in the suburbs may be considered the luxury, what with longer commutes and ever bigger SUVs, and a dwindling supply of crude oil in the earth. Living in the city can be one of the most environmentally positive things you can do, mainly because you drive less.
Finagle, if you want to dredge up old things, please keep it to the pit. What you may feel about my personal life is not relevant to this argument.
I was objecting to the idea that having a multi-bedroom house in a prime area so that you can house several kids is some sort of reasonable expectation for middle-class people in urban areas to have. It’s not. What is a reasonable expectation to have in the suburbs is not a reasonable expectation in the city. It’s not your god-given right to live like the Cleavers wherever you choose to settle down. I expect to live within walking distance of at least fifteen different restaurants with the cuisines of at least four continents. Nobody is going to listen to me when I move to the suburbs and complain that my life is so hard because I have to get in my car and drive twenty minutes just to get some decent Cambodian food.
My mom lives in a spacious four bedroom house in a Sacramento suburb and her mortgage is about half of the rent I pay for my one bedroom sardine-can apartment. I could move to Sacramento right now, get a job with the state, and rent a house with more rooms than I’d know what to do with. I know that anyone who can make enough money to buy a million dollar home in the city can find some sort of reasonable well paying job (if not the most exciting and top-dollar one) in a less expensive area so they can buy a ranch home to live out their domestic fantasies in.
You won’t find anyone in an expensive housing markets that isn’t making some sort of sacrifice- commute, space, schools, crime, job market, etc. We all decide which of those we are important to us and which we can sacrifice. If you refuse to sacrifice any of those, you are living in a way that almost nobody can and you are indeed living in luxury.
But what on Earth does that have to do with whether or not the mansion tax is fair? Your argument seemed to be:
a. I can’t afford a 10K/month mortgage.
b. I’m not going to shed tears for someone who can. So tax them.
Um, I fail to see how this is the basis for an equitable tax system.
The rational for imposing a tax like this is simple; it was easy. At the time this tax was passed, relatively few people were affected so there was little opposition. As time goes on, it becomes an increasingly large source of revenue that legislators know will need to be replaced, probably at great political cost.
Hell, passing a tax like this is almost as easy as bringing in a lottery.
We are arguing if a one million dollar house is a luxury. Since this is something that the vast majority of people in an area cannot afford, I argue that it is.
Specifically, we are arguing this statement in the OP:
Now, if luxury taxes are fair and equitable or not is another subject entirely, and one which the OP wasn’t specifically asking about. If you want to debate this, go ahead. But if you want to talk about my personal finances as part of that minor hijack I ask you to put it in the pit.
This is unfair. **even sven ** may have done things like that in the past, but this post was pretty straightforward - even I saw her point was not about poverty, but about sacrifices in the city vs. suburbs - and you are dragging past history into it.
Considering that the Republicans spent more money in the last few years than has ever been spent in the past and then went on to get re-elected, I think we can assume that’s a clear mandate in favor of government spending. You and I personally might not like it, but that’s the way things work in a democracy.
So the question isn’t whether or not the tax will be collected; it’s who will it be collected from? Those of you who are opposed to the mansion tax can’t just say you don’t like this tax; honesty requires you to explain who you would tax instead.
Me? I think people who can buy a million dollar home can afford a 1% tax more than people who can’t buy a million dollar home.
I’m still not seeing where I posted that I’m opposed to all taxation. Can you try putting it in bold?
(HINT: I never posted it, or even anything remotely like it.)
Good to know that that whole spending issue is settled once and for all. :rolleyes:
Are you trying to be serious with this?
Why can’t honesty require us to explain that we would be in favor of less spending instead? Oh, that’s right, the whole spending issue is settled since the Republicans won an election. :rolleyes:
Seriously, I hate these kinds of arguments. There are plenty of ways to reduce spending in government. There are plenty of other ways to get revenue via taxes, even within real-estate. If you put the onus on us who want to stop taxes by somehow having us be responsible for saving the money or raising it another way then you get what we have: A huge mess of overly complicated tax codes and laws that nobody understands fully and doesn’t work efficiently.
It should be the other way around. You should be able to prove that a tax is a sensible one, that has no unintended consequences, and that is fair before laying it out on people without so much as a test or study on the effects.
But it is, in a way. A big city house takes up a lot of valuable real estate. A block of four family homes could be torn down and in its place could go an apartment building that houses twenty families. AFAICT, that space-taking is what’s being taxed. As for why the cap is at a million, well it has to be somewhere. I agree that if trying to “punish” people for their taking up of space is the goal, they should calculate it based on square footage, but the cost is also often a good barometer of how big a house is. And that will also bring in more revenue.
If this tax helps to cap outrageous housing prices, then I see that as a good thing. Not that it was necessarily created for that reason, but that could be an end result (not too many houses priced over a million). I bet there will be a rash of realtors marketing homes for $999,999. (Not that that ain’t luxurious, either.)
The majority of people in many of the areas in question cannot afford any house, so this is a somewhat misleading statement, but leads to the argument that owning a home is a luxury period (which seems to be what you are saying?).
That’s a perfectly respectable position to take, but then why set the tax at 1 million dollars? Why not just add another 1% tax to everyone who buys a house.
As someone pointed out earlier, what I described as a million dollar house in NYC or SF would run about 80K where they are. If the houses are comparable, what makes one a mansion and the other a house?
If we’re simply going to tax expensive homes as someone else suggested, “expensive” is a relative term as well. 200K may be an expensive home in Plattsburg, NY but there are probably only a handful of apartments in NYC priced that low.
Again, I have no problem with a luxury tax as long as it is equitable. There is a reason that economists use percentages and per capitas and other similar statistics and the reason is that sometimes a flat number (like one million dollars) is meaningless by itself.
A big city “house” takes up a lot less actual real estate that a home in the suburbs, because most (pretty much all in the case of NYC) are coming in the form of high rise condominiums. The plot of land that an 80K house in the suburbs sits on could house a high rise condo with hundreds of condos.
Well, because of its location. Owning forty acres so that your kids have a place to run around and you can do some hunting isn’t much of a luxury in Montana (price: about $33,000). Owning forty acres so your kids can have a place to run around and you can do some hunting in Manhattan means…well, I can’t even begin to imagine what that’d mean.
But there’s already a tax on that. Manhattan levies a city tax.
Well, location, location, location is hardly an insight. The deal is that the OP was stating that a fairly modest expectation for a house is going to run nearly a million clams in certain high-priced areas. Even Sven argues that the OP needs to lower expectations by either commuting or giving up on the three bedroom American Dream. But that’s just a slippery slope that ends up with arguing that everyone should be happy living in mud huts with slits in the roof to let the smoke out.
And…that argument doesn’t answer the basic question. If market forces are already forcing the buyers to pay a premium price to live in their desired area, then what social benefit is being satisfied by further penalizing them? Certainly if people have grit their teeth and ponied up for the (often) 200% rise in house prices in an area, another 1% isn’t going to deter them. So we’re not forcing lower prices. We’re probably not taxing people who can afford it (as enjoyable as sticking it to the rich can be), because, by and large, folks buying modest houses at these prices are just like the rest of us --buying as much or more house than the budget can stand, not because they have the cash to throw away, but because that’s what the market forces them to do.
My point was that there are two different issue being discussed and you’re trying to jump back and forth between them and pretend there’s only one.
1 - How much money should the government collect overall based on how much the government will spend?
2 - Given the figure set by the above question, what taxes are best used to collect this amount of money?
And my point about the Republicans is they lost any right to claim they wanted to lower government spending when they got elected and instead raised government spending to record highs. Republicans have shown that “lower government spending” is just a slogan used to get elected and not an actual policy used in office.