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points by logankeenan 1 day ago | 0 comments

A good portion of revenue is from property taxes. A property tax is a wealth tax. I always find the discussion interesting around wealth taxes on billionaires equity when the average worker has typically always paid a wealth tax on their largest asset.

[–] mrkiouak 1 day ago

A property tax is not a wealth tax, in any common meaning of 'wealth tax'. It's a property tax. The majority of people with real wealth own assets outside of property that they derive income from. Notably, the vast majority of people own property they do not derive income from, e.g. their homes.j

A tax on a home not deriving income does not fit any normal person's definition of a wealth tax.

[–] tekla 1 day ago

What? Property taxes are definitionally a wealth tax. It's also probably the most efficient/best one. It's also part of the common meaning of the wealth tax because its the one that most people experience.

https://projectionlab.com/financial-terms/wealth-tax

[–] hocusPokeUs 1 day ago

Yeah agreed; what they even saying?

People determined not wealthy enough to get a mortgage do not pay property taxes on a house they are not wealthy enough to own.

Those wealthy enough to own a house pay property taxes; ergo wealth tax.

Over the years different explanations were written down as legal justifications "why it's different than this other very similar scenario" but people of the past were just making something up to not look hypocritical; someone with the means is taxed more for the privilege is how it goes. Poor people don't pay taxes.

[–] wredcoll 1 day ago

> Poor people don't pay taxes.

Poor people (typically) don't pay income taxes.

This is why it's worth knowing the difference between progressive and regressive taxes.

[–] hocusPokeUs 1 day ago

You're doing that thing where you appeal to subtle complexity that doesn't exist as anything but a social trope; there is no real physical complexity to any of this; the complexity is all made up rhetorical gotchas.

It's like scaffolding out the Windows pipes screensaver in your head; endless bends and bends while no pipes actually exist. There is no spoon; it's just primates parroting the bird song they have been whistling since youth.

[–] wredcoll 1 day ago

What.

[–] Sparkle-san 1 day ago

The tax is the same regardless of the equity or "wealth". I can be underwater on my mortgage with a negative net-worth and still owe the same property taxes on someone with a comparable house and $2 million in the bank.

[–] labcomputer 1 day ago

The tax is levied on the amount of wealth you have stored in real property.

Many taxes have exemptions. You get a "personal exemption" on your income tax. You don't pay tax on 100% of social security income because of another exemption.

A "property tax" is a wealth tax that simply has exemptions for all of your wealth stored in stocks/bonds/anything-that-isn't-real-estate.

[–] Sparkle-san 1 day ago

> The tax is levied on the amount of wealth you have stored in real property.

It's not though, it's levied on the assessed value of the house regardless of the stored value. A fully paid off house and a mortgage a month old at 90% LTV have the same property taxes if they are assessed at the same price. It would have been disingenuous to tell everyone who was underwater on their mortgages after the housing collapse in 2008 that they had so much wealth in the their houses based on the fact that they still had to pay property taxes.

[–] hocusPokeUs 1 day ago

Yeah? And? You don't get a mortgage and pay the tax in the first place without being wealthy enough; poor people don't get to own a home and don't pay property tax (excepting for those in rentals who proportionally subsidize the payments the landlord makes).

It's fundamentally a tax on wealthier people among a community.

We really going to sit here in 2026 and pretend the people who wrote down all these rhetorical circumlocutions weren't just making up language to justify their supposed expertise/their social moat? The entire American system is rich families manipulating the legal system to screw have nots. Whole lot of have nots defend a system that doesn't care they exist.

Strip away the ornamental language of the law and just see the ground truth; a person with means to buy the house pays a tax on it all. A poor person never pays a tax because they never own a home.

What is this? Why does everyone feel like they stepped out of the middle ages where dark tongues still exist and the ornate incantations of superstitious people still rule?

It doesn't need to be logically as complicated and intentionally obscured (in my opinion legalese has been to manipulate the illiterate which were the majority back in the day).

Such social conservatism is holding society back.

[–] Sparkle-san 1 day ago

By your logic, everything is wealth tax. Bought a $5 item and paid sales tax on it that at least one person couldn't afford? Wealth tax! Got groceries while someone was going hungry? Wealth tax! And as you acknowledged, poor people are still paying property taxes, they're just baked into their rent. You're out here decrying "rhetorical circumlocutions" and "ornamental language" while ignoring the argument at hand and engaging in the same discourse you denounce.

[–] hocusPokeUs 1 day ago

Happy to end our chat as your flip flopping between "save the Byzantine but essential legal rhetoric that is the tax code" while complaining my 3-4 paragraph argument to reduce legal sprawl and assess via simpler terms is itself sprawling nonsense...that cognitive dissonance is confusing.

Like side by side my posts and tax code ... the tax code would look less verbose?

Legal obfuscation often conjured back in the day by local rich politicians and a judge who bbq on weekends, colluded to convince an innumerate illiterate local they best accept just being screwed by the local political feifdom...is somehow preferable to defining our own social norms; history makes it clear of course the people of the past had it all correct!

Functional illiteracy in the raw; no ability to reason outside the tropes of your childhood education.

Without a new JS framework or devops tool to babble about and leverage as a social moat in the job market this forum is no different than Reddit and X; incurious worker bees dancing like monkeys for coin jangling around grandpa billionaires pocket.

[–] Sparkle-san 1 day ago

I get it, you've got some big feelings about taxation and a thesaurus to go along with it. I'm certainly not going to defend the tax code as a whole, it's a mess to say the least. But we're having two parallel conversations with little overlap. I'm speaking only about whether property taxes meet the definition and spirit of a wealth tax which I don't think they do. You're erring grievances about the tax code as a whole (and also trying to appear above everyone else in your galaxy brained intellect) and only engaging long enough with my argument to construct a straw man. I wish you the best of luck with your manifesto.

[–] didgetmaster 1 day ago

Property taxes are not wealth taxes. Two houses side-by-side with the same value, should have the same property tax assessed. One is owned outright. The other is mortgaged to the hilt and its 'owner' has very little wealth from it.

[–] jayd16 1 day ago

I wonder if we should pass a law where borrowing against an asset is a taxable event.

At least it closes the loop hole where you borrow against your stock and never pay taxes on it because you never sold it.

[–] what 1 day ago

I don’t understand this “loop hole”, who is giving loans that don’t have to be repaid? Surely the collateral will be sold eventually to repay the loan and service the interest?

[–] aidenn0 1 day ago

If you are a good customer of the bank and the LTV of the collateral is very low, then you will get a very low interest rate. If the collateral pays dividends (which are also taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income), then the dividends can service the interest. Meanwhile capital gains keep accumulating tax-free.

[–] HDThoreaun 1 day ago

With post covid interest rates this strategy very rarely makes sense. Even people like zuck getting fully collateralized loans against their stock will still have to pay close to 5%. There are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to take a 5% loan, but they are few. It does not make sense to just roll loans over forever anymore. Thats why all the big tech stocks pay dividends now. Founders dont want to sell and they dont want to take loans.

Buy borrow die also leads to massive estate taxes which is why billionaires use trusts instead. Buy borrow die is best for people with around $50 mil in assets because they dont have any estate tax.

[–] quickthrowman 1 day ago

Refinance the loan with another loan or just use a revolving credit account with no fixed term.

If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield. If you have $4B of stock they might let you borrow $1B for what would be ~4-4.5% using that stock as collateral. You can theoretically take out a margin loan for up to 100% of the stock held in an account, but that’s risky due to margin calls.

The idea is to let the cost basis step up to the price of the asset at your death which will eliminate the capital gains that would’ve been owed. Then your heirs sell a portion of the stock to pay off the loan and keep the rest.

[–] tekla 1 day ago

You know, every time this is brought up, a small part of me dies.

People bring up a loophole that does exist, and assume that everyone uses it. Welp, like most of these "1%" discourse, its pretty damn rare.

https://taxprofblog.aals.org/2026/06/16/fox-and-liscow-the-r...

> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.

[–] aidenn0 1 day ago

Here's a different quote from the same article:

> Buy-borrow-die is a real loophole, and in absolute terms the rich borrow a lot...

[–] jayd16 1 day ago

What about a trillionaire habit?

[–] logankeenan 1 day ago

Can you elaborate more on why you don’t think a property tax is not a wealth tax? My understanding is that a wealth tax is a tax on the value of an asset. The asset could be a variety things that have net worth

Also, not all states apply property taxes the same. In my state, my house is assessed often by the government and then my taxes rise based on the value of my house.

[–] aidenn0 1 day ago

A wealth tax is a tax on your net wealth.

Property tax is a tax on specific property (usually we are talking about real property, but I've paid e.g. property tax on a car). It is usually irrespective of wealth.

Someone who buys a house with cash and their neighbor who is underwater on their mortgage and at risk of insolvency will pay the same tax.

Note also that you rarely see property taxes on e.g. valuable jewelry because unlike real property and cars, both of which have ownership centrally registered, jewelry is not centrally registered.

[–] logankeenan 1 day ago

If I understand you correctly, you’re saying the distinction on the “wealth” is specific to if the person owns the whole property. If they fully own the property then it could be considered a wealth tax. However, many people don’t since they have a mortgage so it’s not taxing them in their net wealth.

[–] aidenn0 1 day ago

Right, that's one major difference.

Another major difference is that houses are both harder to hide and easier to value than many other forms of wealth.