Ten Days That Shook Olympia

[archenemy]

Anti-abortion fanatics should have to fund all schools. Problem solved.

[G-spotter]

G-spotter, here's your car analogy shoot-down:

the fees for owning a car are actually nil (i think, feel free to prove me wrong). there's no tax that anybody owes for simply having a car sit on their property & be driven to and from the mailbox.

 

If you own a car but choose not to drive it on the public roads, you will either have to leave it parked on your property,. or find storage from it.

 

Storing cars on your property can reduce the property value (especially the old rusting ones parked on the lawn)

Storing car off your property can involve paying garage fees.

In either case there is a cost.

 

But perhaps owning a boat is a better analogy, with moorage fees.

Since property taxes depend on location - in rural areas in the middle of nowhere they are low, whereas in downtown they are quite high.

[chucK]

I'm pretty sure that people who rent also get these magical benefits.

 

See my comments above about that bogus argument. Which was basically, do what you can and stop worrying too much about being put out more than the other guy.

 

And you think renters don't pay property tax?

[KaskadskyjKozak]

State income tax might be cool. I think it would totally kick ass on the sales tax, but I'd much rather it replace the sales tax than property taxes.

 

progressive or flat? would some people pay nothing (e.g. below some specific income level and would that be based on region/cost of living)?

[KaskadskyjKozak]

My point earlier was that "ownership" is a codified legal abstraction depending upon a whole set of implicities regarding the nature of the "system" we live in. Yes, private ownership quite obviously gives the owner certain functional priveleges that exclude others from these functional priveleges (this is what, at its heart, "private" "ownership" is), and it was here that i was trying to steer the conversation.

 

that's what I suspected. at least I can understand your posts whether about this topic or wasps.

 

[archenemy]

 

And you think renters don't pay property tax?

Um, I own rental properties and am pretty familiar with who gets the bills.

Like the housing market, the rental market is cyclical. I have to charge a competative rate.

Unlike the housing market, my taxes don't seem to go up and down. I have to pay them no matter what I am collecting in rent.

[sexual_chocolate]

For schools I think local control is far superior to State or Federal govt. I don't have a problem with communities getting what they paid for, though a small amount of state or federal subisidies would be nice to alleviate gross disparities.

 

I will not quit until my child learns Intelligent Design in his or her school. No more anti-God secularist Evolution (Evilution they should call it) in my community.

[Bug]

[quote=G-spotter

If you own a car but choose not to drive it on the public roads, you will either have to leave it parked on your property,. or find storage from it.

 

Storing cars on your property can reduce the property value (especially the old rusting ones parked on the lawn)

..

That's what blackberry bushes are for stupid.

[Bug]

 

And you think renters don't pay property tax?

Um, I own rental properties and am pretty familiar with who gets the bills.

Like the housing market, the rental market is cyclical. I have to charge a competative rate.

Unlike the housing market, my taxes don't seem to go up and down. I have to pay them no matter what I am collecting in rent.

So you are not paying more or less in taxes on the rent you collect?

[archenemy]

That is income tax, not property tax. I get to pay them both. Butr we aren't talking about income tax in this particular instance, are we?

[lizard_brain]

And you think renters don't pay property tax?

 

I've been paying my landlord's mortgage and property taxes for years.

[chucK]

All other rental owners have to pay property taxes too. The property tax owners pay is figured into the competitive rate, no? If you didn't have to pay the property tax, then you'd probably lower your rental prices to entice more renters, right?

 

 

[archenemy]

Unless you know all the expenses and amounts that your landlord pays, you don't really know that.

Some years, that is true. Some years, it isn't. Not complaining here, just trying to put a dose of reality into this idea that all us slumlords are cashing in every year.

[ClimbingPanther]

oops, too many people saying the same thing

Edited November 16, 2007 by ClimbingPanther

[Dannible]

Anarchists turned over part of a flatbed truck, dumpsters, and fences to make a roadblock. The police didn't have enough people to do anything about it yet, but other protestors cleared the road.

 

The guy's sign is in refers to an Evergreen student who was run over by an Israeli Bulldozer a while back.

 

After police pushed the crowd back from the line of girls who they were arresting. They loaded the girls into a city bus that said "Special Thank You" on it's electric sign.

 

The roadblock on tuesday night, before the police started arresting people.

 

OPD officer guards convoy.

 

Some of the girls who were arrested on Tuesday. Off White said earlier that bandannas are for hiding people's ID, but most people were in fact using them to protect against pepper spray. As I found out, they really just hold the spray right up close to your face.

 

Police and protestors watch a girl get pulled away from the line.

 

Random wildness.

 

Girl cries while getting treated for pepper spray.

 

If this picture didn't have so much digital noise and you could see whats going on I'd make good money off of it. Soldier on a Stryker returns a peace sign to protestors.

 

 

A few days earlier the pro war people said that they would smash my camera if I took pictures of them because the media always tries to make them look stupid. Stupidity is a choice.

 

Girl getting dragged to the dungeon.

[archenemy]

All other rental owners have to pay property taxes too. The property tax owners pay is figured into the competitive rate, no? If you didn't have to pay the property tax, then you'd probably lower your rental prices to entice more renters, right?

 

There are many other factors involved. How much new building went on in that area? Were home loans affordable and so lots of renters are now owners? Did the area deteriorate during the last X years? Did it improve?

 

The answer to your last question is no, I would not lower my rent due to taxes. If that were true, I'd lower my rent every year for 28 years(depreciation table). My rent amount does not depend on my tax amount.

[chucK]

Another idea might be to limit the total number of years that one is subject to property tax on one's primary residence, so that after say - 25 years of paying property taxes on your principal residence, you are no longer subject to such taxes (no such exclusions would apply to other properties that anyone might happen to own). Best of both worlds - people pay property taxes for the 25 years that are most likely to correspond to their prime-earning years, yet can retire without a permanent tax-indenture on the property that has the potential to force them out of their homes if they can't pay the taxes. Compensate for any decline in revenue that results from imposing such a threshold with an increase in the income tax.

 

Seems like this would impose a pinch on the tax revenues and thus would force rates on the sub-25's to increase. I'm surprised that you aren't arguing for a personal responsibility/free-market alternate solution here. One could take the money that is saved by not having to subsidize those post-25'ers taxes, and invest it however one sees fit into an equity fund sufficient to pay off all personal property taxes for the rest of one's life.

[archenemy]

arch, in the long run, the "market" for rent includes that property tax in the whole package of costs for paying someone else to own & maintain a rental property. i guarantee you if property tax increased significantly, you would see a corresponding increase in rent.

You are not telling me anything I don't know. You gotta think that if I am bright enough to earn the money to buy properties and figure out my taxes, I am bright enough to have passed a basic econ course or two.

All I am saying is that the correlation between rent amounts and taxes are not as clean and simple as folks want them to be.

[JayB]

Market rents and the costs associated with maintaining property are separable and determined by how much renters can afford to and/or are willing to pay (since you can't take out a 30 year debt-security to finance your rent) - not how much it costs the owner to hold onto them.

 

There are quite a few "landlords" in the US in the past few years who can't possibly even come close to covering their mortgage with the rent that they can get for their property, much less mortgage/insurance/taxes/maintenance.

 

If a property has been owned for less than ~4 years and it's up for rent, I'd ask to see enough information from the owner to have some reassurance that he/she can afford to hold onto the property, and you won't have to move and or lose the 1st/last/deposit due to them being foreclosed upon.

[archenemy]

Good advice. Thanks for the good description as well.

[lizard_brain]

A few days earlier the pro war people said that they would smash my camera if I took pictures of them because the media always tries to make them look stupid. Stupidity is a choice.

 

They mean the media captures them looking stupid.

[Recycled]

This is particularly true in Western Washington. VERY few single famly rental houses have positive cash flow if bought within the past few years. In fact, the return on investment on many of these houses is well below what you could earn putting the same amount of money in a CD.

 

Let's see: take a $500k asset that nets you $20k/yr after expenses and you're at 4% pretax income. It's more complicated if you factor in a loan, but the fact is, residential rents are comparative low for asset prices. Property taxes are a very small part of that picture.

[JayB]

Another idea might be to limit the total number of years that one is subject to property tax on one's primary residence, so that after say - 25 years of paying property taxes on your principal residence, you are no longer subject to such taxes (no such exclusions would apply to other properties that anyone might happen to own). Best of both worlds - people pay property taxes for the 25 years that are most likely to correspond to their prime-earning years, yet can retire without a permanent tax-indenture on the property that has the potential to force them out of their homes if they can't pay the taxes. Compensate for any decline in revenue that results from imposing such a threshold with an increase in the income tax.

 

Seems like this would impose a pinch on the tax revenues and thus would force rates on the sub-25's to increase. I'm surprised that you aren't arguing for a personal responsibility/free-market alternate solution here. One could take the money that is saved by not having to subsidize those post-25'ers taxes, and invest it however one sees fit into an equity fund sufficient to pay off all personal property taxes for the rest of one's life.

 

That's quite an idea you've got there. I'm going to call it...."saving for retirement."

 

Whether or not you "had" to increase property taxes would be entirely dependent upon whatever else was done to the tax code in the meantime, but a capital gains tax on this asset class - which I've argued for before for other reasons, could contribute to covering whatever "revenue offset" was attributable to this plan.

 

I don't have terribly strong feelings either way, but tend to favor income (active or passive) and capital gains taxes over property taxes for the philosophical reasons that KK has outlined - and thought that the time limited compromise might satisfy both property tax advocates and those who dislike the idea of the state having a permanent tax-lien on property that they've already paid for in-full.

 

 

 

 

[tvashtarkatena]

Private land ownership is not the basis of our legal system; the Constitution is. Our legal system would be little changed if land ownershp didn't exist.

 

 

That's some Kevbone quality legal analysis there.

 

Can you rebutt it with more than a smiley?

 

 

 

No, I didn't think so.

 

How about you back up your contention that the US legal system would not change in the absence of private property so there is something to rebut. I can't imagine someone who has even a minimal working knowledge of constitutional and common law history making a statement like that.

 

Step one of any rebuttal is to actually read the other person's statement.

 

a) My thought experiment concerned the absence of LAND OWNERSHIP, not private property. In this hypothetical world, you could own any other kind of property.

 

There is plenty of precedence for this. Water, mineral and airspace ownership are more often than not separate from land ownership. If airspace, and in some locales water rights, both necessary resources, cannot be privately owned (and our legal system seems to handle this in stride) why is land somehow fundamntally different? I argue that our current legal system is perfectly able to handle the instance where it isn't any different.

 

b) I didn't state that the legal system wouldn't change, just that it need not change much.

 

Those are my statements. I'm ready to be proven wrong.

 

Go.

 

[octopuswithafez]

 

The riot vest becomes a bit useless when I can aim for the gut