Ok, so no taxes to discourage behavior.
But fines are ok?
I mean, if you go building something that is outside of the zoning code you'll find yourself in quite a bit of legal trouble and likely pay far more than taxes would ever amount to.
Ok, so no taxes to discourage behavior.
But fines are ok?
I mean, if you go building something that is outside of the zoning code you'll find yourself in quite a bit of legal trouble and likely pay far more than taxes would ever amount to.
What if suddenly the zoning code said you couldn't have vacant land? I mean, if you think zoning is ok, at what point does it become not ok?
If I get your jist, you don't like being compelled to do something. Whether it's paying taxes or developing land. Both are you being compelled to do something.
But isn't a building code official saying "uh, your stairs need a railing" compelling you to do something?
Isn't a zoning code saying "you can't turn your property into a pig farm" compelling you NOT do something?
I'm not moving the goalposts. I'm trying to find out where you land on the scale of acceptable government intervention.
In Texas raw land is already taxed at a lower value if its actively being used for agricultural purposes instead of sitting not being used at all by investors hoping to turn them into suburbs someday.
The place where I train my dogs is classified for tax purposes as a working ranch because they have sheep and alpacas there. If they just had the big house and the acreage without the animals their taxes would be a lot higher.
In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
Do people frequently subdivide off large portions of raw land so that their primary residence sits on say... an acre, but they actually own another 20 acres of raw land that they keep some hobby farm animals on?
Steve_Jones said:In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
If I decide I want to develop it, of course I need to follow zoning, but you can't force me to develop it just because YOU don't think it's adding value sitting vacant. That's what started this thread 2 years ago
Property taxes are determined by the value of the property. You know how much the taxes would be on empty land in the middle of New York City, or for that matter, even Downtown Dallas if there even was any available? What about Mountain View California in the middle of the Silicon Valley? I suppose if you have a lot of money you could buy up land in a desirable area and just sit on it forever, but that does not make good business sense. Without any rental income or other kind of income that is just a bad business decision or a way to go broke. I seriously doubt that anybody is sitting on land that valuable no matter what the OP of this thread says. I'm sure that there are investors buying up land outside of most fast growing suburbs hoping that the growth will go that way. That has been going on for hundreds of years in this country. Did you ever see the movie, Chinatown? The villain in that movie bought up a whole bunch of real estate when he knew the water department would be bringing water into a dry valley, making it suitable for development. When Jack Nicholson found out, he got his nose busted up over it. I don't remember the part where John Huston whined about being forced to develop the property when the homebuilders showed up waiving large amounts of money around.
In reply to pheller :
You are moving the goalposts. You started this thread because you saw a vacant building and had a better idea for its use. You can't afford to buy it, so you want to know how to force "the greedy owners" to do what you think they should do.
You now want to compare stair railings to government intervention.
It's not about me being compelled to do something, it's about you thinking you have the right to tell me what to do with my money or property. Not the government, You. Like I've said a few times, you worry about you, I'll worry about me.
In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
The OP isn't waving a bunch of money around to BUY the land, he wants the government to take it "for the greater good". Big difference.
pheller said:In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
Do people frequently subdivide off large portions of raw land so that their primary residence sits on say... an acre, but they actually own another 20 acres of raw land that they keep some hobby farm animals on?
Subdivide? You mean do people buy ranches in rural areas? Yes. They do. But this is not in Dallas or suburban Plano. This is further out where all of your neighbors also have ranches. There are people in my family who have owned ranches for years. Most of them bought when land was cheap. Some of the land they have in Oklahoma and Arizona is still cheap. It aint New York City. Some of my relatives make a living buying and selling cattle. It's not a hobby farm. It's not any kind of farm. It's a ranch. Farms are where they grow food.
pheller said:In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
Do people frequently subdivide off large portions of raw land so that their primary residence sits on say... an acre, but they actually own another 20 acres of raw land that they keep some hobby farm animals on?
Yep. Usually a couple of goats because they're low maintenance.
Steve_Jones said:In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
The OP isn't waving a bunch of money around to BUY the land, he wants the government to take it "for the greater good". Big difference.
If the owner doesn't pay the taxes the government will take it for the greater good, or the lesser good depending on the property. There is property the county doesn't want. Somebody on this thread found a bunch of it for sale in South Dallas. Thus many auctions for property take place on the courtroom steps. Not all property is worth a lot. There are government owned property developments out there too. Some call them projects. It's been done.
Any other site would have a far more vicious debate over New York vs Chicago style pizza (well, I did get equated to a slave owner a few pages back but it's all good).
Congratulations hive on being pretty darn civil for 62 pages and counting.
j_tso said:pheller said:In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
Do people frequently subdivide off large portions of raw land so that their primary residence sits on say... an acre, but they actually own another 20 acres of raw land that they keep some hobby farm animals on?
Yep. Usually a couple of goats because they're low maintenance.
You can make a whole lot more off a couple of hundred head of cattle like my cousin does. Ask him what he gets for bull sperm when he shows up at the Fort Worth Stock Show. Or, in the case of my first example, you can breed trained Border Collies and sell them, and put on seminars on training stock dogs and charge a whole lot of money bringing other ranchers in to train their dogs.
How can you make money owning two goats? You can make pretty good money selling goats milk to Whole Foods Market, but you will need more than a couple goats. You have to report your income every year for property tax purposes. I doubt if a couple of goats on the property would qualify you for a property tax exemption.
RX Reven' said:Any other site would have a far more vicious debate over New York vs Chicago style pizza (well, I did get equated to a slave owner a few pages back but it's all good).
Congratulations hive on being pretty darn civil for 62 pages and counting.
Now I know what I want for dinner.
Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:Steve_Jones said:In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
The OP isn't waving a bunch of money around to BUY the land, he wants the government to take it "for the greater good". Big difference.
If the owner doesn't pay the taxes the government will take it for the greater good, or the lesser good depending on the property. There is property the county doesn't want. Somebody on this thread found a bunch of it for sale in South Dallas. Thus many auctions for property take place on the courtroom steps. Not all property is worth a lot. There are government owned property developments out there too. Some call them projects. It's been done.
No one said anything about the owner not paying the taxes, so it's not close to relevant.
Around here you can rent your goats out to clean brush. Going rate is $150 per goat, per day. Not a bad gig.
Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:RX Reven' said:Any other site would have a far more vicious debate over New York vs Chicago style pizza (well, I did get equated to a slave owner a few pages back but it's all good).
Congratulations hive on being pretty darn civil for 62 pages and counting.
Now I know what I want for dinner.
They both suck 
Grilled fish tacos was the correct answer.
GameboyRMH said:Opti said:Second I read this article and its not disputing the laffer curve, its disputing arguments that use the laffer curve rather terribly in their "proof." The laffer curve pretty much only says that there is some tax rate at which maximum tax revenue is achieved and moving it higher or lower results in a lower tax revenue. Thats not even controversial. The controversy comes into play when people argue about what the revenue maximizing tax rate is and wether we are currently above or below it.
That's what makes it worse than useless. There's very little to the basics of it but it implies immense powers of prediction that are incredibly tempting to try using, and proposed curve shapes have grown around it because of this. The best thing it can do is nothing, the worst it can do is mislead people terribly.
An analogy I like to use is that a dyno graph produced by a dynamometer is real, and one produced by an algorithm that takes a couple of engine specs and claims to be able to produce a dyno graph is a joke. Anyone who tried to use its output could only be misled. The Laffer curve is that algorithm for economics, and some of the specific curve shapes proposed for it are like a set of background constants just waiting for a gullible user to plug in their displacement and idle RPM.
If such an algorithm were really floating around and was somehow as popular as the Laffer curve (maybe because a popular constant set said intake vortex generators and a little bit of backpressure were the best things ever), it would be treated as the worst piece of bunk in existence in the engine tuning world.
Im sorry if you dont understand the usefulness of theory.
Id love to hear you try and dispute this simple theory: A certain tax rate, between 0 and 100, exists at which a govt maximizes tax revenue and above and below that tax revenue decreases.
Or you can show me something that actually disputes that, NOT something that disputes a specific argument in which the laffer curve is used as an argument. You say you disagree with the laffer curve, but it seems like you actually have a disagreement with where people think the tax rate falls.
Also your engine algorithm you talked about is called a virtual dyno, its actually very commonly used by engine builders (good ones). Although its raw outputs numbers arent always great it is useful to see what effects changes will have on output and curve. Very similar to the laffer curve.
frenchyd said:Opti said:frenchyd said:Opti said:
I remember seeing charts like this for other developed countries and we ( the USA) were near the bottom.
And your point? Culture, form of government, and public opinion play a part in this. Let me give you an example, you have two countries lets say one has been various forms of a monarchy for the last couple thousands years and because of thats its people have been subject to oppressive taxes by the aristocracy for the last ~1500 years, and another country overthrew that same monarchy a couple hundred years ago because of a couple percent tax on tea. These two countries are going to have different levels of taxation that is considered ok.
To illustrate this further lets look at supply and demand. People call supply and demand a law but it isnt applied equally to all goods. Milk and gasoline have very different demand curves and elasticity. This doesnt mean that supply and demand is wrong, it just means they start from different base levels and have slightly different forces and effects acting upon them.
TLDR: just because the USA is lower doesnt mean it CAN or SHOULD be higher.
The countries that have the most content ( happy) citizens are ones where their security needs ( food/clothing/shelter are going to be comfortably met and where the citizens perseve the government is responsive to the citizens, not special interests.
Finland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium are such countries. Yes their tax rate is higher than here in America. However they perceive their needs are being met.
Fewer of their citizens are in jail. They are among the best educated and healthiest people in the world their medical care provides them with long health lives and as proof they tend to be much taller and slimmer than Americans.
Since Americans are now 22 in education, 21 st in health and life expectancy. Wealthier than average Americans. Clearly we aren't doing something right. It's called best practices. We don't do it anymore.
Maybe it's time America looks around the world and starts following best practices?
Belgium actually falls right below the US on the happiness scale (19 and 20) and a couple below them on the corruption scale, so if you consider them happy, you must consider the US happy. So if a country can be happy with less of its money going to the government isnt that good?
Id love to argue about the Nordic countries specifically, but unfortunately I cant without getting into very specific political arguments. I cant do it with generic and vague topics like tax rate and its effect on investment, etc.
Also something to consider is all the nordic countries together have a lower population than Texas alone, so maybe its not an apples to apples comparison.
I dont disagree that we dont do best practices anymore, but we disagree on what best practices are.
pheller said:Ok, so no taxes to discourage behavior.
But fines are ok?
I mean, if you go building something that is outside of the zoning code you'll find yourself in quite a bit of legal trouble and likely pay far more than taxes would ever amount to.
You'll get a stop work order.
Those systems are already in place and work fine.
WHAT PROBLEM ARE YOU TRYING TO SOLVE? It's been asked many times, and you haven't answered.
I've lived in extremely wealthy places where the taxes are extremely high.
I've also lived in very poor places, where the taxes are very low. Most of the people who live in those places are quite content with their lack of government intervention.
I think the needs of the people and the public good are being met in BOTH places.
I am now in the position that I could live in either. I choose LESS intervention (and I am well aware of the compromises I make for that)
In reply to SV reX :
"Life's not fair and I deserve more" is what the problem sounds like to me.
SV reX said:pheller said:Ok, so no taxes to discourage behavior.
But fines are ok?
I mean, if you go building something that is outside of the zoning code you'll find yourself in quite a bit of legal trouble and likely pay far more than taxes would ever amount to.
You'll get a stop work order.
Those systems are already in place and work fine.
WHAT PROBLEM ARE YOU TRYING TO SOLVE? It's been asked many times, and you haven't answered.
Where I live the problem is a lack of affordable housing for people with low paying jobs. I'm not sure it's a problem the government can solve. These guys need small apartments that rent for less than $1,000 a month. These people probably don't have enough credit to buy a house in a bad part of town and refurbish it. They may not even want to do this. If they can't find an affordable place to live, they can move to Oklahoma or East Texas where the rent is cheaper. Problem solved, but that doesn't really help the employers here. There is a labor shortage. In California in places like Lake Tahoe and San Francisco the problem is even worse. Stores and restaurants actually shut down when they can't find employees. One guy in Lake Tahoe provides dormitories for his employees. That was his solution. It worked. I think California's economy is going to crash soon and create a whole new slate of different problems.
I'm sure there are places from Baltimore to Detroit to South Dallas where people don't want to live that have abandoned houses. People don't want to live there and companies don't want to move to where there is nobody to hire. And everybody wants to live in cool places like Austin and Seattle where rents are going up, up, up. As long as you have a Constitution you can't force people to live where they don't want to live.
There seems to be a nationwide problem regarding affordable housing near jobs. Some people want to move out of apartments and into houses and there aren't any for sale where they live and work. It's the American dream. Everything from supply chain problems to rising interest rates are a problem here. And programmers from Austin aren't really interested in moving to places where there isn't a Starbucks on the corner and a Whole Foods Market down the street, even if they can work from home.
In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :
So... 60-odd pages and we're back to the fundamental truth of Supply and Demand.
In reply to Duke :
The solution is to build more supply. They actually are doing that here in Texas. In NIMBY places like California, not so much. Apartments are popping up everywhere they can fit them. There are tiny homes and one room apartment complexes going up. Mobile homes and prefabricated homes could be a solution as well.
Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to Duke :
The solution is to build more supply.
Yes... WHEN IT MAKES ECONOMIC SENSE TO, more housing supply gets built.
The originally-proposed solution was to artificially force it to make economic "sense" by jacking the proforma calculations out of whack (via excessive social-engineering property taxation). I still fail to see how making it too expensive to not develop a property is expected to solve the original problem of housing not being cheap in popular areas.
In reply to Duke :
I guess that what we do here in Texas for agricultural land would be some kind of social-engineering property taxation as well. You pay less in property taxes if you use it for grazing cattle than if you sit on it and do nothing. They also favor individual owners, farmers and ranchers, over corporate owners.
This is already being done.
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