falcon0159 t1_jdoli45 wrote on March 25, 2023 at 11:42 PM

Reply to comment by YawnTractor_1756 in Can someone explain the justification for having "private" beaches? It seems like access to natural attractions should be free. by SnooBooks4898

It's certainly an interesting idea, but very flawed as you pointed out. I agree that primary residences would have to be exempt somehow (but then why won't people set the value very low?) and maybe instead of being forced to sell if someone offers you the amount you set, they would need to offer more, and they only get one chance to offer more, and you could also choose to raise the valuation to that amount that they offer.

They would of course need to provide valid proof of funds for an offer and be willing to go through with the purchase or else be fined/lose an earnest money deposit of x% of their offer (maybe 10-20%?) which could go 75% to the homeowner and 25% to the state or something.

This would help prevent abuse and allow you to keep your property. We could also limit the frequency of those "takeover" offers to once a year or something like that as well.

We also have the highest property taxes in the country at the moment (and one of the highest income taxes), so we would need to find ways to both raise more money while making it more affordable IMO.

YawnTractor_1756 t1_jdoon5p wrote on March 26, 2023 at 12:05 AM

You can see how "defining property value" tax code is exploding right at your laps? And mind that none of us is tax specialist, and still you were able to type out 4 "rules", and I can type 3 comments to each of the rules you made, and tax specialist will probably be able to type 20 comments to every rules you made, and make 250 more rules easily because they know the problematics.

The point is: what's the point of this whole overhaul? Does it really help with anything? Is it really provided that it will lead to more fair taxation?

falcon0159 t1_jdp7jyj wrote on March 26, 2023 at 2:31 AM

Oh, I'm not the OP that you were initially responding to, I just read the thread and thought it was an interesting, but also a complicated and inherently flawed idea in many aspects and decided to comment on some ideas

I can come up with a ton of additional rules of the top of my head, but you're right in that I'm not a tax "expert" in that I'm not a CPA, but I am personally very knowledgeable about tax and work in a related field. (Obviously I have no idea about OP and what their knowledge on the subject is. Your assumption is generally a very safe one as most redditors don't know much about tax, or even personal finance let alone corporate or institutional finance.

I am not sure what OP's intentions were with this tax idea, but I believe the purpose is to fairly tax each individual property based on it's value on a state wide level, rather than doing it by municipality. This would lead to a much more accurate valuation and tax base, as we wouldn't be relying on town's to do reassessments. We could then set a state wide property tax rate based on revenue needed and adjust it annually based on the total property valuations rather than having each town have it's own semi-arbitrary tax rate. This would lead to people in town's like Alpine and Paramus have a increase in tax as they have very low taxes ($ wise) in relation to property values and other towns like West Orange seeing lower taxes as they have the opposite problem.