Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023
Sorry Jonesy, but none of your suggestions work (e.g., everyone would find a way to defer tax, and then it wouldn’t achieve the objective), and the things you dismiss as “not a big deal” are in fact a big deal.
What would really happen is that real estate values would crash through the floor. There’s absolutely no way that any government does that on purpose. Probably not even the Corbynites.
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The systems he describes more or less exist in Toronto and real estate prices certainly haven't collapsed here. The City has a number of mechanisms for low-income and particularly senior property owners (primarily deferral based) and recently a new property code was created by the Province to allow certain private buildings housing cultural institutions to be taxed by the City at lower rates. I've spoken to city staff about the low-income deferral program and it's relatively easy to administer even with a thorough vetting process. Even for very expensive homes the deferral amount ends up being a very small percentage of total tax revenue which is easily shifted to the remaining property base due to how the system is set up.
Of course we've been on an LVT system for many decades so don't have to worry about the pains of switching over. However, the manner in which this was done in Ontario was changed about 20 years ago (shifted from municipal to provincial valuation) which resulted in phased-in assessments for commercial properties.