Well thought out, and thank you for the reply—some of these are diabolical!
Question: we currently have property taxes, and yet I’ve never heard of anyone trying some of these—I wonder if there are reasons we’re not aware of? I suspect some of them might be considered tax fraud.
One trick is Banach Tarski tax dodging. You divide your land into a large number of small regions of incredibly intricate shape, to which no value can be easily assigned.
For example, divide your house into 100 pieces, each owned by a different shell company. Each piece is low value (because who wants a sliver of someone elses bathroom) The pieces of land are only useable when all owned by the same person.
If the government doesn’t buy this, and values the pieces so they add up to a normal house price. Then you could always try only paying tax on a few of the pieces. The rest get auctioned off, but no one wants random pieces of bathroom, so they sell cheap.
You’re right that there are a lot of considerations which go into the valuation of land, but the data and methodology to value it exists; in fact, basically everywhere in the first world does it regularly, because they all pay property taxes!
Well thought out, and thank you for the reply—some of these are diabolical!
Question: we currently have property taxes, and yet I’ve never heard of anyone trying some of these—I wonder if there are reasons we’re not aware of? I suspect some of them might be considered tax fraud.
You’re right that there are a lot of considerations which go into the valuation of land, but the data and methodology to value it exists; in fact, basically everywhere in the first world does it regularly, because they all pay property taxes!