Here's a website that would have been significantly better if it had been written using AI. HN readers complain about "AI slop" but I would prefer AI slop over this site. Folks, if you are not motivated to make a decent page, please use AI.
Just curious, because it looks fine to me(ad blocker?), but there were other comments saying how terrible it is, what is wrong with it?
Header large image, small pointless article, additional navigation. Sure nothing exceptional, but also, nothing offensive, looks like every other "news site" I have seen.
Landlords are price takers. They respond to the market by setting rent at the highest anyone will pay them. Of course they might decide to sell, but if they dont then they cant just raise rent whenever they face a supply shock.
Oregon, where we get taxed to hell on both income and property yet still have decrepit infrastructure, declining publicly funded healthcare(OHA), and poor education.
Well, yeah, OR doesn't have a general sales tax so it's proportionally more dependent on income tax. vice versa for WA, no personal income tax so depends more on sales tax.
This is an interesting chart, but it really is showing one policy dimension - choice of tax base.
I suspect "other" is mining or equivalent natural exploitation(oil)
And pet peeve, personal income tax and corporate income tax are almost the same thing. With few exceptions the individual person does not pay their income tax, the corporation does, and for those exceptions the individual is the corporation. Income tax is really a sales tax on a corporation biggest expense, it's payroll.
Corporate income tax is a very different thing from an employer withholding wages. Withholding is still considered the individual paying the tax, just they never get to hold the money. Corporate income tax is money the corporation pays based on its own income vs expenses.
You can also just go to your employer’s HR software and change withholding to 0% everywhere I’ve worked, giving you a bigger paycheck but moving the burden of paying the IRS on you.
But that would just show you some states are much bigger than others? I think per capita dollars, or normalized to that state's median income would be more informative.
A good portion of revenue is from property taxes. A property tax is a wealth tax. I always find the discussion interesting around wealth taxes on billionaires equity when the average worker has typically always paid a wealth tax their largest asset.
Property taxes are not wealth taxes. Two houses side-by-side with the same value, should have the same property tax assessed. One is owned outright. The other is mortgaged to the hilt and its 'owner' has very little wealth from it.
I don’t understand this “loop hole”, who is giving loans that don’t have to be repaid? Surely the collateral will be sold eventually to repay the loan and service the interest?
Refinance the loan with another loan or just use a revolving credit account with no fixed term.
If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield. If you have $4B of stock they might let you borrow $1B for what would be ~4-4.5% using that stock as collateral. You can theoretically take out a margin loan for up to 100% of the stock held in an account, but that’s risky due to margin calls.
The idea is to let the cost basis step up to the price of the asset at your death which will eliminate the capital gains that would’ve been owed. Then your heirs sell a portion of the stock to pay off the loan and keep the rest.
> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.
If you are a good customer of the bank and the LTV of the collateral is very low, then you will get a very low interest rate. If the collateral pays dividends (which are also taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income), then the dividends can service the interest. Meanwhile capital gains keep accumulating tax-free.
With post covid interest rates this strategy very rarely makes sense. Even people like zuck getting fully collateralized loans against their stock will still have to pay close to 5%. There are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to take a 5% loan, but they are few. It does not make sense to just roll loans over forever anymore. Thats why all the big tech stocks pay dividends now. Founders dont want to sell and they dont want to take loans.
Buy borrow die also leads to massive estate taxes which is why billionaires use trusts instead. Buy borrow die is best for people with around $50 mil in assets because they dont have any estate tax.
Can you elaborate more on why you don’t think a property tax is not a wealth tax? My understanding is that a wealth tax is a tax on the value of an asset. The asset could be a variety things that have net worth
Also, not all states apply property taxes the same. In my state, my house is assessed often by the government and then my taxes rise based on the value of my house.
Property tax is a tax on specific property (usually we are talking about real property, but I've paid e.g. property tax on a car). It is usually irrespective of wealth.
Someone who buys a house with cash and their neighbor who is underwater on their mortgage and at risk of insolvency will pay the same tax.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying the distinction on the “wealth” is specific to if the person owns the whole property. If they fully own the property then it could be considered a wealth tax. However, maybe people don’t since they have a mortgage so it’s not taxing them in their net wealth.
Alaska gets a huge portion of its revenue from taxes on extracting oil and gas. This is a model that any state could use on data centers extracting compute from local resources. And if demand for compute is actually heading up the Kardashev scale, it could eventually fund the whole state and subsidize resident incomes. It would act as a hedge against possible disruptions of AI.
"Datacenters" is needlessly narrow -- as capital eats the world, we need to tax capital. Simple as.
We already tax houses, and by comparison stocks are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. There is no excuse.
As I have grown my small business, I have come to an appreciation for how comically lopsided the tax code is to push all of the taxes out of the invest/return economy and into the work/consume economy. It's really quite something. Anything to avoid the right side of the Kuznets Curve!
End of the day big tech would find a friendly government to work with before paying massive data center taxes. The fossil fuel extraction taxes work because the fossil fuels are literally in the state. If you want them you gotta work with the states government. Data centers dont have nearly the same physical restrictions
The other reason fossil fuel extraction taxes work so well is because you're effectively taxing the residents of other states. The people who bear the impact of the taxes don't get to vote on the taxes.
I'm a Delawarean, and I have done research and reporting about the state's unique role in corporate America.
You may wonder why two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware. Is it because the cost of incorporation is lower than in other states, or because corporate tax rates are lower? Those are factors, but they are not the primary reason. The primary reason is risk avoidance, and in particular legal risk avoidance.
Delaware benefits from a flywheel effect: Because so many companies are incorporated in the state, its Chancery Court has a more developed set of case law than other states, and so outcomes of lawsuits involving corporations are more predictable -- which makes it an even more attractive place to incorporate, which continues the flywheel effect.
The down side is that the state is incredibly dependent on corporate licensing fees and escheatment. States like Nevada have, in recent years, been competing against Delaware as a corporate haven, and if we start to see a significant migration, we'll be in a real pickle, because the state imposes no sales tax and has relatively low property taxes.
DE law is also, broadly speaking, favorable to corpos -- they didn't just go there because common law got hashed out. Plenty of other east coast states with long histories and lots of lawsuits.
but the parent poster is correct: it is unambiguous and well litigated in its benefits and downsides.
even if the benefits are only mild, it makes it easy to map out and control the legal risks.
Florida passed their ballot initiative (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/what-the-new-florida-h...) to begin exempting non-school portions of property tax (a bit over 1/3 of state revenue). This is a concern in my industry, which derives budgets primarily from property taxes. But, more generally: what is the plan for the revenue shortfall? Any Floridians have insight? Does FL not need this money, assume they will make it up in a sales tax because of increased disposable income, or they are just fine with the services based on this revenue getting rinsed?
Options are increase millage rate, increase user fees, spending cuts, state revenue sharing, and sales tax increase (limited and must be voter approved)
Interesting that federal funding isn't included in this comparison, given that a quick web search suggests[1] it comprises anywhere from 20%-40% of state revenues.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] threadSome sites these days won't show anything at all without Javascript, so I actually give the site kudos for working well with no Javascript.
Evidently Javascript causes cancer.
Header large image, small pointless article, additional navigation. Sure nothing exceptional, but also, nothing offensive, looks like every other "news site" I have seen.
- NH gets nearly 2/3 of its revenue from property taxes
- OR raises more of its revenue than CA in income tax
- TN/AZ are a close 2nd/3rd to WA in sales tax revenue
This is an interesting chart, but it really is showing one policy dimension - choice of tax base.
And pet peeve, personal income tax and corporate income tax are almost the same thing. With few exceptions the individual person does not pay their income tax, the corporation does, and for those exceptions the individual is the corporation. Income tax is really a sales tax on a corporation biggest expense, it's payroll.
At least it closes the loop hole where you borrow against your stock and never pay taxes on it because you never sold it.
If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield. If you have $4B of stock they might let you borrow $1B for what would be ~4-4.5% using that stock as collateral. You can theoretically take out a margin loan for up to 100% of the stock held in an account, but that’s risky due to margin calls.
The idea is to let the cost basis step up to the price of the asset at your death which will eliminate the capital gains that would’ve been owed. Then your heirs sell a portion of the stock to pay off the loan and keep the rest.
People bring up a loophole that does exist, and assume that everyone uses it. Welp, like most of these "1%" discourse, its pretty damn rare.
https://taxprofblog.aals.org/2026/06/16/fox-and-liscow-the-r...
> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.
> Buy-borrow-die is a real loophole, and in absolute terms the rich borrow a lot...
Buy borrow die also leads to massive estate taxes which is why billionaires use trusts instead. Buy borrow die is best for people with around $50 mil in assets because they dont have any estate tax.
Also, not all states apply property taxes the same. In my state, my house is assessed often by the government and then my taxes rise based on the value of my house.
Property tax is a tax on specific property (usually we are talking about real property, but I've paid e.g. property tax on a car). It is usually irrespective of wealth.
Someone who buys a house with cash and their neighbor who is underwater on their mortgage and at risk of insolvency will pay the same tax.
Another major difference is that houses are both harder to hide and easier to value than many other forms of wealth.
We already tax houses, and by comparison stocks are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. There is no excuse.
As I have grown my small business, I have come to an appreciation for how comically lopsided the tax code is to push all of the taxes out of the invest/return economy and into the work/consume economy. It's really quite something. Anything to avoid the right side of the Kuznets Curve!
You may wonder why two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware. Is it because the cost of incorporation is lower than in other states, or because corporate tax rates are lower? Those are factors, but they are not the primary reason. The primary reason is risk avoidance, and in particular legal risk avoidance.
Delaware benefits from a flywheel effect: Because so many companies are incorporated in the state, its Chancery Court has a more developed set of case law than other states, and so outcomes of lawsuits involving corporations are more predictable -- which makes it an even more attractive place to incorporate, which continues the flywheel effect.
The down side is that the state is incredibly dependent on corporate licensing fees and escheatment. States like Nevada have, in recent years, been competing against Delaware as a corporate haven, and if we start to see a significant migration, we'll be in a real pickle, because the state imposes no sales tax and has relatively low property taxes.
but the parent poster is correct: it is unambiguous and well litigated in its benefits and downsides.
even if the benefits are only mild, it makes it easy to map out and control the legal risks.
[1] https://reason.org/commentary/ranking-the-states-most-and-le...