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Consider a fixed tax with an exemption for those with income below poverty level:
If you're above poverty level, you pay a flat x dollars. A person making $50K pays x dollars and someone making $1 million pays the same x dollars. If you're below poverty level, you are exempt.
Some people call that a head tax and some people say it isn't. What do you think?
Consider a fixed tax with an exemption for those with income below poverty level:
If you're above poverty level, you pay a flat x dollars. A person making $50K pays x dollars and someone making $1 million pays the same x dollars. If you're below poverty level, you are exempt.
Some people call that a head tax and some people say it isn't. What do you think?
A "fixed" tax would indicate that everyone would pay the same dollar amount.
If you're making 50K a year, 2000 dollars is a whole lot of income, but if you're making 500000 a year, 2000 is chump change.
There are some people in Portland who would like to impose such a tax. The Oregon Constitution (Article 9, Section 1a) says "No poll tax or head tax shall be levied or collected in Oregon."
Proponents of the tax say it's not a head tax. Apparently their reasoning is that if some people are exempted, it's not a head tax.
I was surprised when looking it up to find that some cities (Chicago, Seattle, Denver) have imposed a head tax on business owners, what some have called a tax on jobs. (Now THAT is taxing job creators.)
The short story is that Michigan has a "nonhomestead tax" levied locally for schools. Farms and owner-occupied primary residences are exempt from this tax if the homeowner files an annual form claiming his home or farm as his primary residence (homestead).
This tax was created by the legislature and was intended as a state levy (similar to the state education tax on all taxable property) but was made a local tax because the state was bumped up against a constitutional tax limitation (Headlee Amendment, 1978).
This tax is 3x the state education tax, making the total school tax rate on rental property 4x the rate on owner-occupied homes.
As a local (millage) tax, it must be voted and renewed periodically by voters. This tax usually passes by overwhelming margins (I vote against it at every opportunity), which is not surprising since a large majority of votes are cast by homeowners (in Michigan, school elections are usually held on the second MONDAY in June, guaranteeing a ridiculously low turnout) and the vast majority of homeowners do not own any nonhomestead property.
As an aside, a property tax cap was established years later. The Headlee Amendment allows voters to override tax limitations, and voters used this provision to override the cap ON THE NONHOMESTEAD TAX but never even considered overriding the cap on their own homes. As a result, I later came to regard my vote for the Headlee Amendment to have been the single most regrettable vote in my life.
So a majority of homeowners votes itself free money paid for by owners of nonhomestead property and their tenants.
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