this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
339 points (89.5% liked)

A Boring Dystopia

12157 readers
1038 users here now

Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

Rules (Subject to Change)

--Be a Decent Human Being

--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title

--If a picture is just a screenshot of an article, link the article

--If a video's content isn't clear from title, write a short summary so people know what it's about.

--Posts must have something to do with the topic

--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.

--No NSFW content

--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
(page 3) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (8 children)

It's always funny when looking at the tax-system in the US from an EU perspective. Americans looking at any receipt they get in an EU country and immediately pointing out the huge VAT tariff.

Then one only needs to point to the property tax in the US.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago

basically what happens when you create and support a housing system whose goal is to make profit. doesnt matter if you yourself plan on living in it, people voted for the system that approved the nonsense of longterm profiteering of a basic need.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

You’d think a real estate attorney would know better.

Anyway, property –with the improvements they made, has appreciated over $163,000 on average every year since they bought it. Ya, $75k more than they planned on sucks, but they can take it from the value of the house no?

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Every think about downsizing?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fuck off and sell the home. Why is this a sob story.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (8 children)

Mao was right about landlords

That being said these people can afford to pay this, their house is millions of $s.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

Sure must be nice having a house to remodel.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (18 children)

Okay I know it's not such a popular opinion but I'm still on the notion that you shouldn't pay taxes for holding on to the place that you live.

Yeah yeah local governments need income and all that and their house is assessed over 4 million dollars and many people can't even afford a home at a 10th of that and they should have known and blah blah blah but come on, commodified housing is bad enough. Paying what amounts to a rent to the state just to hold on to the property, actual repairs and upkeep and other naturally occurring costs aside is insane.

Tax the sales of property. Tax the legal transfer of control of LLCs that "own" property. I'm not even saying never charge property tax on properties not occupied by the owner, but you should be able to have a house to live in without paying the state for the privilege of them not taking it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Tax the sales of property.

I'm thinking of the untended consequences of that policy. The first I can think of is people simply would never sell their houses because they'd get hit with enormous taxes (large enough to equal decades of property taxes). Home owners would simply rent out the houses when they need/want to move away. So home ownership for those living in the homes would collapse. Further, city services would likely starve from lack of funding because there would be no little revenue and what revenue they got would be very sporadic.

but you should be able to have a house to live in without paying the state for the privilege of them not taking it.

There are absolutely houses like that (in the USA at least). Those houses not in cities with police and fire protection, roads, sidewalks, snow plowing, public libraries, or any other kind of city services. If you want the benefits of a society someone has to pay the bill. Alternatively, some cities have income taxes or very high sales tax. Both of which you'd pay to live in the city.

Who are you suggesting paying the bill for your consumption of city services besides you?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're planning to tax on events like sales and hope there's enough churn to still fully-fund the things property tax provides for? That's really hard to make a case for.

Given bungalows rarely deliver a town enough to recoup on providing and maintaining services anyway, you're starting with a very tricky goal to maintain. Detroit happened, and that was with consistent, recurring payments.

Then you want to put a home sales tax on that is big enough to pay the back taxes plus borrowing cost to hold the debt and you think people are gonna go for this? What if you've owned your home 15 years, paid no taxes on the infrastructure maintenance, ambulance fire or police service, mail service, street lights and pavement, and then your house burns down? You could very well owe more than the lot is worth alone. What do we tell the homeowner about that? The town can't absorb the loss given margins are so low.

Nah. I don't think you can sell that idea to the voters.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Why not tax the property for all value above X. Where X is some amount over the average or median property value. That way, if you can afford a luxury home you pay some tax on it.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (15 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

That sucks, but I also think the era of the single family home is ending. No regular person can afford these home prices. Even if you can afford a one time renovation on your $650,000 house does not mean you can afford a $90,000/year tax bill. Single family home values have gone off the charts and regular people cannot afford them. We need to increase housing supply.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (3 children)

They’re artificially high because concentrated wealth is buying up the supply. As of 2024 as much as 25% of the supply is being purchased by institutional investors in some markets

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›