I like the idea of high speed rail where we have big cities 2-3 hours apart. But one issue that remains is what happens when you get to your city? When you arrive at the train statin in Amsterdam, there is a subway station with multiple lines and a street car system. Ditto for Berlin -- S-bahn, U-bahn, etc.
A little more time and/or imagination would have had Matt proposing something like this: If a conservative state legislature is going to blow off subsidiarity, they should do it in a more enlightened way than messing in the local affairs of the big cities they so hate and fear. That way would be, start pushing more—a lot more—economic and infrastructure development money to smaller cities and towns with directives as so how the money could be used (the anti-subsidiarity part). The benefit from a conservative perspective would be twofold: it would strongly promote the growth-oriented economic development mode that conservatives (and by all evidence Matt) favor, and it would do so outside the big cities and thereby undercut the “blue” population growth in those areas that conservatives fear. Shoring up rural and small town/city populations would be an economic-electoral win-win for conservatives.
Unrealistic? Maybe, but it’s what an enlightened Republican Party would do if it wants to lock in and build on the outstate dominance it needs to maintain power.
PS: Please revise out the "or imagination" part in that first sentence. Matt's definitely not lacking in that dept. and other ideas like mine are what the comments section is for.
So much wrong with this piece. Instead of reading Matt's 'A Billion Americans' read Edward Slingerland's 'Drunk'. For the good of civilization, taxing getting wasted is just about the dumbest policy you could adopt.
My wild guess is the book would say it encourages the state to encourage alcohol selling businesses. But I wish David would summarize it since I don't actually know
Short summary: No civilization without intoxication. Without intoxicants we'd all be at each others throats like our baboon ancestors. A billion more of us without a place to get wasted would be a disaster. Why Texas has Austin.
I know little about Texas, but my cliche image of the state suggests that they should be fully onboard (pun intended) for a >200 mph train as described here. Beyond the beneficial economic effects, super fast bullet trains would just be a great look and -- best of all -- man, the bragging rights they would have over my California and its disaster of an HSR.
I grew up in Texas during the bipartisan years, and the descent of the state's political leadership into a bunch of cookie-cutter Fox News Republicans makes me really sad. It's also kind of emblematic of the intellectual rot in the GOP. It also weakens both the state and that party. Here's a few scattershot thoughts:
1) Recall that George W. was successor (as governor) to a Democrat, Ann Richards. He had to work with a Democratically controlled legislature. All of that was because the replacement of the Dixiecrats with Republicans and the general Southern shift of the GOP was still in-progress; it took longer in Texas because that state has different dynamics than the pure Old South. As a result, you had period of genuine bipartisan governance in Texas. My hope is that the gradual blue shift of the state might deliver another such period.
2) The bipartisan period owed a lot to the fact that Texas used to have a much stronger libertarian streak in its politics. The government just did less stuff. That could be for ill--hello, pollution--but it could also be for good, in the sense that the current GOP mania for highly intrusive government, i.e. the anti-CRT, anti-mask kind of BS, was checked. As part of both the libertarian and bipartisan stuff, Texas politics had a strong "good governance" streak. Again, this was often in the service of preventing the government from doing stuff, and the state has usually lagged on services. But it also led to things like a solid rainy day fund and a preference for competence over partisan performance in politicians.
3) Under appreciated: the emphasis on low state government control left a lot of space for individual Texas cities and counties to be their own thing. This could be really, really bad: Dallas was essentially a Klan stronghold for big parts of the 20th C.; small Texas towns could be scary racist and corrupt. I once delivered a lawsuit against the sheriff in a small county where we had family (I was a courier and file clerk as my undergrad side job). My dad told me not to mention our name unless asked directly, and that if a cop car tried to pull me over in the county, I should not stop until I got to a public parking lot across the county line. And he was right. Before I could deliver the papers, I had to get them notarized in the county clerk's office. By the time I drove over to the sheriff's office, all the deputies were hanging out in the lobby. The clerk had called ahead. Happily, they just wanted to gawk.
BUT...the lack of central control also left tons of space for liberal places to do their own thing, too. This is how Austin became "Austin." Less well-known, Houston had a surprisingly liberal / cosmopolitan streak, in part because the oil and shipping industries demanded a certain level of it--if you wanted that sweet, sweet Saudi crude, you couldn't ask a sheik to come in the back door and use the crappy water fountain. (One customer at my law firm was literally the Sheik of Qatar, who, hilariously, owned some condos in Houston because that's a good way to park money out of country.) Houston passed ordinances protecting employment for gay people in the '80s, UNDER REAGAN. It wasn't a liberal place, precisely, but it was also not what you think of as a conservative paradise.
4) To see the changes of the 21st C., consider the progression of governors:
George W. Bush was a fairly bipartisan and benign governor. Texas was relatively open and welcoming to immigrants. The state was focused on education. The Bush crew's approach to that problem, including an emphasis on standardized testing, has not aged well, but it was a genuine attempt at improvement, and at the time it was believed to be delivering results. Again: they were likely "wrong," but not in a way that was obvious at the time, and the effort of folks like Karen Hughes was pretty clearly genuine. Bush goes to the Presidency on a campaign of "compassionate conservatism." He spearheads a global AIDS initiative, PEPFAR. I'm a global health person. I think Iraq and Afghanistan ended up being stupid disasters. But PEPFAR has saved, no hyperbole here, millions of people's lives in the developing world, and it is very idiosyncratically a Bush program. It would probably not have happened otherwise.
(Also, no one cares about it because of all the other disasters, which: fair. They were disasters. And a lot of the Bushies, starting with Cheney, were straight-up villains and clowns.)
Bush is replaced by Rick Perry. Perry is more GOP-ish. He is also demonstrably more corrupt; despite never having held a job other than as a politician and coming from poverty, he eventually leaves office as a millionaire thanks to his side hustle as a land speculator that just "happens" to deliver absurdly lucrative profits on deals cut in the Austin area. He oversees a GOP-controlled legislature best remembered for the antics of Tom DeLay, who makes a play to do an off-year gerrymander of the state to buttress GOP power in Congress. DeLay eventually goes to jail. BUT...Perry does remain open to immigration. He initially continues on the some of the "compassionate conservative" stuff. This eventually blows his chance at becoming the GOP presidential nominee (it hurt that he was kind of dumb--"oops"--but his immigration openness had already killed his chances at that point).
Perry is replaced by Greg Abbott. You know Greg Abbott from Fox News. The legislature is busy passaging messaging bills. The state power grid has collapsed multiple times. Abbott called on the legislature to pass messaging bills. Abbott's AG (elected separately, but still), is under Federal investigation, and he's only the tip of the corruption iceberg. That's okay, though, because the legislature is going to do some anti-abortion stuff. Abbott is going to build the wall. HE'S GOING TO FUND IT WITH THAT RAINY DAY FUND I MENTIONED. Also, the state now has incredibly high Covid numbers, and the health system is beyond capacity and edging towards collapse. Abbott's response: special legislative session to do some voter restrictions. Oh, and executive orders against mask mandates that even the state's GOP-controlled Supreme Court can't get totally behind.
Basically, the party has descended into a corrupt clown show. It's really depressing. It's one of the major reasons why I have never, not even once, thought that it would be good to move back to Texas. I love my old state, but at this point seeing what is going on there just makes me sad. (And it's hard for me not to assume that, despite its many natural advantages, enough corruption is eventually going to kill the golden goose.)
I feel like the people who died in the freeze and the people who are currently unable to get beds in Texas ICUs probably disagree with you. OTOH, the people fleeing fire in CA probably agree with you. It's the usual tangle of good and bad.
My assessment of CA is complicated by the fact that I'm trained in environmental history, so I look at it as a water-sucking desert where people shouldn't live long-term owing to the problem of drought. But I would say the same of big portions of Texas, and add to it the disastrously poor water management that has flooded out people in my parents' neighborhood three times in the past ten years.
But sure, repeat those CA talking points. I'm from Texas, so I haven't just heard'em--I've said'em, back when I was a conservative kid dreaming of becoming what Paul Ryan actually became. (Hugest moment of my life as a young conservative: meeting Dan Quayle! THE Dan Quayle! VP of these United States!)
The Richards > GWB > Perry > Abbott decline of governance in Texas has been absolutely heartbreaking. My first political memory was the governor's race between Ann Richards and Clayton Williams, and how even though the state had shifted away from the Democrats, Willians was such an absolute scumbag that Richards was able to pull off the win. I wonder if we would have seen the same result if we had today's media environment back then.
Hilariously, I was chalking up "Gentile" as some weird usage to indicate "mixed," assuming you meant the two parties and the bipartisan era, so I'm a bigger idiot.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Texas Central Railroad, which is building the Houston to Dallas leg of your proposed map essentially according to your design philosophy: owned by a private company using Japanese technology and a European operator.
They're a little behind schedule but look much more promising than other American regional rail projects. Joe Biden endorsed it while VP, the Trump administration paid lip service to it, and hey, we're hopefully about to get a big infrastructure bill passed! I'm hoping it works well and the model is extended to Austin (where I live and is currently planning a major light rail expansion) and San Antonio.
Also surprised at no mention of this, it seems to be “real” and moving forward, if somewhat behind schedule. Biggest mistake of Texas HSR seems to be not putting the midpoint stop in College Station, I’m baffled by that one.
The Welch Foundation (https://www.welch1.org/grants-programs/research-grants) already gives $80,000 annual grants to chemistry professors located in the state of Texas - basically half of the departments at UT, A&M, and Rice have them, and these grants are used as a recruiting tool by the universities (because it's basically free money that you can't get if you take a job in Seattle or Chicago or Boston). Having a more general Texas-only grant, open to fields outside of chemistry, would be a similarly big recruiting tool.
That language about "not in Austin, Houston, or Dallas" seems like something the College Station (and Waco and Lubbock) legislators could get behind. While there would probably be a few people at UTEP and UTRGV and maybe Texas Christian University that would be able to get these grants, it would basically all go to A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor faculty.
That, and the dream of Making College Station a Station Again makes this sound like the ideal platform for someone wanting to be the next Rick Perry (first Aggie governor).
While we're on the dreaming, can we get the Union Pacific track connecting College Station and Bryan to run a local light rail, and rezone all the empty industrial land along Finfeather Road to allow massive car-free student housing?
There's definitely a role for a bit of easy money without too many strings. As my lab grows, it's increasingly difficult to keep everyone paid from federal grants alone just due to timing (they all start and end at different times). Having some funds with fewer restrictions can help bridge gaps between other grants and also give you some room to develop new ideas.
Growing up in Bryan/College Station, I'd really doubt the local population would utilize the station very much, particularly considering it will likely be a 30 minute ride to the station, plus boarding, traveling, dealing with navigating Houston without a car. The outskirts of Houston are just over an hour away by car!
I'd expect Texas A&M would offer bus service to the station, particularly during semester breaks. It might get infrequent utilization from College Station to Dallas, and you might see a community of Houston commuters pop up close to the station (if the Houston terminus is convenient).
B/CS to Houston would be mainly used by students I would think (as long as the Houston Metro extends a light rail line to the station, which I believe they're planning to do), and Houston to B/CS route would be huge on game day, but I think you're right that this leg would be relatively low-use otherwise. However, I do think that locals would use hypothetical routes to Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio pretty frequently (especially since the stations in those cities would likely be walking distance to the main visitor attractions).
But I think the bigger thing is probably the connections between the big cities.
I wonder if there would be a market for high-rise condos above the station - certainly many university-affiliated people would be happy to live there for easy getaways, but I wonder if there would be some work-from-home Texans who wouldn't mind living near a campus in exchange for having quick access to all the cities.
Absolutely. My above comment was mainly to add context on the local B/CS utilization. I see a lot of potential of the Houston/Dallas link. I'd expect both cities to try and support inter-system connections, financing allowing. I hope it works out and the regional network is extended to the rest of central Texas.
I write this as a former Houstonian who now lives in the East. Isn't the argument against a Texas train the simple fact that you have to get around once you get off the thing? Could any city in the state build a transit network big enough to deal with all the people who might be getting off a train several times a day? Not saying it can't be done, just that building the rail system might turn out to be the easy part.
I really feel the advent of ride-hailing services makes this a much more manageable issue. (Especially once the US auto fleet is substantially further along on the transition to EVs, though the country is (shockingly!) foot-dragging on this last part, from what I can see).
Build a nice big parking garage next to the station and let a storey each to Hertz, Avis and Enterprise.
There are a lot of people that fly from Houston to Dallas - if I'm reading the BTS data tables correctly, about 1.3 million in 2019 (and presumably a similar number in the opposite direction). All of those are people who arrived without a car. The train will be much faster than flying (if for no other reason than the absence of TSA security theater).
Add on however many can be attracted from driving, which won't be insignificant.
Sure, if you can build a real transit network, even better. But Alon Levy is correct that these cities are big enough that there will be plenty of customers even without.
Houston and Dallas both have light rail that I've heard is reasonable and city governments that would likely support linking to the regional rail, financing allowing.
I would love to have you take a crack at Florida, since we have some weird things going on of our own. As an example, we have universal pre-K already! We have new infrastructure projects all the time (but they're mostly roads), and there's very few dense urban cores but a LOT of mid-density suburb-esque cities, and I'd be curious to see what you'd come up with
The Department of Energy Office of Science has a similar budget to the NSF ($7 billion vs. $8.2 billion in 2020) and funds a similar amount of research. When this is overlooked, we end up with things like senators claiming the DOE doesn't do any science or need any more funding during the committee debate on the Endless Frontier act.
Texas has a process whereby people can contest the county assessor's valuation of their property each year, to ensure they aren't overtaxed. I definitely worry right now that this is a way of empowering rich people to decrease their property tax burden, while giving counties cover for over-taxing property of anyone who doesn't have the skills needed to do the contestation process.
I worry that this sort of system might be even worse with a land value assessment system - though it's also quite possible that it will avoid problems. (My house dropped in value by 50% in the first tax year, and then returned to the value I paid for it the next year, because the county assessor didn't have any idea how to assess a modern attached townhouse in walking distance of downtown, but I suppose the land would be easier to assess accurately, since it's the same as the single-family homes across the street.)
Not to mention the rich person's scam of giving away a conservation easement. Suggest the same for anyone living in a doublewide with a view of a tree.
I'm shocked to hear a county assessor decreased the assessment value. I thought that was just a theoretical possibility, not something that could actually happen in real life.
The county assessor never reduced the assessment value - at the time we bought the house, there were no comparable properties in the county, so the very first assessment was half what we paid for it (i.e., they assessed a modernist townhome within walking distance of downtown at the price-per-square-foot of a suburban McMansion because the only new builds in town up until that point were suburban McMansions) but a year later, when the other units in the building had sold, they assessed our property at the price-per-square-foot the others in the building sold at. (This lack of comparable properties actually made it a bit difficult to get the mortgage at first, and the bank had to do something they probably considered shady internally to approve a mortgage of the size we took out.)
I tend to think the appeals process could be less easily abused under a LVT. (I agree that it really privileges rich homeowners, but I think pretty much every state has an appeal/contestation process; to not have one could be a due process issue.) The issue with property assessment as it's done now is that it's basically an appraisal process. And appraisals are inherently subjective and easily abused. Under a LVT it would be pretty hard to argue that two parcels of land next to each other have a different value, and you also wouldn't have difficulty distinguishing between the value of residential, commercial, and industrial properties (a big issue for a long time in Cook County/Chicago has been underassessment of commercial properties relative to residential).
The technical detail I'm less familiar with is how you go about actually setting the land value in the first place. With residential property sales in a modestly sized market, it's conceptually easy to figure out how much a given piece of real estate is worth. But, sort of by definition, there isn't a large market for vacant land in densely populated areas.
I don't know either TBH. I'll have to talk to a friend of mine, he's a tax assessor in a New Jersey city that could charitably be described as "blighted."
As I understand it, the difference between LVT and property taxes is whether you include the assessment of improvements on the land (houses, pools, etc.)
Why would you say its better to exclude improvements when calculating the tax?
There's two axes here, one economic, one urbanist/neighborhoody.
The economic axis is Adam Smith's old observation that a tax on "ground rents"--that is, a land-value tax--is the least-distortionary tax available. This is because the supply of land is, to a first approximation, completely fixed; Dubai and the Netherlands aside, you can't really create more of it, and you certainly can't do it cheaply. On the other hand, the amount of *buildings* on a given parcel can be quite variable, especially now we have elevators. Taxing the improvements discourages development, which depresses the overall amount of economic activity in an area. But taxing just the value of the land doesn't do that, at least not nearly as much. (At least, this is the economic theory as I understand it, I could be wrong).
The urbanist/neighborhoody axis is this: Property taxes penalize good/consciencious property owners and reward bad/lazy ones. A property owner who keeps their house or storefront or what have you looking nice and in good repair pays *more* in standard property tax than their neighbor who let the facade crumble and the yard get overrun by weeds. Property tax particularly incentivizes landlords to put a bare minimum of effort into maintaining their properties, since doing so increases their tax burden and narrows their profit margins. A land-value tax, by taxing the properties the same, eliminates this malign incentive, which hopefully leads to nicer neighborhoods and better housing for tenants.
Thanks for sharing. Definitely not an expert, but most of the variation in appraisals that I've seen come down to location much more than upkeep. Doesn't change the underlying point though.
As I understand it, the advantages of a George-ite land tax system are A) removes/reduces the disincentive to improve property and B) discourages amassing of large land holdings. Obviously the rate of taxation is a critical detail. I think to make such a system work the government would need act as a land bank to take custody of no-longer-wanted land parcels.
The land-bank portion is important. The interesting thing is that many cities have built the infrastructure to do this already (they already have the land bank), so there's nothing stopping them really. Also, relating this to Texas, that can be the state-government policy to get municipalities to switch to LVT: "Adopt an LVT basis and the state will take care of unwanted properties, you won't bear that cost." Given Texas's hot real estate market, I can't imagine the burden to the state would be that large, and the state can take advantage in the long term.
True, but with standard property tax there's a tax advantage to keeping the empty plots empty, whereas with LVT you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't try and make some use of your land. I can confirm from conversations with several of the kinds of landlords who prevail in Tioga and East Germantown that not wanting to pay higher property taxes is a major reason they don't keep up their properties. (I don't handle City REA directly, but I deal with these guys all the time because they also neglect other City taxes and fees that I do handle.)
The other thing is the interaction of LVT and upzoning. If your property gets upzoned then your LVT goes up. Your property tax only goes up when you actually build that bigger building.
This means that having a single family home on land that could permit a missing-middle apartment block is expensive in taxes. Doing the same in a conventional property tax regime isn't.
I won't get into land value vs. income/consumption taxes; I haven't studied it enough. Between traditional property tax and land value, though, it's pretty much a no-brainer to me. (I invoke "The Land" mostly as a joke; I'm not actually a single-tax Georgist.) On the Philly-specific front, actually, adopting an LVT structure would make moot all the arguments we've had back and forth about the 10-year tax abatement by giving it to everyone.
That seems reasonable, though obviously whether we've struck exactly the right balance is a fair subject for debate. The biggest advocate of rebalancing in favor of property taxes is probably Domb, and even he doesn't think we should get rid of our other taxes. I'm agnostic, just so long as I still have a job lol.
(I do think we should look into restructuring/reforming the taxes, as they are rather confusing, but that may be difficult because what we can impose is in large part dictated by stuff like the tax uniformity provision in the state constitution and other impositions from Harrisburg. Like, a graduated income tax would open up lots of possibilities, but we can't do that because uniformity.)
Yeah, if you want to keep it administratively simple, just say that they have to use the federal tax brackets so they can't go inventing their own thresholds.
That wouldn't work, "uniformity" is a weird provision in the PA state constitution that has been interpreted to prohibit both the state and municipalities from imposing graduated taxes of any kind, as well as having some other effects (e.g. you can't tax commercial property at a higher rate than residential). It's called "uniformity" because the language mandates that the rate of taxation of a tax be "uniform" throughout the jurisdiction to which it applies.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I'm not saying that a graduated tax would be a *good* idea, but it's annoying we can't even consider it. It's the most obvious example of the constraints placed on the City's taxing power, the rest get kinda esoteric.
I'm curious how important you think it is to balance state income variability in that process? My understanding is that property tax intake has much lower intake variability than income taxes. I know Philly and California aren't the same, but my understanding of California is that their tax intake is quite variable because they rely so much on income taxes relative to property taxes and their income tax is very progressive. So that when Silicon Valley is doing well (2020) they are flush, but when IPOs and such slow down, their intake can drop dramatically.
I like the idea of high speed rail where we have big cities 2-3 hours apart. But one issue that remains is what happens when you get to your city? When you arrive at the train statin in Amsterdam, there is a subway station with multiple lines and a street car system. Ditto for Berlin -- S-bahn, U-bahn, etc.
Do New York next come on you're from here
A little more time and/or imagination would have had Matt proposing something like this: If a conservative state legislature is going to blow off subsidiarity, they should do it in a more enlightened way than messing in the local affairs of the big cities they so hate and fear. That way would be, start pushing more—a lot more—economic and infrastructure development money to smaller cities and towns with directives as so how the money could be used (the anti-subsidiarity part). The benefit from a conservative perspective would be twofold: it would strongly promote the growth-oriented economic development mode that conservatives (and by all evidence Matt) favor, and it would do so outside the big cities and thereby undercut the “blue” population growth in those areas that conservatives fear. Shoring up rural and small town/city populations would be an economic-electoral win-win for conservatives.
Unrealistic? Maybe, but it’s what an enlightened Republican Party would do if it wants to lock in and build on the outstate dominance it needs to maintain power.
PS: Please revise out the "or imagination" part in that first sentence. Matt's definitely not lacking in that dept. and other ideas like mine are what the comments section is for.
Do Georgia next! We’re somewhat relevant in the political sphere and should turn reliably blue in the coming decades
"Policy Advice for Georgia and Thoughts On My Time at FreakNik"
So much wrong with this piece. Instead of reading Matt's 'A Billion Americans' read Edward Slingerland's 'Drunk'. For the good of civilization, taxing getting wasted is just about the dumbest policy you could adopt.
What's so dumb about it? Isn't it correlated with less drunk driving and less alcohol related violence?
My wild guess is the book would say it encourages the state to encourage alcohol selling businesses. But I wish David would summarize it since I don't actually know
Short summary: No civilization without intoxication. Without intoxicants we'd all be at each others throats like our baboon ancestors. A billion more of us without a place to get wasted would be a disaster. Why Texas has Austin.
But I think the idea of taxation is to nudge society in the direction of a little less intoxication, not ban the stuff altogether
Read the book, can't really be summarized in a Tweet, but it's a fun read.
I know little about Texas, but my cliche image of the state suggests that they should be fully onboard (pun intended) for a >200 mph train as described here. Beyond the beneficial economic effects, super fast bullet trains would just be a great look and -- best of all -- man, the bragging rights they would have over my California and its disaster of an HSR.
I grew up in Texas during the bipartisan years, and the descent of the state's political leadership into a bunch of cookie-cutter Fox News Republicans makes me really sad. It's also kind of emblematic of the intellectual rot in the GOP. It also weakens both the state and that party. Here's a few scattershot thoughts:
1) Recall that George W. was successor (as governor) to a Democrat, Ann Richards. He had to work with a Democratically controlled legislature. All of that was because the replacement of the Dixiecrats with Republicans and the general Southern shift of the GOP was still in-progress; it took longer in Texas because that state has different dynamics than the pure Old South. As a result, you had period of genuine bipartisan governance in Texas. My hope is that the gradual blue shift of the state might deliver another such period.
2) The bipartisan period owed a lot to the fact that Texas used to have a much stronger libertarian streak in its politics. The government just did less stuff. That could be for ill--hello, pollution--but it could also be for good, in the sense that the current GOP mania for highly intrusive government, i.e. the anti-CRT, anti-mask kind of BS, was checked. As part of both the libertarian and bipartisan stuff, Texas politics had a strong "good governance" streak. Again, this was often in the service of preventing the government from doing stuff, and the state has usually lagged on services. But it also led to things like a solid rainy day fund and a preference for competence over partisan performance in politicians.
3) Under appreciated: the emphasis on low state government control left a lot of space for individual Texas cities and counties to be their own thing. This could be really, really bad: Dallas was essentially a Klan stronghold for big parts of the 20th C.; small Texas towns could be scary racist and corrupt. I once delivered a lawsuit against the sheriff in a small county where we had family (I was a courier and file clerk as my undergrad side job). My dad told me not to mention our name unless asked directly, and that if a cop car tried to pull me over in the county, I should not stop until I got to a public parking lot across the county line. And he was right. Before I could deliver the papers, I had to get them notarized in the county clerk's office. By the time I drove over to the sheriff's office, all the deputies were hanging out in the lobby. The clerk had called ahead. Happily, they just wanted to gawk.
BUT...the lack of central control also left tons of space for liberal places to do their own thing, too. This is how Austin became "Austin." Less well-known, Houston had a surprisingly liberal / cosmopolitan streak, in part because the oil and shipping industries demanded a certain level of it--if you wanted that sweet, sweet Saudi crude, you couldn't ask a sheik to come in the back door and use the crappy water fountain. (One customer at my law firm was literally the Sheik of Qatar, who, hilariously, owned some condos in Houston because that's a good way to park money out of country.) Houston passed ordinances protecting employment for gay people in the '80s, UNDER REAGAN. It wasn't a liberal place, precisely, but it was also not what you think of as a conservative paradise.
4) To see the changes of the 21st C., consider the progression of governors:
George W. Bush was a fairly bipartisan and benign governor. Texas was relatively open and welcoming to immigrants. The state was focused on education. The Bush crew's approach to that problem, including an emphasis on standardized testing, has not aged well, but it was a genuine attempt at improvement, and at the time it was believed to be delivering results. Again: they were likely "wrong," but not in a way that was obvious at the time, and the effort of folks like Karen Hughes was pretty clearly genuine. Bush goes to the Presidency on a campaign of "compassionate conservatism." He spearheads a global AIDS initiative, PEPFAR. I'm a global health person. I think Iraq and Afghanistan ended up being stupid disasters. But PEPFAR has saved, no hyperbole here, millions of people's lives in the developing world, and it is very idiosyncratically a Bush program. It would probably not have happened otherwise.
(Also, no one cares about it because of all the other disasters, which: fair. They were disasters. And a lot of the Bushies, starting with Cheney, were straight-up villains and clowns.)
Bush is replaced by Rick Perry. Perry is more GOP-ish. He is also demonstrably more corrupt; despite never having held a job other than as a politician and coming from poverty, he eventually leaves office as a millionaire thanks to his side hustle as a land speculator that just "happens" to deliver absurdly lucrative profits on deals cut in the Austin area. He oversees a GOP-controlled legislature best remembered for the antics of Tom DeLay, who makes a play to do an off-year gerrymander of the state to buttress GOP power in Congress. DeLay eventually goes to jail. BUT...Perry does remain open to immigration. He initially continues on the some of the "compassionate conservative" stuff. This eventually blows his chance at becoming the GOP presidential nominee (it hurt that he was kind of dumb--"oops"--but his immigration openness had already killed his chances at that point).
Perry is replaced by Greg Abbott. You know Greg Abbott from Fox News. The legislature is busy passaging messaging bills. The state power grid has collapsed multiple times. Abbott called on the legislature to pass messaging bills. Abbott's AG (elected separately, but still), is under Federal investigation, and he's only the tip of the corruption iceberg. That's okay, though, because the legislature is going to do some anti-abortion stuff. Abbott is going to build the wall. HE'S GOING TO FUND IT WITH THAT RAINY DAY FUND I MENTIONED. Also, the state now has incredibly high Covid numbers, and the health system is beyond capacity and edging towards collapse. Abbott's response: special legislative session to do some voter restrictions. Oh, and executive orders against mask mandates that even the state's GOP-controlled Supreme Court can't get totally behind.
Basically, the party has descended into a corrupt clown show. It's really depressing. It's one of the major reasons why I have never, not even once, thought that it would be good to move back to Texas. I love my old state, but at this point seeing what is going on there just makes me sad. (And it's hard for me not to assume that, despite its many natural advantages, enough corruption is eventually going to kill the golden goose.)
All that and still WAY better than what's going on in CA
I feel like the people who died in the freeze and the people who are currently unable to get beds in Texas ICUs probably disagree with you. OTOH, the people fleeing fire in CA probably agree with you. It's the usual tangle of good and bad.
My assessment of CA is complicated by the fact that I'm trained in environmental history, so I look at it as a water-sucking desert where people shouldn't live long-term owing to the problem of drought. But I would say the same of big portions of Texas, and add to it the disastrously poor water management that has flooded out people in my parents' neighborhood three times in the past ten years.
But sure, repeat those CA talking points. I'm from Texas, so I haven't just heard'em--I've said'em, back when I was a conservative kid dreaming of becoming what Paul Ryan actually became. (Hugest moment of my life as a young conservative: meeting Dan Quayle! THE Dan Quayle! VP of these United States!)
The Richards > GWB > Perry > Abbott decline of governance in Texas has been absolutely heartbreaking. My first political memory was the governor's race between Ann Richards and Clayton Williams, and how even though the state had shifted away from the Democrats, Willians was such an absolute scumbag that Richards was able to pull off the win. I wonder if we would have seen the same result if we had today's media environment back then.
Born with a silver spoon in his mouth!
Took me a moment to realize typo. Scratched head trying to understand the Gentile descent of Texas
Hilariously, I was chalking up "Gentile" as some weird usage to indicate "mixed," assuming you meant the two parties and the bipartisan era, so I'm a bigger idiot.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Texas Central Railroad, which is building the Houston to Dallas leg of your proposed map essentially according to your design philosophy: owned by a private company using Japanese technology and a European operator.
They're a little behind schedule but look much more promising than other American regional rail projects. Joe Biden endorsed it while VP, the Trump administration paid lip service to it, and hey, we're hopefully about to get a big infrastructure bill passed! I'm hoping it works well and the model is extended to Austin (where I live and is currently planning a major light rail expansion) and San Antonio.
Also surprised at no mention of this, it seems to be “real” and moving forward, if somewhat behind schedule. Biggest mistake of Texas HSR seems to be not putting the midpoint stop in College Station, I’m baffled by that one.
The Welch Foundation (https://www.welch1.org/grants-programs/research-grants) already gives $80,000 annual grants to chemistry professors located in the state of Texas - basically half of the departments at UT, A&M, and Rice have them, and these grants are used as a recruiting tool by the universities (because it's basically free money that you can't get if you take a job in Seattle or Chicago or Boston). Having a more general Texas-only grant, open to fields outside of chemistry, would be a similarly big recruiting tool.
That language about "not in Austin, Houston, or Dallas" seems like something the College Station (and Waco and Lubbock) legislators could get behind. While there would probably be a few people at UTEP and UTRGV and maybe Texas Christian University that would be able to get these grants, it would basically all go to A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor faculty.
That, and the dream of Making College Station a Station Again makes this sound like the ideal platform for someone wanting to be the next Rick Perry (first Aggie governor).
While we're on the dreaming, can we get the Union Pacific track connecting College Station and Bryan to run a local light rail, and rezone all the empty industrial land along Finfeather Road to allow massive car-free student housing?
There's definitely a role for a bit of easy money without too many strings. As my lab grows, it's increasingly difficult to keep everyone paid from federal grants alone just due to timing (they all start and end at different times). Having some funds with fewer restrictions can help bridge gaps between other grants and also give you some room to develop new ideas.
Growing up in Bryan/College Station, I'd really doubt the local population would utilize the station very much, particularly considering it will likely be a 30 minute ride to the station, plus boarding, traveling, dealing with navigating Houston without a car. The outskirts of Houston are just over an hour away by car!
I'd expect Texas A&M would offer bus service to the station, particularly during semester breaks. It might get infrequent utilization from College Station to Dallas, and you might see a community of Houston commuters pop up close to the station (if the Houston terminus is convenient).
B/CS to Houston would be mainly used by students I would think (as long as the Houston Metro extends a light rail line to the station, which I believe they're planning to do), and Houston to B/CS route would be huge on game day, but I think you're right that this leg would be relatively low-use otherwise. However, I do think that locals would use hypothetical routes to Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio pretty frequently (especially since the stations in those cities would likely be walking distance to the main visitor attractions).
But I think the bigger thing is probably the connections between the big cities.
I wonder if there would be a market for high-rise condos above the station - certainly many university-affiliated people would be happy to live there for easy getaways, but I wonder if there would be some work-from-home Texans who wouldn't mind living near a campus in exchange for having quick access to all the cities.
Absolutely. My above comment was mainly to add context on the local B/CS utilization. I see a lot of potential of the Houston/Dallas link. I'd expect both cities to try and support inter-system connections, financing allowing. I hope it works out and the regional network is extended to the rest of central Texas.
I write this as a former Houstonian who now lives in the East. Isn't the argument against a Texas train the simple fact that you have to get around once you get off the thing? Could any city in the state build a transit network big enough to deal with all the people who might be getting off a train several times a day? Not saying it can't be done, just that building the rail system might turn out to be the easy part.
I really feel the advent of ride-hailing services makes this a much more manageable issue. (Especially once the US auto fleet is substantially further along on the transition to EVs, though the country is (shockingly!) foot-dragging on this last part, from what I can see).
Build a nice big parking garage next to the station and let a storey each to Hertz, Avis and Enterprise.
There are a lot of people that fly from Houston to Dallas - if I'm reading the BTS data tables correctly, about 1.3 million in 2019 (and presumably a similar number in the opposite direction). All of those are people who arrived without a car. The train will be much faster than flying (if for no other reason than the absence of TSA security theater).
Add on however many can be attracted from driving, which won't be insignificant.
Sure, if you can build a real transit network, even better. But Alon Levy is correct that these cities are big enough that there will be plenty of customers even without.
Houston and Dallas both have light rail that I've heard is reasonable and city governments that would likely support linking to the regional rail, financing allowing.
Texas Central Railroad out here like "we exist"
I think we need companion pieces for NY, CA, and FL
I would love to have you take a crack at Florida, since we have some weird things going on of our own. As an example, we have universal pre-K already! We have new infrastructure projects all the time (but they're mostly roads), and there's very few dense urban cores but a LOT of mid-density suburb-esque cities, and I'd be curious to see what you'd come up with
More Brightline!
The Department of Energy Office of Science has a similar budget to the NSF ($7 billion vs. $8.2 billion in 2020) and funds a similar amount of research. When this is overlooked, we end up with things like senators claiming the DOE doesn't do any science or need any more funding during the committee debate on the Endless Frontier act.
Are there any conservative NIMBY forces working to prevent more growth in hopes of preventing further movement to the left? There has to be few.
Would absolutely read a slow boring series on how to Yglesify every state in the union
"Better Know A State!"
Then he could put Setbacks and other zoning requirements On Notice.
(Ignore this post, young people.)
The Neoliberal Shill version of Sufjan Stevens's Fifty State Project
Except it was all a lie and there was never a plan to do the full 50 :( :( :( Matt already has 2!
You mean he doesn’t have an album’s worth of material on North Dakota he’s been waiting to release?
Sufjan made it to two as well, so we'll see if Matty Yg can beat him
This might be the closest to home a slow boring comment has EVER hit.
I am disappointed that your tax recommendations did not include adopting/encouraging municipalities to adopt a land value tax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fzk_Sc4bBY
The land! The land! 'Twas God who made the land!
The land! The land! The ground on which we stand!
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
God gave the land to the people!
Texas has a process whereby people can contest the county assessor's valuation of their property each year, to ensure they aren't overtaxed. I definitely worry right now that this is a way of empowering rich people to decrease their property tax burden, while giving counties cover for over-taxing property of anyone who doesn't have the skills needed to do the contestation process.
I worry that this sort of system might be even worse with a land value assessment system - though it's also quite possible that it will avoid problems. (My house dropped in value by 50% in the first tax year, and then returned to the value I paid for it the next year, because the county assessor didn't have any idea how to assess a modern attached townhouse in walking distance of downtown, but I suppose the land would be easier to assess accurately, since it's the same as the single-family homes across the street.)
Not to mention the rich person's scam of giving away a conservation easement. Suggest the same for anyone living in a doublewide with a view of a tree.
I'm shocked to hear a county assessor decreased the assessment value. I thought that was just a theoretical possibility, not something that could actually happen in real life.
The county assessor never reduced the assessment value - at the time we bought the house, there were no comparable properties in the county, so the very first assessment was half what we paid for it (i.e., they assessed a modernist townhome within walking distance of downtown at the price-per-square-foot of a suburban McMansion because the only new builds in town up until that point were suburban McMansions) but a year later, when the other units in the building had sold, they assessed our property at the price-per-square-foot the others in the building sold at. (This lack of comparable properties actually made it a bit difficult to get the mortgage at first, and the bank had to do something they probably considered shady internally to approve a mortgage of the size we took out.)
I tend to think the appeals process could be less easily abused under a LVT. (I agree that it really privileges rich homeowners, but I think pretty much every state has an appeal/contestation process; to not have one could be a due process issue.) The issue with property assessment as it's done now is that it's basically an appraisal process. And appraisals are inherently subjective and easily abused. Under a LVT it would be pretty hard to argue that two parcels of land next to each other have a different value, and you also wouldn't have difficulty distinguishing between the value of residential, commercial, and industrial properties (a big issue for a long time in Cook County/Chicago has been underassessment of commercial properties relative to residential).
The technical detail I'm less familiar with is how you go about actually setting the land value in the first place. With residential property sales in a modestly sized market, it's conceptually easy to figure out how much a given piece of real estate is worth. But, sort of by definition, there isn't a large market for vacant land in densely populated areas.
Assuming there's a reasonable amount of new build, you can do sale price minus construction cost.
I don't know either TBH. I'll have to talk to a friend of mine, he's a tax assessor in a New Jersey city that could charitably be described as "blighted."
There's a shiny dome.
Yeah, there's more consistency for neighboring parcels. Interesting local perspective!
As I understand it, the difference between LVT and property taxes is whether you include the assessment of improvements on the land (houses, pools, etc.)
Why would you say its better to exclude improvements when calculating the tax?
There's two axes here, one economic, one urbanist/neighborhoody.
The economic axis is Adam Smith's old observation that a tax on "ground rents"--that is, a land-value tax--is the least-distortionary tax available. This is because the supply of land is, to a first approximation, completely fixed; Dubai and the Netherlands aside, you can't really create more of it, and you certainly can't do it cheaply. On the other hand, the amount of *buildings* on a given parcel can be quite variable, especially now we have elevators. Taxing the improvements discourages development, which depresses the overall amount of economic activity in an area. But taxing just the value of the land doesn't do that, at least not nearly as much. (At least, this is the economic theory as I understand it, I could be wrong).
The urbanist/neighborhoody axis is this: Property taxes penalize good/consciencious property owners and reward bad/lazy ones. A property owner who keeps their house or storefront or what have you looking nice and in good repair pays *more* in standard property tax than their neighbor who let the facade crumble and the yard get overrun by weeds. Property tax particularly incentivizes landlords to put a bare minimum of effort into maintaining their properties, since doing so increases their tax burden and narrows their profit margins. A land-value tax, by taxing the properties the same, eliminates this malign incentive, which hopefully leads to nicer neighborhoods and better housing for tenants.
Thanks for sharing. Definitely not an expert, but most of the variation in appraisals that I've seen come down to location much more than upkeep. Doesn't change the underlying point though.
As I understand it, the advantages of a George-ite land tax system are A) removes/reduces the disincentive to improve property and B) discourages amassing of large land holdings. Obviously the rate of taxation is a critical detail. I think to make such a system work the government would need act as a land bank to take custody of no-longer-wanted land parcels.
The land-bank portion is important. The interesting thing is that many cities have built the infrastructure to do this already (they already have the land bank), so there's nothing stopping them really. Also, relating this to Texas, that can be the state-government policy to get municipalities to switch to LVT: "Adopt an LVT basis and the state will take care of unwanted properties, you won't bear that cost." Given Texas's hot real estate market, I can't imagine the burden to the state would be that large, and the state can take advantage in the long term.
True, but with standard property tax there's a tax advantage to keeping the empty plots empty, whereas with LVT you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't try and make some use of your land. I can confirm from conversations with several of the kinds of landlords who prevail in Tioga and East Germantown that not wanting to pay higher property taxes is a major reason they don't keep up their properties. (I don't handle City REA directly, but I deal with these guys all the time because they also neglect other City taxes and fees that I do handle.)
The other thing is the interaction of LVT and upzoning. If your property gets upzoned then your LVT goes up. Your property tax only goes up when you actually build that bigger building.
This means that having a single family home on land that could permit a missing-middle apartment block is expensive in taxes. Doing the same in a conventional property tax regime isn't.
I won't get into land value vs. income/consumption taxes; I haven't studied it enough. Between traditional property tax and land value, though, it's pretty much a no-brainer to me. (I invoke "The Land" mostly as a joke; I'm not actually a single-tax Georgist.) On the Philly-specific front, actually, adopting an LVT structure would make moot all the arguments we've had back and forth about the 10-year tax abatement by giving it to everyone.
That seems reasonable, though obviously whether we've struck exactly the right balance is a fair subject for debate. The biggest advocate of rebalancing in favor of property taxes is probably Domb, and even he doesn't think we should get rid of our other taxes. I'm agnostic, just so long as I still have a job lol.
(I do think we should look into restructuring/reforming the taxes, as they are rather confusing, but that may be difficult because what we can impose is in large part dictated by stuff like the tax uniformity provision in the state constitution and other impositions from Harrisburg. Like, a graduated income tax would open up lots of possibilities, but we can't do that because uniformity.)
Yeah, if you want to keep it administratively simple, just say that they have to use the federal tax brackets so they can't go inventing their own thresholds.
That wouldn't work, "uniformity" is a weird provision in the PA state constitution that has been interpreted to prohibit both the state and municipalities from imposing graduated taxes of any kind, as well as having some other effects (e.g. you can't tax commercial property at a higher rate than residential). It's called "uniformity" because the language mandates that the rate of taxation of a tax be "uniform" throughout the jurisdiction to which it applies.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I'm not saying that a graduated tax would be a *good* idea, but it's annoying we can't even consider it. It's the most obvious example of the constraints placed on the City's taxing power, the rest get kinda esoteric.
I'm curious how important you think it is to balance state income variability in that process? My understanding is that property tax intake has much lower intake variability than income taxes. I know Philly and California aren't the same, but my understanding of California is that their tax intake is quite variable because they rely so much on income taxes relative to property taxes and their income tax is very progressive. So that when Silicon Valley is doing well (2020) they are flush, but when IPOs and such slow down, their intake can drop dramatically.