Madam, – Fintan O’Toole makes some very good sense in his article on property tax and the lack of Government willingness to even start the process of looking at a fair process of evaluating property in this country.
A start could be made by requiring that the value of all property transactions are correlated by a Government agency and published. This would, after a very short time, produce the required data as to valuations throughout the country. It would also be of great help to the consumer who has had to rely on “expert” advise as to property valuations from estate agents, whose agenda may not always be that of the client. I would, of course, expect opposition from the estate agents whose “expertise” would be diminished.
A bit of transparency in property valuations could only be a good thing, and if it assists in an eventual accurate database on which a fair property tax can be levied it should benefit us all. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Fintan O’Toole’s article about property tax (Opinion, July 13th) is very interesting, but I see a major flaw in his argument. I fully agree with his point that “At the height of the boom, in 2006, the State took in €1.3 billion from stamp duty. That revenue – together with the income from VAT on building materials and from the wages of construction workers — is gone. And it would be insane to try to bring it back, even if we could. It was fool’s gold.” However, I would question the logic behind his comment, “If we’re going to replace it, it makes sense to do so with a different, more sustainable form of property tax.” I suggest that we should not even begin to try to replace that revenue stream, because it was a stream of borrowed money, not earned money, and as such it is not sustainable.
Whatever chance we have of rebuilding our economy so it is capable of repaying the crazy amounts of money we borrowed between 1997 and 2007, there is no way we can continue to fund the level of Government expenditure that the antics of Seánie FitzPatrick and his buddies facilitated.
The level of public services we can afford is directly related to the level of economic activity taking place. If we distort this relationship by taxing the notional values of private dwellings, as opposed to taxing actual economic transactions, we will destroy the fabric of society from the inside out.
There is only one pot of money the Government can tax, and the politicians’ job is to decide where the taxes are best levied. We can do it in a sustainable way, by taxing economic activity and matching spending to income, or by bleeding the country dry trying to maintain 2007 levels of expenditure using “fool’s gold”. – Is mise,