Friday 23 December 2011

Poor Widows out in force

From the BBC:

One of those who cannot afford to pay the [property] tax is 87-year-old Katerina Leta. She lives with her grandson, Tasos Dimitriadies, a mature student in a small apartment in north Athens. The property has been in their family for generations (1) but without a single income between them, they are dependent on relatives for most of their expenses...

He says he cannot afford it and won't borrow the money because he is angry there is no exemption for people in his position."They are asking us to pay a tax that we paid when we bought the house and the constructor paid when he built the house," (2) he tells the BBC World Service...

In cafes and tavernas, talk of the tax seeps into almost every conversation and many refer to it as the "haratsi", a name for the hated levy imposed on them under the Ottoman occupation. Mayor Iraklis Gotzis is encouraging his constituents not to pay the tax Even the union representing electricity workers at state run company DEI has called on its members to boycott the tax, describing it as "barbaric"...(3)

The Greek government further alienated itself when Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos, part of the government that devised the tax, told Mega TV channel that he could not afford to pay the €7,500 (£6,250, $9,785) bill for the many properties he owned... (4)

And new Prime Minister Lucas Papademos decided earlier this month that the levy would not be withdrawn at the end of the year because it was "absolutely necessary to ensure that public finances did not stray from the targets set". But he did offer some concessions, promising to seek a fairer way of excluding those unable to pay the tax, which ranges between €0.50 and €20 per square meter depending on the location of the property...

With a mother who has cancer and a son who is a full-time student living at home, Dimitra Koutsis struggles to make ends meet on her meagre pension. Unable to afford the tax, she has been given another fortnight to pay up.

"I am hoping that something will change, that they will see that this is madness," she says, "My mother has cancer and she needs to be comfortable. We even keep her medicines in the fridge so I don't know how we would manage. (5) It is pure blackmail, that is what it is. (6) Next we will be finding taxes on our water bills and who knows where it will end."

Greece's highest court is considering whether the threat of withdrawing people's power supply is unconstitutional, but so far the measure seems to have been effective. The government says it has already collected 80% of the first wave of property taxes (7).


1) What relevance does that have to anything? Is he suggesting that only arrivistes should pay it? This attitude has been drummed into the British, that the longer land has been occupied by the same family, the worthier the family is. Why? It just means they could never be bothered to do anything apart from collect rent.

2) Well obviously he didn't. That's like saying "I don't want to pay my car tax because the manufacturer paid corporation tax".

3) Ooooh! An adjective! "Barbaric"! Well that proves it then, doesn't it?

4) So it's not huge amounts of money, is it? And if he can't afford to pay for them all, then he can sell a few.

5) Wow! What a sob story. Mrs Koutsis is an even Poorer Widow than Mrs Leta!

6) No it's not blackmail, it's a tax and you have to pay it. It's funny how she's quite happy to collect her "meagre pension", pick up the drugs for her poor sick mother or send her son to a subsidised university, all of which are paid out of taxes levied on other people.

7) 80% is pretty impressive by Greek standards, which is yet another argument in favour of such taxes.

Via Drewster at HPC

17 comments:

QP said...

All very true but a "classic" argument against LVT is "Oh no not another tax" when in reality we want to reduce other taxes in lieu. But in Greece this is indeed an additional tax, hence the hostility.

Now if they reduced income tax at the same time as introducing this property tax then the old widow and the mature student would..

..oh wait.

Derek said...

QP wrote ...oh wait

That's why the Citizen's Income is such an important part of LVT implementation. It acts like an income tax reduction for those who pay income tax and like a property tax reduction for those who don't.

Mark Wadsworth said...

QP, but other taxes are relatively low in Greece, i.e. because people evade them en masse.

D, agreed.

QP said...

I guess you could argue that the Greek hostility is because the property tax is so hard to avoid. A useful attribute for a tax and not something the Greeks are used to!

Mark Wadsworth said...

QP, is there no such thing as an honest Greek? LVT and the like are taxes for honest people - it's impossible to evade so honest people don't have to pay extra to subsidise the dishonest.

dearieme said...

"This attitude has been drummed into the British": come off it, Wadders.

"Ooooh! An adjective! "Barbaric"!" Some people seem to find deployment of that adjective a quite sufficient argument against capital punishment.

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, OK, can you explain to me why we are supposed to down on these welfare families who are third generation unemployed but are supposed to look up to these twentieth generation land owners who haven't done a day's honest work in centuries?

And to compare LVT with capital punishment is extreme, fundamentalist Home-Owner-Ism, isn't it? At least people can explain why capital punishment is barbaric, nobody has done any such thing for this Greek tax.

Rob said...

80%? Fucking heroic by Greek standards. Probably unprecedented.

Greeks may lose their status as the world's #1 tax evaders if this keeps up.

Duncan Stott said...

I'll do Katerina Leta and any other pensioner a deal: I'll pay your property tax and let you live there rent-free for the rest of your life, if you hand the deeds over to me.

There you go, that's your "poverty" sorted out.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Rob, exactly.

DS, ah, but don't forget that "the property has been in the family for generations", surely you wouldn't want her unemployed grandson to be diddled out of his tax-free inheritance?

TheFatBigot said...

Mr Wadsworth, the more you comment on your beloved LVT the more statist and oppressive your position becomes.

The facts as reported - and you cite no basis on which they should be disputed - are: (i) these two people live in a small apartment, (ii) they have no rent or home-purchase loan to pay, (iii) one is beyond the age at which it is reasonable to expect her to work for a living, (iv) the other is a student, (v) they need little income to live and receive what they require mainly from relatives.

Clearly they are prime candidates for a tax in the eyes of those who consider ownership of a tiny bit of real estate to be an evil that should be punished.

Anonymous said...

TFB: citizen's income would cover the tax on their "tiny bit of real estate".

I don't know how it works in Greece, but if students needed to pay council tax in the UK, their bursaries could be increased and would just be an additional factor in students choosing where to live.

Mark Wadsworth said...

TFB, you know perfectly well that (part of) the point of collecting LVT is to dish it out again as Citizen's Dividend. As Anon 9.51 says, people in small, cheap flats would pay very little LVT and it would be a small chunk out of their CI.

And I know you've spent a life time twisting the truth for a living, but this is nonsense:

"Clearly they are prime candidates for a tax in the eyes of those who consider ownership of a tiny bit of real estate to be an evil that should be punished."

No no and thrice no.

The land is just there and things run much better if people have exclusive possession of certain bits. So far so good.

One of the many benefits of LVT/CI is that everybody owns some land as of right, as the ground rent is collected from everybody, a bit spent on actual core functions of government, and the rest is dished out as a CI. If you are happy to make do with an average value plot, then LVT and CI net off to nothing.

I see nothing evil about that.

What is evil is that the Home-Owner-Ists want everybody to fight over a fixed amount of land and to try and bid the prices up ever higher, which is completely pointless. And what is evil is the way that these hugely rich and powerful bastards always pluck a few poor widows out of a hat to use as a human shield against LVT.

They couldn't give a shit about poor widows, and flatly refuse to admit that it's not difficult to work out a system of exemptions, discounts, deferments, higher state pension, whatever.

Bayard said...

I'm not very impressed if all the anti-LVT lobby can put forward as an argument is the tired old PWB. Come on, BBC, where are all the other KLNs? There's 184 other ones, you know.

Lola said...

The thing that annoys me most about landlordism (!) is that it works to take all the profit from wealth creation. As I drive my business forward so the landlord seeks a bigger share of this wealth that he hasn't earned. You can see this operating best in pubco's. If LVT can sort out this then I am for it absolutely.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, exactly. There are infinite KLNs, all you need to do is choose a hardship case or an unrealistic premise and busk it from there.

L, pubco's is a specifc topic, sure LVT will help, but in the short term it's the smoking ban which needs fixing and in the medium term, the difficulty in getting change of use to open a new pub.

Lola said...

MW. Yep. I am a fervent non-smoker (asthmatic) and I discourage it in the two of my children who smoke. But I am fiercely against the official ban of smoking in pubs. It is authoritarianism, a destruction of freedom. It is absolutely nothing to do with the state where people smoke, or drink come to that, as I am also passionately against licensing laws. As a non-smoker I am perfectly able to not give pubs full of smoke my custom. I am also certain that other pubs will offer non-smoking areas (or smoking areas).