Photo by Jametlene Reskp

We know the Trump crew regularly spews batshit crazy stuff on things like pet-eating migrants and boys being transitioned to girls at school recess. That’s great for the genuinely loony core of Trump supporters, but there is a slightly less crazy type of lie that they tell for those who have pretensions of being serious people.

I came across this yesterday while reading about an initiative in my town (Astoria, Oregon) to have a vacant property tax. I have long been a big fan of vacant property taxes. This stems from the old saying that we should tax things that we want less of. That’s why we have big taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling. These are all things where most of us agree we would be better off with less.

The same story applies to vacant properties. We want people to live in houses, not have them sit empty some or all of the time.

The way the Astoria proposal is written, vacation homes would be subject to the tax unless the owner rented them out when they aren’t there. I believe this is similar to the tax that Zohran Mamdani has proposed for New York City. The idea is that we would rather have someone living in the unit all year, but if someone is rich enough to have a second (or third or fourth) home, they can afford to pay a premium to the city to help it provide services to its residents. In the case of the Astoria proposal, the money raised would be designated for affordable housing.

In seeing the debate around the tax, I was struck by many opponents claiming that it would require an elaborate bureaucracy to enforce the tax and that the city would be monitoring people’s comings and goings to determine how much time they spent in their unit. As the opponents put it, this would be an enormous invasion of privacy.

I double-checked the verification requirements under the proposed ordinance. They actually are quite simple. Every property owner indicates on a short form whether they live in, or rent their unit, or whether it is available for rent. If it doesn’t fall into one of these categories (there are a few others), they are subject to the tax. That’s it, one form, probably less than 2 minutes.

So where do the opponents come up with the vacant property tax Gestapo? There can be an investigation if someone lied on their form, sort of like the I.R.S. can investigate if we lie on our tax return. If someone has in fact answered honestly, it should be easy to show. They can show the rent checks from a tenant, or they can have the neighbors vouch that you mowed the lawn every week.

There could be some marginal cases, but these are likely to be few and far between. The only real problem comes if someone wants to lie and is upset about getting caught. Criminals don’t like law enforcement. We get that, but this is not an argument against the tax.

Anyhow, there are honest arguments people can make against the tax. It certainly discourages people from looking to Astoria as a place for a second home. Also, not everyone who has a vacation home is that rich, so maybe it’s not fair to tax them. But the idea that the tax is a horrible intrusion on people’s privacy is just crazy nonsense.

I was struck by a similar dose of crazy nonsense around the proposal for a wealth tax in California. The billionaires, of course, don’t want to pay more taxes, and they are spending lots of money to prevent the initiative from passing.

One of the lines that their lackeys came up with is that if the billionaires all sold their stock at the same time to cover their tax bill, it would create a panic in financial markets. We’ll get Mr. Arithmetic to help out here.

The estimates are that the tax will get the state $100 billion. Most of this can be paid in over five years, but let’s say it’s paid in just a single year. For comparison, the daily volume of trading on U.S. stock markets is roughly $440 billion. That comes to $110 trillion over the course of the year. That means the billionaires’ sell-off to cover their tax liability is less than 0.1% of the annual trading on the stock market. And this assumes they don’t pull any of the money out of bank accounts, CDs, government bonds, or other assets. That doesn’t seem very likely to cause a market panic.

Again, there are serious arguments that can be made against the wealth tax. It could discourage rich people from living in the state, although since the tax is based on residency at the start of 2026, the threat of leaving won’t matter much on this one. Still, the fact that people in the state are comfortable taxing the very rich may have a longer-term effect. And some people may think it’s unfair to tax away some of the fortunes of the very rich.

But it would be good if the argument could be reality-based. Absurd threats to the stability of the stock market are not reality-based, nor is the story of the vacancy tax Gestapo.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.