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........

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