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Tim Helm's avatar

Thanks for diving into the stamp duty paper.

I can imagine that if the stamp duty to LVT switch increased the tax concessions for owner-occupiers relative to investors, then the composition of the seller and buyer cohorts would change in a way that produced the result. But then the result wouldn't be due to the removal of the transaction tax per se. We could keep stamp duty but make it punitive for investors and it would achieve the same thing.

From your reading, however, that's not why the result occurred. The result was by assumption. Interesting!

I have reached out to the author to ask him to upload a non-paywalled version.

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Jesse's avatar

It becomes increasingly obvious from Cam's arguments with property tax reform that specially targeted tax design makes more sense for achieving specific objectives rather than wholesale broad based tax changes for the sake of neutral tax treatment and "efficiency". Especially given the high political (and/or fiscal) cost of making these tax changes.

Do we want more new dwellings? Then tax new dwellings less.

Do we want more homeowners? Then tax people who don't own a home less. Tax people who own more than 1 property more.

Do we want wealthy people to stop banking wealth in their PPR as a tax shelter and keeping potentially good development sites off the market? Then tax those properties more.

Do we want pensioners to not face barriers to downsizing due to asset testing? Then create tenure neutrality for asset testing the pension.

Maybe if we actually started talking about making small tweaks that moved in these directions and made it a long term objective, we would start getting somewhere.

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