Creating Your Own Low-Tax Haven in Ten Easy Steps
The economic slump got you down? With recent economic news, it’s awful hard to see how much worse things can get. Taxes are going up, spending is down, revenue is down, employment is down, unemployment is up. Is there any bright spot in all this? Yes indeedie doo there is!
Well, first off let’s get on the table that this won’t fix all of your problems, but it’s a start.
Sick of paying high property taxes? Taxes that pay to send her kids to school? His golf course that you never use? The library with the musty books? That black hole of a mass transit district?
The plan: Incorporate your own low-tax municipality! Within months you’ll see business flock to you and residents clamor for housing and you can sit back and bask in the fact that your property taxes are 20, 30 or 50% lower than that guy in that place. Just follow these easy steps!
1) Now this one’s a little tricky, but you have to either a) find yourself a nice plot of undeveloped land adjacent to a (relatively) big city or b) find an area of relatively low-intensity use with high average incomes within an existing municipality or unincorporated area
2) Incorporate! Make a city charter and become your very own city!
3) Form a mass transit district with no bus or rail services so that the mass transit from the city can’t start serving your area and you can keep property values high. This means you can keep taxes low while generating higher revenues.
4) Turn all of your major thoroughfares and arterial roads into state highways. You get the road, the state picks up the tab!
5) Zone all of the land near major roads commercial and with those low low property taxes, businesses will trip over themselves to get into the action!
6) Avoid expensive, ongoing public works projects. This means no or few parks, no library, no museums. That’s why you have to be next to a city. They pay for the stuff and you get to use them – at no or low cost! Oh sure you might have to pay to use the library, but then only the people who use it pay, not all the rest of us.
7) Zone to restrict apartment buildings. More people per unit of land = more chance of children = more schools. Keep the density low! In fact, if you can help it, restrict single family dwellings too. They’re a tax drain. Commercial = good for city coffers, residential = bad.
8) Don’t have a fire or police department. Contract them out to the city. You’ll save the capital costs of maintaining the building and won’t have to worry about labor relations or spikes in cost. Contracting is great for your new little muni because you don’t pay the full cost of the service. Don’t worry though, you’re not stealing it, it just doesn’t make sense to have a full police and fire force for your little piece of Mayberry.
9) Join the best school district in your area. They’re not tied to municipal boundaries and people will pay a premium to see their kids going to the best school around.
10) Keep it homogeneous! I know I know. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Homogenous how? Well start with income. You want everyone roughly equal so that no one feels like they’re paying more. If you can exclude other undesirable types, that’d be great too. Remember, people will pay more for services for people who are like them.
With these simple guidelines, your taxes will be low, stay low, and your town will be rolling in revenue. No municipal crunch here folks!
Comment by arthur on 17 March 2009 at 5:14 pm:
Do you have favorite examples? Obviously Disney World is one, but a more mundane example is City of Industry, California.
Or, for about half of those points, Savoy, Illinois.
Comment by Brandon Ruiz on 17 March 2009 at 5:29 pm:
Well Savoy was actually what I had in mind when I wrote this to be honest. I work for a real estate appraiser, and was talking to my boss about it about a week ago and decided to write something about it. Rather than write about “parasite” cities, I thought this would be more fun.
My favorite example is most of the Inland Empire in California (that’s San Bernardino and Riverside counties for the uninitiated) in relation to the city of LA. But really this applies to one degree or another in most newly-formed municipalities on the urban fringe. It also applies (more egregiously I think) to wealthy enclaves within existing cities that break off. Don’t get me wrong on this. Some of the “steps” are perfectly sensible like contracting out police functions, but others are clever devices to get other people to pay for things the second city’s residents enjoy while it gets to tout its low taxes and business-friendly atmosphere.
Comment by Isabella Edwards on 9 July 2010 at 12:50 am:
Labor relations should always be good to ensure the success of a company.`-”
Comment by Jessica Bailey on 25 July 2010 at 8:12 am:
in order to have good busines practice, good labor relations is very important.:;`
Comment by Andrew Jackson on 10 September 2010 at 12:34 am:
labor relations with employees and company should always be in good terms to be more productive~..
Comment by Electric Shower on 12 October 2010 at 11:54 am:
labor relations should always be keep in good condition for businesses to prosper”.*
Comment by Microwave Cart %0B on 14 December 2010 at 12:13 pm:
labor relations can be like politics, sometimes it is hard to establish some very good labor relations “;:
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