Patrick King of Dublin City Chamber and I presented a paper to the Dublin Economics Workshop this year about how we could match a property tax with local expenditure so that it doesn’t become a transfer mechanism or general revenue raiser.
It would put power into local authorities, maximise incentives to do things in a cost efficient manner, and make it fair and relevant locally so that you aren’t comparing values of a house in Dublin 4 with one up a mountain in Lietrim.
By having no relationship to the actual costs of running a local authority we will instead opt for something that is bound to cause trouble in the future… the presentation is here.
We are going to publish a full paper in time, we never did get a chance to move to a more serious platform with the research, but what it did do (at least …