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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   246 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 2, 2026

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Sometimes it’s good to admit when your enemies do something smart. I like Mamdanis Pied-a-Terre tax. My gut says most of these are likely tax dodgers which isn’t fair to the rest of the city. Either legally tax-dodging by limiting days or being smaller fish not getting caught. Making them pay a PAT tax or NY income taxes seems fundamentally fair to me.

And if it gets people to sell second homes and instead stay in hotels 2 months out of the year I think that’s a net positive for a city with limited housing.

I’ll disagree with a million things with Mamdani and NYC policy but the concept of a PAT tax feels fair to me. I would be in favor of lower taxes overall but a PAT feels like it would capture a lot of people who use NYC services but dodge their taxes which boost tax fairness in my opinion.

I'm not a fan of this policy at all. It incentivizes the kind of person who wants to be in New York to be somewhere other than New York. Given that I live somewhere other than New York, this presents an unacceptable risk of me being exposed to the kind of person who wants to be in New York.

Contraire- this will mildly lower housing costs in New York, resulting in more of the kind of people who want to be in New York living there, thus I will run into fewer of them in DFW.

My opinion is getting rid of rent control would be great. It would be great if NYC kicked out all the poor people living on benefits and cheap rent.

And this harms me. It probably would make sense for me to live in NYC. I would have some career agglomeration effects. The costs structure of NYC is very bad for higher paid professionals especially if you can’t convert income into untaxed equity etc (which you leave for a year when you realize).

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