Talk:Parcel tax

Bias since 2016

This article is extremely biased to color parcel taxes negatively. A core benefit of the parcel tax is its economic efficiency: since the quantity of land parcels is fixed, taxing it doesn't have the negative impact of reducing supply (for example, relative to income taxes reducing work, or sales taxes reducing consumption). It also encourages vertical density by enacting the same parcel tax regardless of the number of units on the parcel. These qualities make it similar to land value tax, one of the most efficient taxes; the parcel tax would be made more efficient only by varying with the value of the undeveloped parcel.

I'd suggest dampening some of the critical language and including benefits to make the article more neutral. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaxGhenis (talk • contribs) 2016-11-06 (UTC)

I agree. An anonymous user in the 184.254.x.x IP address range made major edits to the page in February 2016, and ever since then has been enforcing a priority to calling out the unfairness of the tax over the actual details of the tax, and removing maintenance tags about it. For example, when another user tagged the article as {{NPOV}} and explained why on 2016-04-11, the 184.254 user just blanked the NPOV tag without comment; later that month, when another user removed the words "highly regressive" from the first words of the article, citing NPOV, 184.254 returned it with citations, but didn't address the problem that the intro sentence doesn't actually describe the tax except to make sure it matches a term with negative connotations. When a user added the {{bias}} tag on 2016-07-03, the 184.254 again removed the tag within 2 days, without explanation. When it was re-added the next day (as part of a revert by another user), 184.254 removed it again saying that it "is not clear what the neutrality issue is"). Throughout this, 184.254 has ignored several unsourced paragraphs the same user added in 2016, neither deleting nor providing citations for them. There are several unsourced conclusions that smack of Wikipedia:Synthesis or other Wikipedia:Original research opinions. For example:

• "Major Fairness Issues" as a section header. Not content to label this "Fairness", or "Fairness Issues", apparently the user must emphasize that the fairness issues are "major".
• "Parcel taxes also don’t legally require any relationship between the tax amount paid (or the ability to pay) and the benefits received. As a result, it is up to local voters in a parcel tax election to carefully weigh and evaluate the merits of any parcel tax proposal." Why is that "as a result"? Shouldn't local voters "carefully weigh and evaluate the merits" of any tax or anything else on an election ballot? And in any case, it's original research to claim or imply, without research, that voters have a greater responsibility to evaluate one type of subject more than they would other subjects that don't have this advice.

Due to the 184.254 user, the whole thrust of the article is primarily about how unfair the parcel tax is and how voters can kill it. So I'm going to tag this as {{Essay-like}} and {{original research}} and attempt some repair on the most blatant parts, and if that anonymous IP tries to re-introduce biased emphasis or remove tags without remedying the problems, we can then switch to {{POV}}, which is not to be removed until the problem is fixed. (Note that neutral point of view and factual correctness are distinct topics: An article can be factually correct and still fail to meet the Wikipedia requirement for a neutral point of view.) --Closeapple (talk) 05:35, 31 March 2018 (UTC)