This does nothing but hurt the working people.

If not, then you're the first place I've heard of in the US that doesn't tax real estate.

We have local property taxes and this is the primary way we finance schools in Texas now. It used to be the State of Texas provided the majority of money for public schools. Ever since republicans took control of the state they have been providing less and less money to schools at the state level. School districts have no choice but to make property taxes the majority of their revenue now.

Man I hate that crew at the Texas Lege starting with our dickhead Governor Perry.

has property taxes both at the state level, and at various local levels, including property taxes for library and fire districts.

It would seem that a collection mechanism is already in place, that would not involve either the startup or ongoing expenses of administration. As I recall, Texas has no income tax, if one were to be instituted there, it would require the costs of bureaucracy.

Let's face it, there are only three things to tax:

1) Consumption, through sales taxes, or flat excise taxes on a purchase.
2) Income taxes, which simply tax the amount gained during an annual accounting period, minus certain allowable exemptions and deductions.
3) Wealth taxes, which have can keep constant, even though nothing new is acquired or something existing is sold or disposed of. There are often exemptions and exclusions on what is taxed in this way. Property taxes are a common example of this type of tax.

I think we can both agree that tax type #1 hurts the poorest people, especially if food, medical care, and housing are not exempted. Even if they are, there are still the non-food items that lower income people need that subject them to this tax, no matter how great their needs or limited their incomes.

As for the difference between the other two types of taxes, #2 is much more often than not a "secret" tax, you don't know for sure what any other person is using of the allowable deductions, exemptions, exclusions and credits. The tax return document of the taxpayer is not usually visible to an outside watchdog group, and is more often than not, not fully audited by the taxing authority past simple mathematical accuracy and matching of required reporting. On the other hand, I can find out precisely how many dollars everybody in my town is paying for their homes or their business properties, if somebody worked out a sweetheart deal with the assessor, I can smoke that out.

You see why I tend to view property taxes with less scorn and suspicion than I do the other two types of taxes.

The issue is how would they appraise intellectual property. Would it be assessed against patents and/or copyrights? What about internal process applications that have neither?

It is difficult to get reasonable, fair appraisals on tangible assets. Therefore, I could certainly see some problems arise when trying to tax something like intellectual property. For instance, I wrote programming code for the proprietary databases at a prior employer where I was a stat analyst. One of my more notable projects include developing a database that cost about $5,000 to develop but saved nearly a half million down the road in reduced labor costs. Would you tax the initial investment or the realized gains?

I imagine that others might have concerns that I haven't mentioned. I just don't know how it would be feasible.

We already know that each article is worth $75,000.00 according to Righthaven/Stephens Media.

How many copies of Microsoft Windows? Microsoft retains ownership.

Property taxes are unfair, inequitable, leave too many poor districts inadequately funded. But income taxes are considered EVIL in Texas.