I've heard this claim before, but have never seen it supported. Anecdotally, across decades of experience, it's typically not the poorest people I know who own much land, if any at all. Where they do, they own only a little, rather than a lot. Can you speak to your evidence for your claim?
For most middle class families the most expensive asset they own is their house. Do you really need evidence of that? It should be pretty self evident.
Classically [0], land taxes aren't on the value of the house, but of the land underneath. But, let's say that both the house and the land underneath get taxed, as is currently done. As a middle class homeowner, my total property tax bill is a small fraction of my income tax bill.
Let's say the US collects 6 Trillion/ year in all taxes [I'm probably off by some percent, but not too much for an internet comment.] Let's say there are about 1.5 Billion acres of taxable land in the US (Reverse engineered from "The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land in the United States, about 28% of the total land area of 2.27 billion acres." [1]) That works out to $4000/acre. For my ~sixth of an acre lot, my Federal tax bill would be about $700. That works out to be less than what I pay in income tax, so it looks like a deal to me.
It doesn't, I was replying to the comment that assumes that a property tax wouldn't hurt the poor because middle class is infinitely closer to being poor than they are being rich and this type of tax would hurt those people the most thereby causing them to fall into poverty.
