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The Big Idea

Professor Adam Braus pitches a fix nobody's tried: instead of taxing property at a flat rate, tax it like income — progressively. Own a modest home? You're barely taxed. Own a $50 million Real Estate empire? You pay real Money. It's a property tax with a conscience, and Adam argues it could solve the housing crisis, fix California's broken Prop 13 system, and take a swing at the billionaire-hoarding problem all at once.

Scot Maupin, doing his usual generous-interrogator thing, pokes at yachts, shell companies, and whether landlords will just pass the cost to renters — and Adam's got an answer for all of it.

What's Broken Right Now

• Prop 13 locks property taxes to a home's original purchase price — not what it's worth today. Buy a house in 1985 for pocket change, and decades later you're still paying taxes on pocket change, even as the home is worth millions.
• This hits commercial property too — including, allegedly, golf courses that shuffle ownership through shell-share tricks so they're never technically “sold.”
• The result: California's budget is starved relative to its actual wealth, and the state leans harder on income tax to compensate — which hits working people disproportionately harder than a property tax would.
• Meanwhile, in places like Montana and Hawaii, wealthy outsiders are buying up land and driving housing costs through the roof — not because there's a housing shortage, but because of hoarding and speculation.

The Fix: Progressive Property Tax

Instead of one flat rate on a property's value, tax brackets stack on a person's total property holdings:

• First $200K (or so): little to no tax — protects ordinary homeowners and grandmas on fixed incomes.
• $200K–$2M: a low rate, comparable to today's lowest-tax states.
• $2M–$10M+: rates climb toward the top of the national range (2%+).
• +$50M: a “super bracket” — 2.5–3%+ on the excess.

The pitch: this could roughly double California's property tax revenue (from ~$100B to $170–200B), funneled toward building housing, ending homelessness, and politically popular wins like paid leave — while lowering the tax burden on working people (no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security).

How It Closes the Loopholes

• A beneficiary registry (already used in Australia and some U.S. states) ties every property to a real human owner — so you can't dodge the tax by splitting ownership across an LLC for every house, or spreading deeds across Family members.
• Commercial real Estate is included. Adam's pitch turns this into a two-for-one: tax pressure forces a sell-off of empty downtown office space (a post-COVID glut), and the state can buy it cheap and convert it into actual housing — bringing residents (and life) back to dead downtowns.

The Objections, Pre-Debunked

Scot plays it straight and asks the obvious questions:

• “Won't the rich just flee to Florida or Montana?” Adam's counter: capital flight of real estate is mostly harmless — the buildings can't be packed in a suitcase. If a billionaire sells, the property stays in-state; prices just come down, which is the point.
• “Won't this just raise rents?” Possibly nudges the very top of the market, but the broad base of affordable housing should barely move — maybe even gets cheaper as demand shifts.
• “Will yachts and jets count?” No — keep it simple, this is real estate only.

Where the Idea Comes From

Adam name-checks Gary's Economics (and its scrappier YouTube cousin, Barry's Economics) for the broader “tax wealth, not work” framing, and ties the proposal back to existing progressive wealth-tax proposals from Bernie Sanders (the famous “8% bracket above $1B,” pegged to average market returns) and Elizabeth Warren (flat 2% above $50M) — positioning the progressive property tax as a more politically palatable, state-level cousin of those ideas.

Detour of the Episode

A spirited tangent on Maine's Senate race, Graham Platner — oyster farmer, combat veteran, and the episode's pick for “proof this message can win” — plus a running bit on whether wind turbines can literally use up the wind. (They cannot. Probably.)

Quotable

“I'm so wealthy that I can't pay the tax on my wealth.” — the complaint Adam says is doing a lot of work to protect a small number of very rich people.

Want me to also draft a short, punchier episode description (the 2–3 sentence blurb for podcast apps) or social media copy to go with these notes?

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Comments? Feedback? Questions? Solutions? Message us! We will do a mailbag episode.

Email: [email protected]
Adam: @ajbraus – [email protected]
Scot: @scotmaupin

adambraus.com (Link to Adam's projects and books)
The Perfect Show (Scot's solo podcast)

Thanks to Jonah Burns for the SFM music.

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Adam Braus Author, Blogger, Podcaster

Adam Braus is a polymath professor and professional in San Francisco. He has built many companies and non-profits and currently building a new college called Elton College. He is a lover of big ideas and new solutions.