Flat Property Tax

Atrios at Eschaton has put forth a request for useful bad policy ideas to help illuminate the differences between Republicans and Democrats. My suggestion for this is a flat property tax.

The bad tax proposals so far are a flat income tax or a national sales tax. These are terribly regressive and, in my opinion, make no sense in terms of political philosophy. What of government functions or operations suggests that taxes should be based on income or spending? Instead I suggest that the one function of government that even conservatives can agree is legitimate is defense of property. As such then for each dollar of property one should pay a fraction of its value to cover these costs, hence a flat property tax. One advantage is that the taxes you pay don’t go up just because you get a raise. Only if you purchase something that requires federal government support do you pay additional taxes. This tax, unlike the sales and flat income, would be fairly progressive, although it’s not clear to me know if it would be more or less progressive than our current system.

I am working on examining some federal statistics to try and figure out how such a tax would have to be structured. If anyone knows anything about this, has seen any work on the subject, I’d be very interested. I’d also be interested to know if there is no work on this idea, why that is so. Why should there be people working on things as silly as a national sales tax and no one working on something like a flat property tax?