Richard Reisch: Interventions on Building-Tax Reform

Published in 1904, these collected speaker extracts record Richard Reisch’s interventions in the seventh session of the inquiry into building-tax reform, held on 26 November 1903. Their structure is dialogical: Reisch responds to an expert’s testimony, referring to earlier discussions and numbered questions whose full wording is not reproduced. His interventions address two connected problems: the administrative feasibility of assessing buildings and the capitalization of existing taxes into property values. Throughout, he presses for distinctions that make valuation practicable and for consistency in explaining how taxation affects owners.

Reisch first distinguishes the assessment of construction value (Bauwert) from that of use value (Nutzwert). The preceding day’s proposal, he recalls, concerned establishing the construction value of every individual building. That would be substantially harder than assessing use value, for which more reference points exist and a more standardized procedure would therefore be possible. His objection concerns the information required by a particular valuation method, rather than valuation in the abstract. Even the apparently easier method, however, cannot simply rely on the coverage of the personal income tax:

Immerhin möchte ich auch gegenüber den Ausführungen des Herrn Experten darauf hinweisen, daß es nach meiner Kenntnis der Sachlage in Österreich wohl sehr viele Ortschaften geben würde, welche keinen einzigen Personaleinkommensteuerpflichtigen beherbergen, so daß für die Zwecke der Personaleinkommensteuer noch ganze Ortschaften bezüglich des Nutzwertes nicht in Betracht gezogen wären.

English translation: Nevertheless, in response to the expert’s remarks, I would also point out that, to my knowledge of conditions in Austria, there would probably be very many localities without a single person liable to personal income tax, so that entire localities would not yet have been considered with regard to use value for the purposes of personal income tax.

The practical issue is territorial coverage: an assessment system organized around income-tax liability may leave whole villages unexamined. Reisch thus separates the relative ease of estimating use value from the completeness of the administrative evidence available for doing so. Neither the existence of a tax apparatus nor the availability of some valuations establishes that a comprehensive building assessment is already within reach.

He then turns to question 19 and the “amortization” of the house-rent tax and its surcharges. Here amortization means the absorption of an established tax burden into property value, rather than repayment of a debt. Reisch confines the question to existing taxation: future taxes cannot already have been incorporated, and subsequent changes would require the adjustment process to occur anew. This temporal distinction also governs his treatment of surcharges. If they have remained at the same level for a substantial period, he sees no reason to treat them differently from the underlying tax:

Ich kann mir auch einen Grund, warum Zuschläge zur Hauszinssteuer, so lange sie durch längere Zeit in gleicher Höhe bestehen, anders behandelt werden sollten, nicht denken, und ich glaube, es war wahrscheinlich die Meinung der Fragesteller die, daß, wenn man die Frage bezüglich der Hauszinssteuer zu bejahen oder zu verneinen findet, sie implizite auch hinsichtlich der stabilen, schon länger bestehenden Zuschläge zur Hauszinssteuer beantwortet ist.

English translation: Nor can I think of any reason why surcharges on the house-rent tax, so long as they remain at the same level for an extended period, should be treated differently, and I believe the questioners probably intended that, if the question concerning the house-rent tax is answered affirmatively or negatively, it is implicitly answered also with respect to the stable, long-established surcharges on that tax.

Reisch’s central conceptual move is to make stability and duration, rather than the distinction between state tax and surcharges, decisive for capitalization. He challenges the expert’s reported willingness to regard the state tax as fully amortized while categorically denying the same of surcharges. He also invokes the expert’s answers to questions 5 and 32: if exemptions and differences in taxation affect building values, existing taxation must likewise find expression in those values. The argument asks for symmetry between the valuation of tax advantages and that of tax burdens.

The final intervention formulates a possible agreement rather than recording an unqualified concession by the expert:

Ich glaube, mit dem Herrn Experten übereinzustimmen, wenn ich seine Meinung dahin verstehe, daß die jeweils bestehende Staatssteuer samt Zuschlägen als amortisiert zu betrachten ist und nur spätere Änderungen für den Hausbesitzer fühlbar bleiben.

English translation: I believe I am in agreement with the expert if I understand his opinion to mean that the state tax currently in force, together with its surcharges, is to be regarded as amortized, and that only subsequent changes remain perceptible to the house owner.

The extracts therefore contribute a focused clarification to the reform inquiry: valuation requires adequate evidence, while the incidence of an established tax must be distinguished from the effects of changing it. Their relevance lies in connecting administrative feasibility with a precise account of how fiscal burdens enter property values, without presenting a comprehensive reform scheme.