Henry Kissinger once quipped about the Iran-Iraq war, “Too bad they can’t both lose.”
The same can be said of the Los Angeles mayoral race, where two communists are running. Nithya Raman, the challenger, is taking on Karen Bass, the incumbent who let her city burn. Bass is grotesquely incompetent, corrupt, and often malicious. She’s been a communist her whole political life, going back to her time as a Cuban agent in the Venceremos Brigade.
Raman is running to her left. Go figure. Apparently it can be done.
LA’s ‘mansion tax’ backfires spectacularly as thousands of homes and jobs vanish https://t.co/1j1HG7SsCh https://t.co/c7zEHngIGB
— New York Post (@nypost) October 4, 2026
Raman sits on the City Council, so she has a record too, and her record is atrocious. One of her great achievements is a so-called “mansion tax,” meant to fund expanded subsidized housing.
Shockingly, it didn’t work. It had the same effect as every luxury tax: reduced jobs, far less revenue than expected, and money poured into a program that doesn’t work.
LA’s “mansion tax,” sold to Angelenos as a way to tax the rich and boost housing, has instead blocked the building of 9,100 homes, wiped out 16,650 full-time construction jobs and cost $452 million in revenue.
A damning new report says the tax, officially known as United to House LA, or ULA — has had a negative impact on the city’s high-end and multi-family real estate markets and collected less than half what it was expected to generate to tackle the city’s housing crisis.
The ULA was expected to raise about $900 million a year, or $2.7 billion over its first three years. Instead, it brought in about $1.2 billion.
The tax — which went into effect in April 2023 and was championed by socialist mayoral hopeful Councilwoman Nithya Raman — means if a property in LA sells for more than $5.4 million, the seller is taxed 4% of the price at closing. If it sells for more than $10.9 million, it increases to 5.5%.
You didn’t have to guess this would happen. We have real natural experiments showing that taxes like this are disastrous in every way possible. And the icing on the cake is that a $5.7 million home in L.A., while not exactly a middle-class abode, is not quite the mansion it would be in Dubuque. This is California, where anyone moving out of state walks away with a pile of cash they can retire comfortably on.
Not to mention that the tax isn’t just for homes; it hits commercial real estate, which means most properties in that market would qualify.
Despite its nickname, LA’s “mansion tax” applies far beyond luxury homes. Apartment buildings, offices, warehouses and vacant land can all trigger the tax if they sell above the thresholds.
About 1,000 of the 9,100-plus new homes lost would have been affordable units — the very thing the tax was supposed to create — according to RAND corporation, a non-partisan, nonprofit research group.
Westside real estate broker Danny Brown told The California Post the tax was ”another disaster initiated by the incompetent socialists who run our city.”
“ULA has chopped the legs from under the residential and commercial real estate industry, which is one of the largest parts of our city’s economic engine,” Brown said.
What happens when you raise the cost of building or selling a property? Why, I don’t know, but perhaps it might result in fewer sales and less building. Which is bad for the tax base.
At least that big pile of money might go to building new housing, right?
Well, no, not really. This is government and NGOs we are talking about, so the money has mostly been sitting there or getting wasted.
And the City has barely touched the cash, spending just $114 million as of May — less than 10% of the money raised. The City Council voted 13-0 last Tuesday, Raman included, to put a record $466.6 million toward affordable housing, with $324 million of that — nearly 70% — coming from ULA.
But when the tax passed, Raman couldn’t stop bragging.
“This is truly the first housing initiative of its kind anywhere in the United States that will have such a widespread, immediate, and long-term impact on the housing and homelessness crisis,” she said.
One property in Brentwood, the Westside enclave long favored by Hollywood stars and pro athletes, shows how the tax can play out in the real world.
The property sold for about $5.3 million in February 2023, weeks before ULA took effect.
The original house was torn down and replaced with a new 8,990-square-foot, seven-bedroom home with a pool, screening room and guest house. It hit the market last December at $19.995 million. After three price cuts, it’s now listed at $15.995 million.
If it sells at that price, the ULA bill would be about $880,000.
Brown showed The Post around the block and said even the modest older houses next door could get hit because the land beneath them alone is worth more than $5 million.
“It’s 2,000 feet. Not a mansion, even though it’s $5.5 million, because of the land it’s sitting on,” Brown said. “Sounds good to tax the millionaires and billionaires. Everyone says, ”great,” but it’s so far from reality of what happens.”
Hayek once said that “If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.”
I’m not sure that I agree with that. At least not when it comes to many government officials, who benefit from concentrating power and distributing money to their friends. It could be that the decline in real estate transactions is a side effect of the intended results: concentrating money and power in the hands of politicians, who then use the proceeds to help friends and political allies.
I can’t say that this was Raman’s priority. She could just be stupid.
Or, we should embrace Glenn Reynold’s advice: “embrace the power of ‘both.'” She could be both stupid and venal.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it’s spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there’s nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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