There appears to be unanimity that I was reading the legal language of the “Taylor Swift Tax” on second homes too closely when I wrote that it should not apply to apartment buildings.  Lawyers for landlord groups, analysts in the executive branch, and analysts in the legislative branch all agree that the net will snag smallish multifamily units, if they’re worth $1 million or more.

If we’re looking for a new nickname for the proposal, I’d suggest the “Tony Orlando Tax.”

But frankly, I’m still suspicious.  As a long-running concern, I think it’s a grave problem that all of us in the policy and law game fall to the legalistic practice of pretending that profound shifts in legal language (like taxing a “privilege” rather than a “property”) are just immaterial “terms of art.”  At the end of the day, the law isn’t what’s written on paper; it’s what lawyers and bureaucrats agree that it means, as a sort of legal clerisy.

Well, these things are “terms of art” until they aren’t… when we discover on some massive, crucial question that (quoting some future judge) “the principle that the ability to have and hold property is a privilege granted by the state is firmly established in the law.”  When that day comes, we’ll learn that the words as written actually did mean something, even though legal experts on both sides of the issue advised us to focus on more immediate traps and loopholes.

As a practical political matter, I have a hard time believing that Governor Raimondo and her staff thought they’d try selling this as a tax on rich vacation-home owners only to turn around once it had been passed and declare, “Ah-ha!  We fooled you landlords!”  At the same time, it’s difficult to believe that they didn’t pick up on the fact that even the guy estimating the revenue for them included such properties.

I suggest the new nickname of the “Tony Orlando Tax” not just because his most famous song was about a guy in an apartment, and not just because the video was filmed in front of a mansion-looking building, but because I think there’s political significance to the lyric:  “knock three times on the ceiling, if you want tax; twice on the pipe, if the answer is ‘no.'”

In order to sneak in the leading edge of a statewide tax on property — on the very privilege of owning property in the first place — the governor knocks on the ceiling asking to tax vacation property, vacant land, and year-round properties.  Then the landlords bang on the pipe to signal, “no, just the other two” and the mistake of including the most organized target for the tax is fixed.  Everybody’s happy, right?

The state’s Director of Revenue Analysis, Paul Dion, tells me that 111 of the 2,359 properties over $1 million that he included in his estimate are “two-to-five family residences,” accounting for 4.7% of the total take.*  Even assuming those are all properties about which landlords would be concerned, that’s about $550,000 total — an easy concession to make in the course of negotiating a budget through the legislature.

* Note: An earlier version of this post characterized the 111 properties as “multifamily rentals,” which was how I asked the question. I should have used “two-to-five family residences,” which is how he responded.