Property taxes do hit retired people differently though. Taxing based on what the government says your land is worth instead of your income is absolutely meant to create opportunities for real estate agents and developers at the expense of the people living there.
The fact that schools are funded by the surrounding area is crap and needs to change. He's retired with a social security income. He paid into the system his entire life already. Telling him he must sell and move out because he's not wealthy enough is exactly what we should be working against. It's a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Of course you are looking at outliers and I feel like you're right to the point that outliers like that should have special assessments or breaks.
Where I live, the taxes are pretty high for real estate, but if you are a senior citizen, you can get a discount where your tax rate is locked in at the value that it was when you retired.
I also have some acquaintances who inherited a house and at the time houses were very cheap but they didn't pay the taxes and they were super upset that they were going to lose their house because they didn't pay the taxes.
So now they're bunking up and living in apartments and Scattered because they didn't want to drum up the two or three thousand dollars a year in real estate taxes that they had to pay to keep an entire house.
Yeah and those laws are great for keeping people who want to age in place in their homes. Unfortunately they aren't the norm. Usually it's just a discount but it still goes up.
The fact that schools are funded by the surrounding area is crap and needs to change. It’s a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Unless there is an article or background on the guy in the picture you're projecting a HUGE amount of stuff you just made up on that guy.
He’s retired with a social security income.
That's what his sign says. I take him at his word on that one.
He paid into the system his entire life already.
Well, no he didn't. He didn't start paying into it until he started earning money. Likely for the first 18 years of his life, he lived of what other people put into the system. Many of those people that paid for him are in the situation he's in right now, except now he sees it as unfair.
Telling him he must sell and move out
No one is telling him to move out. He certainly isn't saying he will be forced to move if he has to continue to pay property taxes. You just made that up.
because he’s not wealthy enough is exactly what we should be working against.
He's not saying he is not wealthy enough. You just made that up. In fact, his sign is indicating he does have he wealth to cover the property taxes via his Social Security. He's saying he doesn't' believe he should have to pay anything one something he bought decades ago while he continues to enjoy the services of the city and society the tax dollars pay for.
No, that's how American K-12 schools are funded. That and infrastructure. Which is why poor areas have worse schools and roads; and police from outside their tax area. Which is both a great way to punish the poor in the old school protestant fashion and force them out the second the wealthy want their land.
And you know exactly what I mean by paying in his entire life.
Finally, paying half your income on property taxes is not financially sustainable. It's ridiculous to me that you would even pretend it is.
Partially true, but not absolutely. K-12 in many places in the USA are funded through property taxes. I'm in the USA and my public school system is funded via income tax. No property taxes go to school.
That and infrastructure.
True in some places. False in others. Some places derive income from high property taxes. Other places choose high sales taxes. Yet others do it on income tax.
Which is why poor areas have worse schools and roads; and police from outside their tax area. Which is both a great way to punish the poor in the old school protestant fashion and force them out the second the wealthy want their land.
Again, partially true. Some states have state taxes that fund various projects at the municipal level irrespective of the wealth of the locality.
I don't disagree that a more equitble system for funding schools should be designed and implemented, but you know know that because I'm trying to have that discussion with you in another thread and you're weak as water on that and won't discuss any specifics except "someone else should pay".
And you know exactly what I mean by paying in his entire life.
I know your words on that don't match reality, and you're skipping a really important part of that reality. I'll admit I was wrong one part of that. I said he likely started "paying into the system at age 18". We know thats wrong. His sign tells us he built his house at age 25. Age 25 is when he would be first paying the property taxes he's complaining about. So he's spent even less time paying into the system and already wants to be except from it for the society benefits he still gets.
Finally, paying half your income on property taxes is not financially sustainable. It’s ridiculous to me that you would even pretend it is.
Again, you're making stuff up from nothing. What are his expenses? He owns his house. He's retired so his healthcare is covered by Medicare. If he's living on just social security he's likely not even paying income tax because his income is low. What are his other expenses? Food? Clothing? Electricity? Water? He might have a well and not even have that bill. Are you saying half his income can't cover those things? Further, we have no idea what he earned in life. Did he spend it on stupid stuff? We don't know. I'm certainly not claiming any of my assumptions of him as fact, but that isn't stopping you from doing so.
We could always, also tax the wealthy. This is not fictional. Retired people in the US are facing a crisis as they're priced out of housing because their social security is fixed and housing prices are skyrocketing.
We could put the stipulation that you’re only exempt from tax increases if the unit is owner occupied, they’ve been there for at least five years, and the resident is retired.
For many states property taxes are the majority of funding for public schools. If that's the case for the pictured person, the sign could also read:
"I got my public education for free from age 5-18 funded from others paying property taxes including learning how to read and write to make this sign you're reading. Now that I've received that free public education and benefited from it, I'm not interested in paying for any kids to be educated using my dollars. F you, I got mine."
Yes and. How most of the US funds their school system is super fucked up. Here in Canada, primary education is paid for by the province, and school funding is based on student enrollment numbers. This translates to much more equal levels of education, regardless of how wealthy a given neighborhood may be. I was shocked to find out that schools are paid for by catchment area taxes in must of the states - it makes the history of redlining so obvious when the is literally a "wing side of the tracks".
Property tax is the mechanism through which the taxes are gathered, but funding is through the province. This is very different than how allocation happens in most states, where schools are directly funded by their catchment area.
Here in Canada, primary education is paid for by the province, and school funding is based on student enrollment numbers.
So the source is the provincial government, but in that system where is the province deriving the revenue to pay for schools? What is being taxed by the province to bring in the money it uses to fund schools?
Using property tax to fund education simply leaves poor areas poor and uneducated.
Now if they restructured it so the property tax went to the state level and was distributed to those schools that needed it most, not those schools that were in proximity of the land, I'd be for it.
It's based on wealth that matters for rich people. For the average person it's extremely regressive. We're telling people that they must sell and move if they aren't rich enough. There are better ways to tax people and assets in the 21st century.
I love the "but it pays for schools" argument, like how about we drop 3 less bombs per year and just pay for all the schools out of the existing tax pool like it should be.
I agree with the sentiment but to put some numbers into perspective we spend about 850 Billion a year on K-12 education. The US military budget is about 850 Billion. Now I would fully support switching about 200 Billion of that and throwing it at the most underfunded schools in the country. Another source would be police budgets. Police are massively overfunded and take most of a local region's money. So we could easily grab some of that funding too.
Generally wealth transfer taxes should be higher though, so buying houses (especially second and third houses or out of state houses), buying vehicles over the "budget" category (ballpark 35K these days?), any boat that's not a primary residence or a 10 foot fishing boat, etc etc... This idea that anything other than income tax should affect everyone equally is pretty ridiculous, as is the idea that the only way to tax wealth is to tax stocks.
If you're actually serious, you have to do better than that for an answer. How are you going to tax them? What are you going to tax them on? Who is considered rich?
"Tax property" has finely enumerated rules completely spelled out in the letter of the law in hundreds of different variations across many states and cities. You can certainly disagree with it, but its a fully formed and executed system that is funding many schools today.
What you've got so far in this discussion is "stop what is currently in place and make someone else pay somehow". Thats not even fully formed thought much less an argument that can be defended. Your first statement, and now this follow up tell me you're really interested (capable?) of proposing a better alternative.
I'm not going to "finely enumerate and spell out the letter of the law in hundreds of variations" for you.
Income and wealth taxes also have hundreds of variations and fine tunings. Saying I have to invent a whole new system on my own right here and now or else I'm not serious is not serious.
Which means he's paying $12k in property taxes a year. That does sound quite substantial. Assuming that's somewhat equivalent to rates in the UK, I pay around £1400.
Do you have stamp duty in the UK? We have both rates (yearly) and stamp duty (once off during purchase) in Australia, and property taxes in the USA are roughly the same as rates and stamp duty combined into one.
Most places are around 1% of value with many having caps on increases in value or other differences in taxed and actual value. This means his house is worth 1,000,000 to 1,600,000
If he was really living on 24k he wouldn't be able to pay 12,000 in property tax. He bought when it cost almost nothing and spent most of his life paying neither rent nor mortgage unlike most of us and has a reasonable retirement.
He could at any time sell and live better than you or I even if he didn't have a dime other than the house. Instead he uses his time to whine about his good fortune.
You are making a lot of assumptions there but setting that aside, I'm not sure I'm in favour of turfing a pensioner out of their home to pay tax because they lucked out. Surely it'd be better to settle up after they die. It's not like he's preventing a needy young family moving in - presumably anyone buying this house would need to be pretty wealthy!
Step one make schools mostly dependent on property tax by funding them almost entirely through property tax
Step two watch the price of housing skyrocket to the point where half of them are owned by old fuckers
Step three make old fuckers fully or partially exempt from this tax
Step four wonder why your schools have basically been defunded
Lets imagine a scenario bob the old lives at 65 lives in a 2M home which isn't exactly a castle its just in a really desirable area. Bob is cash poor but house rich. He's going to be taxes out of his home sooner or later without relief. Suppose we provide him that relief.
Shall we let him sell his house and realize his gains. Tax those gains but leave him enough to live wealthy for the next 20 years and collect 20 years of 1% taxes or about 660k with 5% appreciation. We would also collect around 300k of that 2M in capital gains taxes.
All in all we are giving up almost a million dollars in tax revenue which will be collected by taxing people who aren't sitting on a 1.7M pot of gold. We will be taxing lots of folks barely getting by MORE to write a million dollar check to grandpa.
Then when he dies all those capital gains that were in fact real evaporate because the new owner who inherits it gets to start fresh at present value.
To justify your position I want you to imagine going around to a bunch of poor people's apartments and taking stuff out of their house to give to one rich guy. Yes someone who is "house rich" doesn't SEEM rich but assets are fungible and in a good market remarkably liquid.
If the property tax scales with inflation and social security is also adjusted for inflation, but your property tax is getting more expensive relative to your social security income, something's not right.
::: spoiler spoiler
I understand that housing prices are outpacing general inflation... that's kinda my point.
:::
I went and argued my taxes at my annual township tax assessment meeting. I was being assessed for a new deck and ramp. That added about $200 to my taxes. What I did do was move the wheelchair ramp out away from the house a bit for better winter time safety and repaired the steps, ramp boards, and railings.
Should I have been taxed for a whole new deck and ramp when I just did repairs and made safety changes?
You have to think more like Trump, LOL. The rich don't pay any taxes through the use of loopholes. Why should you. Slum lords should be forced to pay taxes, not working class schmo that needs a roof over their heads. Tax the slum lords.
And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It's a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
True, you just need to make sure you start high enough up, or exempt the value of a primary residence (maybe limit the exemption to a non-opulent value of a house so the richest don't start building castles to bind their money tax free)
UK has property taxes too and its pretty shit tbh. Council tax, there are bands based on what your house was worth in the 90s (yes really...) and generally the poor will pay a higher % of their income. I have a pretty small bungalow, 60m². One of the lowest bands and pay £1600 a year on a house that cost £230k. The most you can have to pay is £4200, beyond that point regardless of how much more expensive your house is the tax rate doesn't increase.
The original plan of the tax was a fixed rate per person. This among other things is why many people were keen on the idea of digging a hole so deep that we could hand Thatcher over to Satan personally.
That has to be the most regressive tax I've heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I'm sorry it's happening to you.
Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it's on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it's not considered excessive.
This doesn't fit the narrative, but a lot of American states have lower effective property tax rates than European nations. There exceptions on both ends of this of course (like TX which is making up for a lack of income taxes).
People should look them up and compare European nations to major us cities and states. Europe ends up with not only higher income taxes, but also higher property taxes overall. And a completely insane financing method like having adjustable rate mortgages being normal, locked only for a period of 3 to 5 years before basically being forced to refinance. Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates.
No system is perfect and people with means tend to find every flaw in them (and plant those flaws if they are wealthy enough). But people really need to remember that the grass is always greener because of all the manure.
And that man clearly does not live in such a state, nor did I (or anyone else I think) claim that his circumstances apply to the entire usa. You're wrong in assuming that other people are not aware that different places have varying laws and tax systems.
Your whataboutism defence of regressive tax systems is also very strange to me. That other places have unfair practices in place, is no excuse to put up with an unfair system in any one place. Call them all out on their brokeness, but if you do call them out, you'll have to be more specific in your example(s), state things that are actually verifiable instead of some vague whataboutism.
If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it's easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.
Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he's a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he's deriving no income from that wealth, since he can't rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he's a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.
Taxing liquid capital is fairly straightforward, especially if it's tied to income (like company founders owning shares).
Taxing non-liquid assets is complicated because it's hard to make it fair in cases of family home inheritance and similar situations.
But taxing use of assets as collateral for loans (to create liquidity from a non-liquid asset) should be reasonably fair, it can be treated as an advance on capital gains taxes on the collateralized asset.
But taxing use of assets as collateral for loans (to create liquidity from a non-liquid asset) should be reasonably fair, it can be treated as an advance on capital gains taxes on the collateralized asset.
Interesting. In Texas once you hit 65 they freeze your property taxes and no longer increase it. My parents are only paying $1,800/year on a $250K house. Meanwhile I’m paying $14,000/yr on a $500K house.
If you live FULL TIME in Florida there is a cap on property tax increases. Many people in Florida own homes but do not live here full time and therefore are not eligible for this protection against increases. But they don't have an age limit that ends all increases.
Yes it does help limiting some snow birds. There is a whole methodology with snow birds. Unrelated to property tax and and home ownership. To establish state residency you need to physically live 6 months and a day in a state to be considered a "resident" there. Many try to get around it. But states go as far as checking where your cell phone is along with credit card purchases to catch people lying about where they were.
Low income taxes. And our sales tax is typically lower than European VAT when the comparison is valid. But those generally go to the feds and the state, that do not fund municipal services, so municipalities have to collect the remainder they need through property taxes, typically on real estate and cars. And none of them fund healthcare, so we have to pay a company premiums for that. Basically the same for higher education. When you look at our total financial burden to receive the kind of services that are funded by taxes in other developed countries, we can be deceptively expensive, especially if you start thinking about the comparative quality of those services. But our income and capital gains tax rates are low, especially if you are very rich! I made myself sad
Comparing property taxes now in 2025 dollars to unadjusted original cost in 1950 dollars is nonsensical. The two numbers bear no relation nor should they.
The average social security check is $1,978 a month or $23,736 per annum. Half of that is $11,868. Lets suppose he lives in CA where the annual rate for owner occupied is 0.74%. His house would be worth approx 1.6 million dollars. To to be clear he is whining about paying the appropriate and legal tax on his fully owned 1.6M cash hoard. This is a great problem to have.
If its that burdensome he can cash out and even with rent payments for the rest of his life live great even if he has no other savings of any sort.
Looks like about $5800 a month gradually increasing with inflation for at least 25 years.
If he has another $400,000 which seems super likely since I don't think he's actually living in his 1.6M house on $12,000 a year it could be more than 7500 a month.
If we add a little realism and only include another 15 years he could probably actually withdraw about 11,000 a month.
Property tax funds important things like schools, emergenct services, etc.
if he was destitute otherwise would already have sold it. You are arguing in favor of a tax break for some rich prick probably worth north of 3 million not paying the taxes that pay for your kid to get a decent education because basically feels.
Its no more immoral than you giving up your income.
There is no way you can convince me that gentrification is actually good for kids. Property tax funding education does nothing but punish poor families.
Property taxes funding education, in a state like Texas where school districts are seized by the state and systematically dismantled by private equity interests operating in state-appointed positions, is a fucking joke.
This isn't strictly an issue of taxation. Its an issue of (un)representative governance forcing people into a privatized model by leveraging the pain caused through dysfunctional public services. "Oh oh! Crimes up! We need even more cops! Oh oh! Schools are failing! So we need more... checks notes football stadiums and administrative offices."
It's deliberate mismanagement intended to destroy confidence in public institutions.
Seconded. This is inaccessible net worth. It is useless to someone who cannot take advantage of it. Sale would incur capital gains, which would be significant, and finding another property to live in would be just as unaffordable.
Lets suppose he lives in CA where the annual rate for owner occupied is 0.74%. His house would be worth approx 1.6 million dollars.
That's largely due to the property inflation from the tech sector and not consistent across the state. You could be in San Fransisco and see your land 10x in value as the city explodes around you or you could be at the ass end of Oakland or the rural east end and still live in a slum.
This guy could also be from Texas - in the exurbs of Austin, Dallas, Houston, or El Paso - and be looking at closer to 1.5-2% annual rates. Very possible he acquired some dirt cheap land in Beaumont or Bexar County only to see his $5k plot balloon to $100-200k over the course of 20 years.
Either way for California he wouldn't be affected because Californiamnproperty taxes are effectively snapshotted at time of purchase and grandfathered for people like him. If he truly bought or built 50 years ago and ows it outright then prop 13 has long capped what he pays decades ago.
People like him, in California, are subsidized by the modern generation who don't get capped by prop 13. And when he sells that house it's value gets assessed at current market value and full taxes are due from the buyer.
Put shortly, his story is likely bullshit if he's from California. And people without houses and salty about it need to do some research.
I think you may have it wrong on what is happening, this guy isn't paying less tax than those around him from how i read it. Your area seems to be taxed based on the purchase price and not the assessed value of the property.
From how i read it his taxes have steadily gone up base on home prices and assessments. He pays taxes every year and they are relatively the same as those around him. The problem is that the value has gone up more than it should have due to the local gov wanting to be paid more. Most county commissioners (R/D doesn't matter) are paid a percentage of what the property tax based on population. This means that if the price goes up then they get paid more. At times these also come from the state instead of a county. This means that they reps are paid based on the tax assessment.
If we make the math easy lets say he paid $30,000 for his house. (I know a city wont be this way but a small house in a rural area works for this also lets assume it was purchased some time ago). The current (as of today) monthly average of Social Security payments is $1976. ($23,712 yearly) This is about $70,000 every 3 years. $70,000/2 is $35,000. Again those payments are based on today and not the last few two years. Based on that math, SS 1976 x 12 (year) $23,712 divided by 2 (half my ss check) thats $11,856. He is essentially being taxed 30% of what he purchased his home for. I know this may not sound like much to some but its not about you in the city working the full time job for x an hour. This post is about a guy who built his home and purchased the lumber piece by piece and built it himself after purchasing the land.
No, the person you're replying to likely lives in an area with annual assessment limits. This means when they move into their house, they pay taxes on the assessed amount at that time. Every year, even if the assessment shows a 50% increase in value, your tax increase will be capped at something like a 2% increase. Over the course of 30 years this adds up to huge tax savings the longer you stay in one place. The downsides are that it causes more traffic, causes homes to sell less often, and provides less local tax to fund public programs like schools.
This guy's actual problem isn't that his property taxes have gone way up. His problem is that his income, that is say social security, has not kept pace with the inflated cost of property taxes. And of course it hasn't kept up with any of the other inflationary costs we are dealing with today as well. And this is something that has hit everyone else because the average wage has not kept up with inflation either.
While I do think there should be some relief for some people as far as property taxes are concerned... living in a town or city gives a person access to many local government subsided services. Firefighters, and ambulances are some simple ones that everyone uses. Roads as well. And the cost of that does increase over time. Basing a person's contributions to paying for that based on the value of thier property is just easier for local governments, and more stable. But it doesn't really corelate with the use of those services. Nor with income or ability to pay.
Life necessities really shouldn't be taxed at most levels. Food, shelter, water, heat, medical care. Most already aren't. But housing still is. Investment properties should be taxed of course, but an average primary residence really shouldn't be.
Looking at my electrical bill is depressing. It's always power used x and then taxes that are the same as x plus fees. So using $100 in electricity means I pay $220 with over half being taxes and extra fees
Yeah, and property taxes result in more low density housing, as that increases the amount of tax revenue per person. High density housing means less revenue per person but the costs of services per person is still about the same. Sure theoretically, public transit is cheaper per person with high density housing, but realistically it isn't because nobody gives a shit about public transit in the suburbs.
Of course there's more costs overall because more suburbs mean governments are pressured to spend insane amounts of money on building and expanding highways. But it's usually a different level of government that builds the highways, so doesn't factor in the decisions to create more low density housing.
I've read otherwise on the costs of services per person and density. A fire station can only reasonably cover a certain amount of space. So low density housing means you need more fire stations for the same amount of people. And of course you need more road per person in general.
I see both arguments for this as valid. I get that you wanna stay and live your entire life in the place you owned forever. The reality is taxes are needed and will increase forever, which are important to keeping your state functioning (as long as the people in charge are doing a good job and actually using the funds wisely). I wonder what state they are from because I know property tax can be wildly different depending upon that. I'm sure they don't want to, but there are like 6 states that currently offer no property tax to seniors over 65 and 10 that offer exemptions based on income and age. At the same time it is good to see them complain because maybe they can try to sway the state to also offer the no property tax benefit to seniors as well. Still if he is hurting that much, then it's probably easier to sell the place and move to another place that will allow him to be better off with less worrying. It's a valid option even if he doesn't agree with it.
his point is that his income should have increased to reflect inflation, since his taxes did. it's actually obscene that half his check goes to property tax on land he's had forever, and people are talking down about him for it.
Yeah, that makes much more sense. I absolutely agree, sadly most places draw the line on ever allowing that to happen. Although I do remember reading that some states have minimum wage tied to it which was pretty shocking, despite making perfect sense.
I'm not going to offer numbers and percentages but I would propose an overall cap on state property taxes. That would force the state to spend less or finally get rid of funding for things that are not providing the desired results. I would shift the percentage of property tax levied more on commercial than residential. And finally I would have a lower rate for those who own the house and live there as opposed to an owner who is renting out the house.
Property tax is the big thing that forces people to engage with capitalism against their will.
Without property tax, you could live off-grid for eternity. But with property tax, you always have to earn money, and the people that control that money therefore control you.
He could also just be in an area that was decently outside a major metro area when he bought his house, and urban sprawl and real estate speculation has massively raised the value of his property.
When my parents bought my childhood home in the 80s, the road ended about a mile down from the house and they had to park at the lake and carry things up. There's a hunting preserve just on the other side of the train tracks to the north, and when I was growing up, farms with cows, horses, and a shitload of corn.
These days, I don't know anyone I grew up with who can afford to live there any more, as it's become yet another commuter town in the country for the higher paid employees in the nearest major city. When they sold the house, I'm pretty sure it had to be knocked down completely (we had squirrels in the walls, and the previous owner had done a hack job on the electrical wiring to convert it from a summer cottage to a full-time residence) yet a half acre of land and a house you couldn't legally sell for occupation was still close to $500,000.
I can actually rent a two bedroom apartment in NYC for less than it would cost me to rent a studio in my home town, which has no public transport, and it was a two mile walk to the nearest gas station, one way.
It's kind of messed up that entire communities can be destroyed, through nothing they actually did and developments they had no way of predicting 40 years ago.
TBH, property taxes could be a necessary evil, like only imposing them above a certain number of owned homes, to curb some companies buying up homes en masse to control the rent market, but I have a weird feeling they might not be the ones paying these taxes.
Lots of countries have property taxes that are more reasonable because they focus on city services like trash pickup and stuff. The problem is property taxes are tied to education in the US and in many states the higher the property taxes the better the schools, the more exclusive the neighborhood, etc.
If you rent you need permission for every modification, every pet, even for something like planting a garden.
Ownership can be conditional; you can own a domain, but if you don't pay the renewal fee it can be taken away; you can own a car, but if you drive it without paying your registration it can be impounded; you can own a business, but if you don't pay your license renewal it can be revoked.
Owning something doesn't mean it can never be taken away or that you don't need to do anything to keep it.
Property taxes also aren't egregious if you don't live in an expensive house in an expensive area.
The problem is that most of ya'll have been conditioned to think "that's not good enough for you" even when you can't afford more. Then entitlement kicks in where you think you deserve more before others who have less and before you know it, Bernie loses the nomination and we're stuck with a trump presidency.
You could take the interpretation of "ownership" to many ridiculous conclusions, from "all ownership is theft" to "nothing is owned" to "all governent is crime" to "all taxation is theft" etc...
From a practical standpoint, "ownership" is an arbitrary threshold of exclusivity that is generally respected by society under appropriate conditions. Where that threshold and what the conditions are will vary by the type of property and general social sensibilities.
Here the increases are capped at 3% per year if you live in the house. I lived in a shitty house we bought for 35k in the 1990s crash, and property taxes when we sold it in the breakup 20 years later were still under 1k a year, though insurance was crazy high. With husband we had to buy a much more expensive house, there are no shitty ones for sale anymore, all are snatched by corps to flip and rent. So now it's high but in 20 years maybe it will seem low again. Especially if the market crashes and it's re-assessed more reasonably.
It's just inflation, I do think someone owning a home costs the city in roads, trash, transit, other services, Is not crazy to tax on property ownership.
Inflation is also not what the guy with the sign is taking into account in his complaint. He’s at least 40 years older in that picture than he was when he bought his property if he’s getting social security. The real purchasing power of whatever he paid back then is much smaller than the same number of dollars is now.
Also, it’s only every three years that he’s paying that much. Honestly, he’s not making the point he thinks he is.
We need taxes to fund emergency services and local government in general. The problem isn’t that taxes go up in dollar amount. The problem is that the 1% take everything for themselves, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs. Our pay and public benefits (like social security) don’t rise with inflation because of the actions of the rich.
The solution is so obvious, but we spend so much time arguing about everything but the real problem.
Yeah, if you are comparing the house you bought in 1980 for 10k dollars and say you pay 5k in tax every three years, using 2025 dollars then that is totally useless as a statement.
My city has a senior discount on property taxes, where seniors that have a net worth and income both below certain numbers pay reduced or as low as 0% of their regularly assessed property tax. I'm not sure how they verify net worth, but it seems like a good system to me as long as they have figured out a way to do that efficiently and effectively
Areas with high property value have higher quality schooling. Area with low property value have lower quality schooling. The rich stay rich. The poor stay poor.
Maybe education money shouldn't come from property taxes. Maybe corporations should pay for the education they require their workers to have visa corporate taxes
Generally the best option is for all property taxes for education to go into one pot to by divided up fairly across all school districts in the state, that way wealthy areas don't end up with over funded schools while rural areas and poor areas get poorly funded schools
when that guy was 25, house prices were probably in the $20k for a good house. If he built it, even cheaper. He's equating two things that don't really have relevance to anything but his memory
he's also not taking advantage of his options for being a senior on fixed income nor did he prepare for his retirement properly if all he has is social security
it's too bad you can't see what I said, because that's not it. sometimes people do stuff that on the surface might sound one way, how are we to know what the man did with the next part of his life.
But let's consider he built his own house. And owned it by 25.
I'm of the age that I know a lot of people my parents age faced with situations similar to what is being presented in the picture.
I've also been homeless with my family and lived a pretty typical native American not living on a rez life. i know what being poor is. i know what it's like for old people who are poor
Yea, it's super location dependant. Generally the more rural the lower the taxes. But it also varies by state. States with low or no income tax tend to have higher property tax.
So property tax I am ok with, in theory. The people with property in a city should pay for services like fire, schools, police, road maintenance..... What gets me is when the city wants more and more for stupid shit like iPads for all students.... Every 3 years due to forced upgrades or just old style deprecation over 3 years.
The amount my taxes go up each year is more than any raise I get. Then add on insurance which has gone insane. I paid off my house to avoid a 20k female flood insurance bill because a 1 foot piece of concrete touched a high risk flood zone. A technicality because if I took down a screen patio, then I wouldn't have to pay.
It's insane how expensive owning a house has become
This isn't a discussion on property tax, it's more about social security. There is no reason we cannot scale taxes/fines to income. Many countries pull this off...
We would need to make sure all loopholes are closed for wealthy people just using investments to harvest losses... Trump only needed to pay $750 in taxes on his "taxable" income one year.
If you want to get reductive, you never truly own it even if you live in a society where there is no tax.
The rule of law that allows the concept of private ownership to be upheld in society runs on tax dollars. If you take away all of the tax dollars, the mechanisms that define and enforce the rule of law go with it.
In a completely tax free society someone can just kick in your door of your house and shoot you, and now they own your house. Who will stop the thief/murderer? There's no police, no courts, no judges, no jails. If instead of an individual its a foreign nation, there's no military to defend your nation's borders. All of that comes from tax dollars. So even then you never really own your own house because someone can take it (and your life) away from you.
Any “civilization” without some form of taxation is either primitive hunter gatherers, or a despotism where the chief already owns everything and everyone.
Here in the United States, this issue and this sign are advocating for what? This man is where? At his county commissioner meeting? This sign implies we want the federal government in our local tax policy? I mean really? GTFO with this garbage. Stay the F out of my busniess, if I don't like property tax, that comes with my local vote, and has nothing to do with the federal government. I could bet someone paid this tool to stand with this sign because someone who doesn't understand decentralized local government power wants to make a point about something that has nothing to do with social security.
This sign implies we want the federal government in our local tax policy?
Where do you read this implication from?
I'm really asking because I might be missing something, because my background is so different.
To me it reads like he thinks local taxes should work differently, either be lower, or be raised based on a different factor other than property value. But I can't see the federal connection.
Or it could be argued that the local county or city is taxing them so much they can't survive and they are essentially taking federal money even though they claim to not need federal money.
But hey I'm just a guy who knows plenty of people who look like this who advocate for better social programs. In most places that have county commissioners, their salary is paid by a percentage of the property tax. This may explain the increase in tax or the increase in allowing too many high density locations that have a property tax associated with them.
My dad literally went to the city and argued against them raising the book value of his home, which would cause him to have to pay more in property tax.
Yes, we can cover the resulting tax shortfall by increasing the tax on single mothers, first-generation low-income homebuyers, and renters.
Look at the result of California's tax policy (which was designed with aims similar to yours): an entire generation of young people will never be able to afford a home in the place they grew up in, while millionaire retirees get a huge tax break while making thousands renting out spare rooms in their massive houses on AirBnB.
These kinds of special tax carve outs sound nice in theory, because it seems like you are just "not taking money from old and disabled people", but that tax burden falls on everyone else, as does the massive distortion of the market. You are in fact taking more money from other people, who may be hurting even more.
And don't tell me, "We'll fund it by a tax on the rich". If that's your proposal, get that tax on the rich passed, and dole out the proceeds to elderly at risk of homelessness. Have it officially be budgeted, so that we can decide if keeping an elderly person in their $2.1m 5 bedroom home is worth cuts elsewhere. As of now, such policies are mostly robbing middle class young people blind.
Tax homes based on how many you own, and how many are vacant. Allow two homes at a regular rate; Enough for a summer and winter home. Then ratchet tax rates up as the person buys more.
And if the third, fourth, fifth, etc home sits vacant for more than a few months out of the year? The tax rate goes up even more, so giant corporations can’t just buy entire neighborhoods and sit on them to remove them from the market and increase property values for the other homes they own across town. Because that’s what’s happening now; Giant corps are buying homes and letting them sit vacant, just to remove them from the market so they can charge higher rates elsewhere. Allow a few months of grace for renovations and finding tenants… But after a ~3 month grace period, that tax rate skyrockets.
And then take the revenue from these increased taxes, and use them to fund First Time Homebuyer programs, so home ownership becomes more available to the people who are renting. Incentivize the corporations to actually flip the houses and resell or rent them, instead of just sitting on them.
Alternate take: If we actually implemented my above plan, you wouldn’t need to be stupidly rich to own two homes. Home prices would be reasonable, because there wouldn’t be giant corporations hoarding all of the real estate.
We have over two vacant houses for every single homeless person in the country. We could give every single homeless person a house, and still have plenty to act as summer cabins. And that’s before you even factor in the fact that the market would be flooded with houses (at least in the short term) from corporations trying to avoid the increased taxes.
It will NEVER be so that owning two houses in America doesn't involve being well into the 1% This is just an absurd take that has become true nowhere on planet earth.
I propose exempting high-density apartment and condo buildings from the taxes. Developers may be building those residences for their own cynical profit motives, but it does happen to greatly benefit society.
There's a better special tax carve out: Don't require tax for the primary residence. The owner MUST be registered as living at that address. Not a family member. The owner.
Okay if you have family you can have a few more homes, but realistically, if you own 10 or 20 homes, how many people can you REALLY trust to have full ownership of them instead of you? You're going to have to start paying tax at some point.
at the primary residence up to .25 acres. Anything more than that should be taxed as normal. Credits should be non transferrable, as in if you're renting your landlord shouldn't be able to claim you for tax exempt status.
Land is land. We don't get any more. Some land is inherently more valuable than other. We should be disincentivizing ownership of land unless it's being cultivated or contributing in some way.
By saying that farms don't pay property tax, we're creating an avenue for billionaires to create "farms" and skirt taxes.
Instead what we should be doing is guaranteeing that crops will sell. Pay the property tax, use the land, and if your harvest fails at market, then the government covers the gap. But not before. I'm even cool with the government buying the seed and feed. That's all renewable and contributes to a bountiful harvest. Having taxes to pay on the value of the land encourages it's use, and pushes the wealthy billionaires away from wanting to own it just cuz. They'll naturally look for the least valuable land if they just want a big ass estate. Who cares if they build a mansion on a pile of worthless rock?
Instead what we should be doing is guaranteeing that crops will sell. Pay the property tax, use the land, and if your harvest fails at market, then the government covers the gap.
.25 acres? Can we up that to at least an acre. I need a place for my chickens to roam and to plant my gardens, and I prefer to have a fire pit with outdoor patio furniture and a grill. Many places an acre is the standard plot size. Not good for everyone, but preferred by many
If that was satire, it was incredibly well done. If it's red sincere, it's a great example of why property taxes should still apply at a certain point, and that point should be very narrow.
That's great and all, but you do realize that in the end that ends up being pro large corporations and limiting freedoms of the people. Cities and towns would be best built that way I agree but the chances that we can completely revoke capitalism is verryyy slim. In such every convenient/grocery store in those neighborhoods would be bought up by money and reduce prices to run out small owners. People not being able to grow their own food or raise their own chickens reduces ones ability to feed themselves independently. Communal neighborhood farms are an alternative which I have seen before, but they are rare and require space as well
To be fair this dude could have gotten his house 45 years ago for 50K. So adjusting for inflation and overall development of his area, it could make sense. Comparing current payments to cost of money 40 years ago is comparing apples to oranges.
Now all that being said....there is a serious issue with cost and availability of housing, and I am not dismissing that. I'm just saying context is needed for this ragebait post.
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it's a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate --- which often means middle class homeowners.
So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as "good" in that folks don't get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea;
The problem is in how its assessed. A market-based tax will be vulnerable to market manipulation. A tax accessed by the agents of lobbyists and kleptocrats will be administered to the benefit of their patrons.
This isn't a policy failure quite so much as it is a democratic failure.
Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence --- investment real estate would be subject to a "wealth tax," but folks wouldn't get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.
Prop 13 should also not apply to inherited houses. It's creating a class of landed gentry who were lucky enough to have parents living near the housing boom, and pricing out anyone who moved here in the last 20 years.
That's the thing about increasing home prices nobody talks about. It increases the "value" of your home, so you're taked more.
When my parents retired, they didn't move out to the country to get away from the city life. They did it because it saved them 40 grand a year in property taxes.
They had municipal taxes, county taxes, school district taxes (when massive school bonds pass every single year without fail that one can really add up), emergency service district taxes, Water District taxes, Healthcare District taxes.
That shit adds up when the value of your property doubles every 3 years like it has been doing in Texas.
No, $40k/yr in property taxes is insane unless your parents own several mansions, even for Texas where the highest property tax rates are around 2.5%. Even if you tack on millages and bonds and other things there's no way it gets near that.
There's a lot of bad takes and clear misinformation from disaffected people in this thread. Stuff like this should be obvious.
For the city. Then double the city rate for the school district, then add some more for the MUDs and the County and the Health district and the Emergency services district. Shit adds up fast, and when you buy a house new for 180 grand and a few years later it's valued at 700 grand, you have to move because you can no longer afford to pay the taxes.
I work for a city where the stupid-rich live. Their houses are NUTS. I recently approved construction of a 5,000sft guest house with a rooftop tennis court. We have over a dozen houses in active construction that cost over 15 million dollars, and no new structures being built under 4 million.
We actually have standards in our development code regarding servant's quarters. And the most important thing to know about those standards is that they're required to be smaller than the minimum allowable size for guest quarters. Can't have the Servant's getting all uppity.
But the thing is, they pay very little in taxes as a portion of their wealth. They have enough political power that they founded a 4mi^2 enclave as its own city entirely surrounded by a major city. They also managed to get their own school district. As a result, they have some of the lowest taxes in the state. Someone with a 7 million dollar house here will pay the same amount of money in property taxes as someone with a half-million dollar condo 2 miles away, because the rates for the school district and city for the wealthy are so low.
For utility districys, they get out of paying property tax by having the city provide it directly without a WCID by contracting to the major city next door that gives them the utilities at a loss to keep the rich assholes happy and supplying campaign donations.
All that to say, then people that are hurt by property taxes aren't the rich. It's people living in areas where the value of homes go up faster than income can keep up with the taxes. My parents eventually had to sell and move. And yeah, they made a nice profit off their house, but they still had to move away from the city they'd lived in for 60 years, and now live 30 minutes from the nearest gas station even though they used to be solidly urbanites.
The house was about 180 when they bought it, then climbed in value over time to the point they had to move due to taxes. The combination of city, county, 2 separate MUDs, school, ESD, health district, and other taxes didn't help either.
The school taxes alone were nearly 2% of the value of their home. When your home quaruples in valueshoppingthe area around you gets ritzy, that adds up.
I don't know his situation but I think primary residence up to certain value shouldn't be taxed at all. There's a huge difference between an old man living alone in a house he had built for his family 60 years ago and an "investor" who owns entire neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, where I live a property tax on as far as I remember 4th and all above residential properties has been proposed and people who oppose it the most are pensioners who live in the only property they own. Right wing media can just outright lie to people telling them the tax is going to be on every property and people go on vote against their own interests.
tying it to income means in a few decades inflation just shrinks the number of people who can actually benefit
If you own one residential property and also live in it, no taxes on that. Multiple properties? That's taxes. Unfortunately, most primary education is funded by property tax, so you'd have to change how that works (and maybe actually pay teachers while your at it). Fortunately, none of this has any chance of ever getting implemented.
Property taxes are based on the assessed value of the land. So if you bought vacant land in the 1970s, improved it with a home, and then lived in it for the next 50 years, you'd see a piece of land that sold for several thousand dollars accrue to hundreds of thousands of dollars. If this guy is living in Texas, he's likely paying 1-2% of the assessed value of the home, which could easily be north of $2-4k/year. That's on land that was practically being given away half a century earlier.
Who does he think maintains road networks and all the other infrastructure he relies on?
The tax rate is fully disconnected from the cost of construction/maintenance. So if my house accrues from $50k to $200k over the course of ten years, I don't see 4x as much construction/maintenance of my local infrastructure. I just see my tax bill go up 4x while my potholes continue to go unfilled, my lines unburied, and my flood control underdeveloped.
And that's setting aside the habit of municipal governments to invest in "improvements" (sports stadiums, convention centers, police surveillance that's focused around corporate properties, twelve lane highways that induce demand rather than improve traffick flow) that benefit private industry over public welfare. City and state officials serving larger and larger constituencies routinely become disconnected from lay voters and increasingly complicit in graft and other kickbacks, as elections revolve more around partisan affiliation than any actual domestic management agenda.
There is a very real and meaningful disconnect between what politicians do at the municipal/state level and what residents actually demand at the retail level. If this guy was perched in a penthouse overlooking Cowboy's stadium, you could reasonably tell him to fuck off. But I guarantee he's not.
He's likely towing the Libertarian party line. We'd be fine without these taxes and all that government waste.
When you start asking about public services, they start, slowly, carefully re-inventing taxes while downplaying corporate greed while putting themselves in a decision-making role where they get to decide what is right for everyone else.
I'm sure he can hardly afford to live in his ancestral home. That SS he paid into all those years doesn't hit the same as a paycheck and might stop altogether soon. If you don't squirrel away your own retirement, you have to make concessions.
While these are fair questions, I think it's a reasonable stance to take that you shouldn't literally get taxed out of your home if you come into poverty, which unfortunately can include Social Security recipients. I know we all need to pay taxes and contribute to society to the extent that we're reasonably able to, but I'm not so sure this is the best way to make it happen. For property beyond your primary residence, sure, but for your only home, I don't super like it.
If your home is now worth millions, you're now rich and can afford the taxes. If you have no income, sell the house. If you want to live in it, do a reverse mortgage. If you want to pass on your house to your heirs, creating generational wealth while not paying your share of taxes now, fuck you, pay up.
Assuming the house is worth millions is a faulty premise. Housing prices have exploded in the last 5-10 years, and that can mean that a home bought decades ago is worth many times its original value, causing a huge increase in property taxes, but still being in line with other regular homes. People who bought decades ago might have had the home appreciate to 10x the value of initial purchase, just to end up still in line with median home prices. Selling their house won't fix the tax rate, it'll just add some leftover mortgage value after they pay taxes on the profit from selling their massively value-inflated home. So now, instead of just paying property taxes, they pay comparable property taxes and the remainder of a new mortgage.
I can agree on inheritance taxes, but I don't think it's super fair to heavily tax the owner a primary home of a reasonable value when they're not selling the home, giving it away, allocating it through inheritance, or otherwise transferring it. Maybe if it's a mansion, but a simple, normal home, maybe on some farm land? I don't see a problem with a family having the security of knowing that come hell or high water, they have a home they won't lose to anything but a natural disaster. We all need to contribute to society as it contributes to us, but I don't think that should come at the expense of security in basic essentials like housing.
And I just don't agree with that. I don't think we should have to pay property taxes at all on a reasonably priced primary residence, as set by local and national standards. Housing should be considered more of a right. We all need to contribute to taxes, yes, no dispute there, but I don't see this as a fair way to do so. Now, if it's an extra property or a particularly lavish home, yeah, tax the piss out of them. But taxing someone into homelessness should never happen because one of the state's core goals at least should be seeing that everyone's basic needs are met, and that includes housing.
Okay, but how do you intend to accomplish that without costing the government more tax money? The most cost effective first step seems to me to be to just not tax a reasonable primary residence. Providing housing the inhabitants don't own costs someone money in building and maintaining that property, and since we're agreeing that housing should be a right, the only way I can see to guarantee that would be through government funding. And we probably should do that for some people, at least those most in need, but what's the sense in forcing people in poverty out of their home of decades just because they can't afford the property taxes, especially when that means pushing them into housing the government is actively paying for? Why is it that we can agree that everyone deserves housing, but we can't agree that they should be able to own that housing? There are other ways to raise that tax money, and the obvious choice is to increase taxes on those with a gross excess, not those who have managed to achieve stability after decades of work.
Property tax rates are based on how much your city/county needs to operate. Property values change, but so do mill rates. Most cities aren't allowed to take surplus tax, so they tweak the mill rate when property values fluctuate.
I think an issue is that taxes are not seen for what they are. The government and agency work on our behalf but don't get paid until I pay my taxes. Maybe the local government just needs to send these bills to people's houses instead and get rid of taxes altogether.
I disagree that it's an issue. I believe vast majority of people understand what a tax is, even if they feel taxes are shitty and respond with blame-y frustration.
All words will be misunderstood by some people. Sometimes more and sometimes fewer. If we kept changing the name of things because a vocal minority of people can't read a dictionary, then we will end up with a handful of generic words that don't actually mean anything. I believe a better solution is to envest in education more broadly.
5? I bought my house a decade ago and it has almost doubled. If he built his house for less than his current property taxes, he would easily get 10x if not higher.
Property taxes always made me think that you don't actually own it, rather its a different form of rent based on property value. I know its the not the same as renting as you have stored value if you sell, but its difficult to call it "ownership"
i mean, this is less of a property tax issue and more of a social security thing.
Though i am pretty fundamentally against property tax, it's a physical thing that i can own, i don't see why i should pay taxes on it. If you want to tax me just hit me with income tax.
except for the fact that it's a wealth tax on wealth that's not really consequential. An income tax by definition must tax ALL income earned by an individual, you cannot hide from that, it's definitionally, evasion.
it's pretty fundamental, there is only a fixed amount of land that exists in the country. A billionaire has roughly 1 billion more dollars than i do. I have roughly one billion dollars less than them, they, weirdly enough, don't have one billion more times land than me.
Theoretically they should have "1 billion times more property tax" than i do, but i'm going to imagine that's not even possible under current tax law.
Personal income tax is not a wealth tax, and there are myriad ways to avoid it without evading it.
Property has infrastructure like water, roads, electrical, sewers, etc running to it that needs to be maintained. It also has things like fire fighting police surveyors etc that need to be paid in order to maintain society. Everyone could work in a city therefore the city/county/state would collect the income tax but the local town you live in doesn't get any of that money.
People need to stop thinking about property like it's any other regular thing like a vehicle.
Land is not a thing it is a limited resource.
If someone owns a piece of land in a city it doesn't matter what they are currently doing with it, even if they do nothing with it, that's wasting potential that someone else could be doing with it and affects everyone around that piece of land.
If his math is right, and assuming that his property tax is about 1-2% of his home's value per year, then the value of his home has increased about 15-30x the original value.
It's difficult to be sympathetic because you are viewing the property as an asset financially. And not as a place to live, he likely does not give a shit that it's appreciated in value because he has absolutely no intention whatsoever of selling and he plans to live there till he dies and that's how housing should be viewed
The average household income where I live is ~$80k. Excluding the top 5%, it drops to ~$50k. That’s (on average) two full-time workers per household, each making ~$12/hour. Their annual (pre-tax) income would be about $480 per week, or ~$2080 per month each. After taxes, that would be closer to $1450. So likely around $3000 for the household’s monthly budget.
The cheapest homes near me start at $300k. A 30 year mortgage with a 6.5% interest rate and 10% down payment would be almost $2100 per month. That’s assuming they’re able to save the 10% in the first place, and get approved for the loan. It also leaves them with only ~$900 for the entire monthly budget. That’s food, utilities, car payment(s), insurance, childcare, etc…
Yeah I mean I guess I'm biased, pgh housing market hasn't really be affected and there aren't massive new housing plans like there are in the west. Here you can buy a house with good bones that needs cosmetic remodeling for 60,000
Certified psycho. If you think owning a plot of land within a country does not have an opportunity cost you are wrong. If you think people imposing costs on others shouldn't pay for it say it out loud.
Just go and found your own country already, you just need a gun in order to enforce your ownership. In the end a state is just the monopoly of force in a place.
We don't rent it from them. We pay for continued ownership. The difference being that eviction is not possible and you do not need permits unless you do something more involved to your property. Calling it renting discounts the complexities that renting brings with it. The costs of renting usually are much higher than property taxes.
"We pay for continued ownership" sure sounds like rent to me.
Make sure you tell those that had their house/property taken away from them due to eminent domain how eviction is not possible.
At that point the term renting becomes something else entirely and therefore useless to discriminate between renters and homeowners. this discrimination is useful, hence we must not weaken our language.
It's more like a tax, you choose to purchase land from the city, you gain access to city services by living in the city, and in exchange you must pay the city annually for the privilege of owning the land, and if you don't pay for long enough the city might seize the land from you. Could even call it a property tax...
Well isn't that pretty much what my local government did?
Considering it's history. It was Monarch land, then took by dictator, then took by Republic, then took by dictator, then back to Monarchy for a short period during democratic transitioning. Well technically they didn't even buy it they just took it.
While the people living here, which with me it's 3 generations of my family but another three before that of another family (the ones who built it), had to paid for it the whole time.
At least the duchess land was really cheap, like 1 testimonial cent even in recent times.
If that sounds fair to you, then okay, nothing different from Absolute Monarchies time except the Monarchs.
Using retirees as a tool to work against property taxes has historically been an effective strategy, but it's important to remember:
What we're actually trying to accomplish
Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
One-by-one:
What we're actually trying to accomplish
Seems to me that the root question is one of housing affordability, in particular for retirees, who may have a lot of assets, but limited cash flow
Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
Reducing/capping property taxes does indeed make it easier for some retirees to keep affording their homes, but reducing property taxes makes real estate a more lucrative investment, driving up the overall prices of real estate. This applies for both private persons intending to use the property to live in, for private persons looking seek rent, and corporate actors doing the same. Messing with property taxes is a large part of the housing affordability issue present in many places in the U.S and elsewhere (zoning laws being another major contributor, in particular those mandating single family homes, and lack of public housing being the other major contributor). Hence, this change would only benefit those lucky enough to have purchased a home in the past, at the expense of all retirees not already that lucky, which are now less likely to be able to do so.
Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
Apart from driving up the prices of real estate for other retirees, everyone else interested in purchasing a home will also feel this broad increase in prices. This has led to large swaths of the population being effectively priced out of home ownership. This has the second order effect of making owning rentals more lucrative, as higher rents can be charged, further exacerbating the larger problem of housing affordability, but now also for even poorer people.
Finally, reductions in real estate taxes limit what public services can be funded through their use. In the U.S, this primarily means schools, infrastructure, firefighting, transit etc, all of which are suffering a lot in quality, much as a consequence of having messed with property taxes in the past.
There's a very, very strong case to be made that the consequences have very much outweighed the benefits in this scenario. I would even say that they have been devastating, being part of the root cause of a large amount of issues seen today.
Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
There clearly are good means to tackle this problem in other ways, the principal of which I believe should be massive public investment in social housing. By building a huge supply of high quality homes affordable to everyone, we make sure no one will have to be forced to go without an acceptable home, regardless of whether they are retired or not.
The second strategy should be to entirely remove the kind of zoning laws that have contributed to the kind of increase in housing prices seen today - mandating that only single family homes should be allowed to be built on massive lots with low utilization is hugely harmful to housing affordability.
These two measures would address housing prices having gone up in the way they have historically, which would also lead to property taxes not rising in such a dramatic fashion.
What should never be done, however, is reducing or capping property taxes.
You make it sound like it's either or. The resonable thing to do would be to reduce property taxes for the property the owner lives in and tax even more the additional properties. The goal is for people to be able to afford their homes and at the same time making properties not so attractive as an investment.
There's potential for mitigating some of the negative impacts using a mixed approach, although I'm not convinced it's going to be straightforward or even worthwhile.
What type of community will his home exist in if everyone stops paying taxes?
Boomers underfunded the schools and shit around here to get out of taxes. Now that they’re ready to move to Florida, they don’t understand why no one wants to buy their house.
Eh, probably paid like 25k for a house that's worth 500k now or something. Really what we need to do is make property taxes scale more aggressively, so it isn't economical to hoard more resources than you can actually use. Maybe something like annual tax owed = (value of all real estate owned by one person)^2/10,000,000. Perhaps with a grace period for new construction/renovations.
As for appraisal, let people declare what their property is worth, and force them to sell if someone offers 20% more than their claimed value.
Land is a natural resource, and like air or sunlight, nobody deserves to own it more than anybody else.
"But my family has live here for generations!" sounds awful similar to "I deserve it because my great great grandfather killed the people that used to live here."
You get to decide how much the land is worth to you. If you value it honestly and somebody else values it higher, a trade benefits both of you.
I value your home more than you, now get the fuck out and find a new one.
In fact going by your first sentence, this system isn't even necessary. Why do you deserve to live where you do just because you paid some random person money? I deserve the land you're living on just as much as you do.
Money represents things you do deserve, like the value created by your own work, as well as things you have no moral claim to, like natural resources. What makes sense to me is that the land is owned collectively. The property taxes are effectively rent to the rest of the population, and those that consider it most valuable should get to use it. I also think there should be separate taxes for things that devalue the land, like extracting minerals. You can still make a profit from extracting minerals based on the value added by your own work, but you need to pay the rest of humanity for their share of the minerals themselves.
Have to consider both the ideal and the existing situation for the best next step. Housing is a combination of value both created by human effort, and an accumulation of natural resources. I think what I've proposed is a big step towards fair allocation of housing, but critically, also something that could actually be implemented.
Has nothing to do with "uprooting families". Average American families are not the ones grossly overestimating the values of their property. It's people like Trump who use overestimated values on their properties in order to hide money and grift people into paying him more than properties are actually worth. And then readjusting to actual values, or lower, in order to dodge taxes.
Edit: my reply was not an endorsement of OP's property assessment plan. I was only speaking to our frustration with the rich who hoard wealth in the form of land and use overinflated valuations of their property to increase their wealth at the expense of everyone else. And even though OP's idea is flawed there is merit in the idea of altering the way property value is determined.
Investment company comes in and buys literally everything because they can just offer 20% over value. Now they rent it out for twice as much as your mortgage cost. What are you going to do, not like there are any other houses left.
Think about what the investment company's tax rate would look like. They'd be bankrupt instantly. They'd have to pay 10M/year in taxes to maintain ownership of $10M in property.
That's not how this works. A better solution would be to tax more aggressively second+ homes and severely limit what corporations can invest into.
Why should a company be able to profit off of second hand housing? This isn't a commodity, but it's treated as such. Companies should be able to build new housing (for sale) and own housing only for the purposes of, say, housing their employees if they so wish. I simply see no benefits to allowing companies trade living spaces like stocks.
The whole point is that you get to decide how much the property is worth to you. If it's worth more to someone else, you're both better off for the trade. The only losers here are people trying to cheat on their taxes by giving a "low" appraisal, and people trying to hoard multiple properties.
Plug some numbers into that formula.
If you own a $100k property, you pay 1k in taxes/year
If you own 10 of those properties, you pay 100k/year. This would mean you have to charge more in rent than a mortgage would cost to buy the same property. The business model would become unprofitable.
I understand the logic of it, my point is that this is a trust/honesty based system which leaves you cornered. Here are some problems with it:
placing a low value on my house to pay less taxes exposes me to a hostile buyout
placing a realistic (e.g. around average for the region) price doesn't solve the previous problem. I'm still in danger of a hostile buyout, while also paying higher taxes. What's more, even if everyone else plays fairly, this additional % someone else paid to take my house is now the minimum added on top of their own valuation, driving prices up.
placing an unreachably high price would bankrupt me as I can't pay the taxes, so there is no scenario in which this works out for me
given a realistic and unequal economy, there will be those who can't afford to place a higher price on their house, i can just go and buy them out on sale, then rent them back to them (that one might sound familiar)
The fault in your assumption is 1. that this would discourage corporations from buying up; and 2. That you live in an equal and just society;
The fault in your assumption is 1. that this would discourage corporations from buying up;
Did you plug in some numbers to see how much you pay when you own multiple homes? Rental units are not profitable when people can buy a house for cheaper than your property taxes on the same property. And normal people can do hostile buyouts from corporate landords too.
Technically yes, but the problem is that they can afford to hold their investments in many small companies so they won't even have to pay that much tax.
Just adding government oversight for this idea is going to be a costly nightmare.
Property taxes do hit retired people differently though. Taxing based on what the government says your land is worth instead of your income is absolutely meant to create opportunities for real estate agents and developers at the expense of the people living there.
Taxes based on assets tax those with assets, instead of income taxes which tax those who work.
If old man owns such a valuable piece of land, he deserves to pay his fair share for the public services he used.
It’s like saying you don’t want to pay for schools because you’re not a student.
The fact that schools are funded by the surrounding area is crap and needs to change. He's retired with a social security income. He paid into the system his entire life already. Telling him he must sell and move out because he's not wealthy enough is exactly what we should be working against. It's a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Of course you are looking at outliers and I feel like you're right to the point that outliers like that should have special assessments or breaks.
Where I live, the taxes are pretty high for real estate, but if you are a senior citizen, you can get a discount where your tax rate is locked in at the value that it was when you retired.
I also have some acquaintances who inherited a house and at the time houses were very cheap but they didn't pay the taxes and they were super upset that they were going to lose their house because they didn't pay the taxes.
So now they're bunking up and living in apartments and Scattered because they didn't want to drum up the two or three thousand dollars a year in real estate taxes that they had to pay to keep an entire house.
Yeah and those laws are great for keeping people who want to age in place in their homes. Unfortunately they aren't the norm. Usually it's just a discount but it still goes up.
Unless there is an article or background on the guy in the picture you're projecting a HUGE amount of stuff you just made up on that guy.
That's what his sign says. I take him at his word on that one.
Well, no he didn't. He didn't start paying into it until he started earning money. Likely for the first 18 years of his life, he lived of what other people put into the system. Many of those people that paid for him are in the situation he's in right now, except now he sees it as unfair.
No one is telling him to move out. He certainly isn't saying he will be forced to move if he has to continue to pay property taxes. You just made that up.
He's not saying he is not wealthy enough. You just made that up. In fact, his sign is indicating he does have he wealth to cover the property taxes via his Social Security. He's saying he doesn't' believe he should have to pay anything one something he bought decades ago while he continues to enjoy the services of the city and society the tax dollars pay for.
No, that's how American K-12 schools are funded. That and infrastructure. Which is why poor areas have worse schools and roads; and police from outside their tax area. Which is both a great way to punish the poor in the old school protestant fashion and force them out the second the wealthy want their land.
And you know exactly what I mean by paying in his entire life.
Finally, paying half your income on property taxes is not financially sustainable. It's ridiculous to me that you would even pretend it is.
Partially true, but not absolutely. K-12 in many places in the USA are funded through property taxes. I'm in the USA and my public school system is funded via income tax. No property taxes go to school.
True in some places. False in others. Some places derive income from high property taxes. Other places choose high sales taxes. Yet others do it on income tax.
Again, partially true. Some states have state taxes that fund various projects at the municipal level irrespective of the wealth of the locality.
I don't disagree that a more equitble system for funding schools should be designed and implemented, but you know know that because I'm trying to have that discussion with you in another thread and you're weak as water on that and won't discuss any specifics except "someone else should pay".
I know your words on that don't match reality, and you're skipping a really important part of that reality. I'll admit I was wrong one part of that. I said he likely started "paying into the system at age 18". We know thats wrong. His sign tells us he built his house at age 25. Age 25 is when he would be first paying the property taxes he's complaining about. So he's spent even less time paying into the system and already wants to be except from it for the society benefits he still gets.
Again, you're making stuff up from nothing. What are his expenses? He owns his house. He's retired so his healthcare is covered by Medicare. If he's living on just social security he's likely not even paying income tax because his income is low. What are his other expenses? Food? Clothing? Electricity? Water? He might have a well and not even have that bill. Are you saying half his income can't cover those things? Further, we have no idea what he earned in life. Did he spend it on stupid stuff? We don't know. I'm certainly not claiming any of my assumptions of him as fact, but that isn't stopping you from doing so.
So you're just doubling down on what if this and that.
Gotta be one of the most dogshit takes I've ever seen, hope you're evicted one day!
It is kinda fucked up if retired are forced to move out from their house via taxation. Only ones who benefits are real estate companies
That’s the fictional boogeyman used by the rich to gut public services. See the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer association and California prop 13.
The tax cuts go to the rich and corporate land owners.
We could always, also tax the wealthy. This is not fictional. Retired people in the US are facing a crisis as they're priced out of housing because their social security is fixed and housing prices are skyrocketing.
We could put the stipulation that you’re only exempt from tax increases if the unit is owner occupied, they’ve been there for at least five years, and the resident is retired.
We could also limit the exemption to modest homes, but instead California gives it to mansions and shopping malls too.
If you’re rich, pay your damn taxes.
Agreed
Its always guys that look like they extract peyote in their kitchen.
What's wrong with that?
Edit: despite that peyote shouldn't be just gathered on the wild, because they're protected
For many states property taxes are the majority of funding for public schools. If that's the case for the pictured person, the sign could also read:
"I got my public education for free from age 5-18 funded from others paying property taxes including learning how to read and write to make this sign you're reading. Now that I've received that free public education and benefited from it, I'm not interested in paying for any kids to be educated using my dollars. F you, I got mine."
We could also just pay for education differently.
Yes and. How most of the US funds their school system is super fucked up. Here in Canada, primary education is paid for by the province, and school funding is based on student enrollment numbers. This translates to much more equal levels of education, regardless of how wealthy a given neighborhood may be. I was shocked to find out that schools are paid for by catchment area taxes in must of the states - it makes the history of redlining so obvious when the is literally a "wing side of the tracks".
Via property taxes.
Property tax is the mechanism through which the taxes are gathered, but funding is through the province. This is very different than how allocation happens in most states, where schools are directly funded by their catchment area.
So the source is the provincial government, but in that system where is the province deriving the revenue to pay for schools? What is being taxed by the province to bring in the money it uses to fund schools?
Property taxes is the answer
property tax is more equitable than sales tax because it is based on wealth instead of consumption.
Using property tax to fund education simply leaves poor areas poor and uneducated.
Now if they restructured it so the property tax went to the state level and was distributed to those schools that needed it most, not those schools that were in proximity of the land, I'd be for it.
It’s this way by design
that is true.
And progressive tax rates collected at the state level distributed based on student density and district need are better than both options.
It's based on wealth that matters for rich people. For the average person it's extremely regressive. We're telling people that they must sell and move if they aren't rich enough. There are better ways to tax people and assets in the 21st century.
I love the "but it pays for schools" argument, like how about we drop 3 less bombs per year and just pay for all the schools out of the existing tax pool like it should be.
I agree with the sentiment but to put some numbers into perspective we spend about 850 Billion a year on K-12 education. The US military budget is about 850 Billion. Now I would fully support switching about 200 Billion of that and throwing it at the most underfunded schools in the country. Another source would be police budgets. Police are massively overfunded and take most of a local region's money. So we could easily grab some of that funding too.
Generally wealth transfer taxes should be higher though, so buying houses (especially second and third houses or out of state houses), buying vehicles over the "budget" category (ballpark 35K these days?), any boat that's not a primary residence or a 10 foot fishing boat, etc etc... This idea that anything other than income tax should affect everyone equally is pretty ridiculous, as is the idea that the only way to tax wealth is to tax stocks.
Until we do, we can't stop the current funding source. Feel free to present your argument on your proposed alternate method.
Have the rich actually pay taxes. Use that.
If you're actually serious, you have to do better than that for an answer. How are you going to tax them? What are you going to tax them on? Who is considered rich?
It's as fine tuned a proposal as, "tax property".
"Tax property" has finely enumerated rules completely spelled out in the letter of the law in hundreds of different variations across many states and cities. You can certainly disagree with it, but its a fully formed and executed system that is funding many schools today.
What you've got so far in this discussion is "stop what is currently in place and make someone else pay somehow". Thats not even fully formed thought much less an argument that can be defended. Your first statement, and now this follow up tell me you're really interested (capable?) of proposing a better alternative.
I'm not going to "finely enumerate and spell out the letter of the law in hundreds of variations" for you.
Income and wealth taxes also have hundreds of variations and fine tunings. Saying I have to invent a whole new system on my own right here and now or else I'm not serious is not serious.
So he bought a house for 6k 50 years go and now has to pay 2k in property taxes each year. If he was renting that wouldn't cover two months.
Does he also complain that the sales tax on candy bar is more than he used to pay for a candy bar when he first bought his house?
The real problem if that's the scenario is that his social security check is less than $400/month.
Its almost 2000
Which means he's paying $12k in property taxes a year. That does sound quite substantial. Assuming that's somewhat equivalent to rates in the UK, I pay around £1400.
Do you have stamp duty in the UK? We have both rates (yearly) and stamp duty (once off during purchase) in Australia, and property taxes in the USA are roughly the same as rates and stamp duty combined into one.
Yes, we have stamp duty, usually a % of the house as a one off.
Most places are around 1% of value with many having caps on increases in value or other differences in taxed and actual value. This means his house is worth 1,000,000 to 1,600,000
If he was really living on 24k he wouldn't be able to pay 12,000 in property tax. He bought when it cost almost nothing and spent most of his life paying neither rent nor mortgage unlike most of us and has a reasonable retirement.
He could at any time sell and live better than you or I even if he didn't have a dime other than the house. Instead he uses his time to whine about his good fortune.
You are making a lot of assumptions there but setting that aside, I'm not sure I'm in favour of turfing a pensioner out of their home to pay tax because they lucked out. Surely it'd be better to settle up after they die. It's not like he's preventing a needy young family moving in - presumably anyone buying this house would need to be pretty wealthy!
Step one make schools mostly dependent on property tax by funding them almost entirely through property tax Step two watch the price of housing skyrocket to the point where half of them are owned by old fuckers Step three make old fuckers fully or partially exempt from this tax Step four wonder why your schools have basically been defunded
Lets imagine a scenario bob the old lives at 65 lives in a 2M home which isn't exactly a castle its just in a really desirable area. Bob is cash poor but house rich. He's going to be taxes out of his home sooner or later without relief. Suppose we provide him that relief.
Shall we let him sell his house and realize his gains. Tax those gains but leave him enough to live wealthy for the next 20 years and collect 20 years of 1% taxes or about 660k with 5% appreciation. We would also collect around 300k of that 2M in capital gains taxes.
All in all we are giving up almost a million dollars in tax revenue which will be collected by taxing people who aren't sitting on a 1.7M pot of gold. We will be taxing lots of folks barely getting by MORE to write a million dollar check to grandpa.
Then when he dies all those capital gains that were in fact real evaporate because the new owner who inherits it gets to start fresh at present value.
To justify your position I want you to imagine going around to a bunch of poor people's apartments and taking stuff out of their house to give to one rich guy. Yes someone who is "house rich" doesn't SEEM rich but assets are fungible and in a good market remarkably liquid.
"I don't understand how inflation works and I'm blaming government for it"
If the property tax scales with inflation and social security is also adjusted for inflation, but your property tax is getting more expensive relative to your social security income, something's not right.
::: spoiler spoiler
I understand that housing prices are outpacing general inflation... that's kinda my point. :::
A big part of why housing prices are outpacing general inflation is constrained supply due to long time homeowners paying artificially low taxes.
I went and argued my taxes at my annual township tax assessment meeting. I was being assessed for a new deck and ramp. That added about $200 to my taxes. What I did do was move the wheelchair ramp out away from the house a bit for better winter time safety and repaired the steps, ramp boards, and railings.
Should I have been taxed for a whole new deck and ramp when I just did repairs and made safety changes?
You have to think more like Trump, LOL. The rich don't pay any taxes through the use of loopholes. Why should you. Slum lords should be forced to pay taxes, not working class schmo that needs a roof over their heads. Tax the slum lords.
And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It's a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
you could have progressive taxes on wealth as well. there's a difference between having one house worth 500k and having 500 million in shares
True, you just need to make sure you start high enough up, or exempt the value of a primary residence (maybe limit the exemption to a non-opulent value of a house so the richest don't start building castles to bind their money tax free)
UK has property taxes too and its pretty shit tbh. Council tax, there are bands based on what your house was worth in the 90s (yes really...) and generally the poor will pay a higher % of their income. I have a pretty small bungalow, 60m². One of the lowest bands and pay £1600 a year on a house that cost £230k. The most you can have to pay is £4200, beyond that point regardless of how much more expensive your house is the tax rate doesn't increase.
The original plan of the tax was a fixed rate per person. This among other things is why many people were keen on the idea of digging a hole so deep that we could hand Thatcher over to Satan personally.
That has to be the most regressive tax I've heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I'm sorry it's happening to you.
Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it's on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it's not considered excessive.
This doesn't fit the narrative, but a lot of American states have lower effective property tax rates than European nations. There exceptions on both ends of this of course (like TX which is making up for a lack of income taxes).
People should look them up and compare European nations to major us cities and states. Europe ends up with not only higher income taxes, but also higher property taxes overall. And a completely insane financing method like having adjustable rate mortgages being normal, locked only for a period of 3 to 5 years before basically being forced to refinance. Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates.
No system is perfect and people with means tend to find every flaw in them (and plant those flaws if they are wealthy enough). But people really need to remember that the grass is always greener because of all the manure.
And that man clearly does not live in such a state, nor did I (or anyone else I think) claim that his circumstances apply to the entire usa. You're wrong in assuming that other people are not aware that different places have varying laws and tax systems.
Your whataboutism defence of regressive tax systems is also very strange to me. That other places have unfair practices in place, is no excuse to put up with an unfair system in any one place. Call them all out on their brokeness, but if you do call them out, you'll have to be more specific in your example(s), state things that are actually verifiable instead of some vague whataboutism.
Ps, while I did not think your whataboutism defence was relevant, this "Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates." was easy to verify and it turned out to be false. Home ownership rates are on average slightly higher in Europe than in the usa, here's statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-rate-in-europe/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Why have taxes based on income when you can tax accumulated capital instead?
If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it's easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.
Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he's a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he's deriving no income from that wealth, since he can't rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he's a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.
Taxing liquid capital is fairly straightforward, especially if it's tied to income (like company founders owning shares).
Taxing non-liquid assets is complicated because it's hard to make it fair in cases of family home inheritance and similar situations.
But taxing use of assets as collateral for loans (to create liquidity from a non-liquid asset) should be reasonably fair, it can be treated as an advance on capital gains taxes on the collateralized asset.
Just worth repeating
Surely this man would be in favor of a greater and graduated state income tax then, right?
...right?
Interesting. In Texas once you hit 65 they freeze your property taxes and no longer increase it. My parents are only paying $1,800/year on a $250K house. Meanwhile I’m paying $14,000/yr on a $500K house.
If you live FULL TIME in Florida there is a cap on property tax increases. Many people in Florida own homes but do not live here full time and therefore are not eligible for this protection against increases. But they don't have an age limit that ends all increases.
Sounds like it’s working as intended to target snow birds or landlords owning multiple properties
Yes it does help limiting some snow birds. There is a whole methodology with snow birds. Unrelated to property tax and and home ownership. To establish state residency you need to physically live 6 months and a day in a state to be considered a "resident" there. Many try to get around it. But states go as far as checking where your cell phone is along with credit card purchases to catch people lying about where they were.
Sorry how much??? I think we pay like 7/800€ property tax yearly on a house worth about 400k€... I thought US had low taxes.
Low income taxes. And our sales tax is typically lower than European VAT when the comparison is valid. But those generally go to the feds and the state, that do not fund municipal services, so municipalities have to collect the remainder they need through property taxes, typically on real estate and cars. And none of them fund healthcare, so we have to pay a company premiums for that. Basically the same for higher education. When you look at our total financial burden to receive the kind of services that are funded by taxes in other developed countries, we can be deceptively expensive, especially if you start thinking about the comparative quality of those services. But our income and capital gains tax rates are low, especially if you are very rich! I made myself sad
My state doesn’t have any income tax. So it’s offset with higher property taxes. Other states have lowe me property taxes but have an income tax.
Americans actually pay a higher effective tax rate than in civilized countries, while receiving fewer services in return.
Only the very weathy have a lower effective rate because they use discretionary spending to purchase lax tax laws.
America is a shit hole country in deep deep denial.
Comparing property taxes now in 2025 dollars to unadjusted original cost in 1950 dollars is nonsensical. The two numbers bear no relation nor should they.
The average social security check is $1,978 a month or $23,736 per annum. Half of that is $11,868. Lets suppose he lives in CA where the annual rate for owner occupied is 0.74%. His house would be worth approx 1.6 million dollars. To to be clear he is whining about paying the appropriate and legal tax on his fully owned 1.6M cash hoard. This is a great problem to have.
If its that burdensome he can cash out and even with rent payments for the rest of his life live great even if he has no other savings of any sort.
Looks like about $5800 a month gradually increasing with inflation for at least 25 years.
If he has another $400,000 which seems super likely since I don't think he's actually living in his 1.6M house on $12,000 a year it could be more than 7500 a month.
If we add a little realism and only include another 15 years he could probably actually withdraw about 11,000 a month.
https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/social-security/average-monthly-social-security-check https://www.tax-rates.org/taxtables/property-tax-by-state
Property tax funds important things like schools, emergenct services, etc.
if he was destitute otherwise would already have sold it. You are arguing in favor of a tax break for some rich prick probably worth north of 3 million not paying the taxes that pay for your kid to get a decent education because basically feels.
Its no more immoral than you giving up your income.
There is no way you can convince me that gentrification is actually good for kids. Property tax funding education does nothing but punish poor families.
Property taxes funding education, in a state like Texas where school districts are seized by the state and systematically dismantled by private equity interests operating in state-appointed positions, is a fucking joke.
This isn't strictly an issue of taxation. Its an issue of (un)representative governance forcing people into a privatized model by leveraging the pain caused through dysfunctional public services. "Oh oh! Crimes up! We need even more cops! Oh oh! Schools are failing! So we need more... checks notes football stadiums and administrative offices."
It's deliberate mismanagement intended to destroy confidence in public institutions.
For those who want more info on this, here's the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
The wealthy often have near zero or net negative income. It's one reason why income taxes are optional for them but property taxes ultimately aren't.
Property taxes on your first house should not be steep. On your other houses on the other hand...
Cash is liquid, the theoretical home in question is not.
It trivially is in any hot market
Seconded. This is inaccessible net worth. It is useless to someone who cannot take advantage of it. Sale would incur capital gains, which would be significant, and finding another property to live in would be just as unaffordable.
No. Capital gains taxes are not taken from your residence.
...does anyone in this thread actually own a residence or at least conduct a basic level of research before forming strong opinions?
Capital gains absolutely apply to primary home sales. You're just allowed to exclude the first $250k of gains, or $500k if married filing joint.
https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc701
That's largely due to the property inflation from the tech sector and not consistent across the state. You could be in San Fransisco and see your land 10x in value as the city explodes around you or you could be at the ass end of Oakland or the rural east end and still live in a slum.
This guy could also be from Texas - in the exurbs of Austin, Dallas, Houston, or El Paso - and be looking at closer to 1.5-2% annual rates. Very possible he acquired some dirt cheap land in Beaumont or Bexar County only to see his $5k plot balloon to $100-200k over the course of 20 years.
Either way for California he wouldn't be affected because Californiamnproperty taxes are effectively snapshotted at time of purchase and grandfathered for people like him. If he truly bought or built 50 years ago and ows it outright then prop 13 has long capped what he pays decades ago.
People like him, in California, are subsidized by the modern generation who don't get capped by prop 13. And when he sells that house it's value gets assessed at current market value and full taxes are due from the buyer.
Put shortly, his story is likely bullshit if he's from California. And people without houses and salty about it need to do some research.
If this was so it wouldn't be half his ss in property taxes. Average ss is 1900 a month
Do you live in Michigan or is there somewhere else that was this idiotic too?
I think you may have it wrong on what is happening, this guy isn't paying less tax than those around him from how i read it. Your area seems to be taxed based on the purchase price and not the assessed value of the property.
From how i read it his taxes have steadily gone up base on home prices and assessments. He pays taxes every year and they are relatively the same as those around him. The problem is that the value has gone up more than it should have due to the local gov wanting to be paid more. Most county commissioners (R/D doesn't matter) are paid a percentage of what the property tax based on population. This means that if the price goes up then they get paid more. At times these also come from the state instead of a county. This means that they reps are paid based on the tax assessment.
If we make the math easy lets say he paid $30,000 for his house. (I know a city wont be this way but a small house in a rural area works for this also lets assume it was purchased some time ago). The current (as of today) monthly average of Social Security payments is $1976. ($23,712 yearly) This is about $70,000 every 3 years. $70,000/2 is $35,000. Again those payments are based on today and not the last few two years. Based on that math, SS 1976 x 12 (year) $23,712 divided by 2 (half my ss check) thats $11,856. He is essentially being taxed 30% of what he purchased his home for. I know this may not sound like much to some but its not about you in the city working the full time job for x an hour. This post is about a guy who built his home and purchased the lumber piece by piece and built it himself after purchasing the land.
No, the person you're replying to likely lives in an area with annual assessment limits. This means when they move into their house, they pay taxes on the assessed amount at that time. Every year, even if the assessment shows a 50% increase in value, your tax increase will be capped at something like a 2% increase. Over the course of 30 years this adds up to huge tax savings the longer you stay in one place. The downsides are that it causes more traffic, causes homes to sell less often, and provides less local tax to fund public programs like schools.
Ohh snap I read the comments wrong. I totally missed the “the way the guy wishes they did” referring to taxes. Nice catch.
I was explaining how it must be for the guy in the pic. Not how the OP was talking about it. Thanks for the clarification on my fuck up.
This guy's actual problem isn't that his property taxes have gone way up. His problem is that his income, that is say social security, has not kept pace with the inflated cost of property taxes. And of course it hasn't kept up with any of the other inflationary costs we are dealing with today as well. And this is something that has hit everyone else because the average wage has not kept up with inflation either.
His property taxes have gone up because his wealth has gone up. Sounds fair to me.
While I do think there should be some relief for some people as far as property taxes are concerned... living in a town or city gives a person access to many local government subsided services. Firefighters, and ambulances are some simple ones that everyone uses. Roads as well. And the cost of that does increase over time. Basing a person's contributions to paying for that based on the value of thier property is just easier for local governments, and more stable. But it doesn't really corelate with the use of those services. Nor with income or ability to pay.
Life necessities really shouldn't be taxed at most levels. Food, shelter, water, heat, medical care. Most already aren't. But housing still is. Investment properties should be taxed of course, but an average primary residence really shouldn't be.
Looking at my electrical bill is depressing. It's always power used x and then taxes that are the same as x plus fees. So using $100 in electricity means I pay $220 with over half being taxes and extra fees
Yeah, and property taxes result in more low density housing, as that increases the amount of tax revenue per person. High density housing means less revenue per person but the costs of services per person is still about the same. Sure theoretically, public transit is cheaper per person with high density housing, but realistically it isn't because nobody gives a shit about public transit in the suburbs.
Of course there's more costs overall because more suburbs mean governments are pressured to spend insane amounts of money on building and expanding highways. But it's usually a different level of government that builds the highways, so doesn't factor in the decisions to create more low density housing.
I've read otherwise on the costs of services per person and density. A fire station can only reasonably cover a certain amount of space. So low density housing means you need more fire stations for the same amount of people. And of course you need more road per person in general.
Is this guy paid by some rich guys wanting to abolish property taxes?
I see both arguments for this as valid. I get that you wanna stay and live your entire life in the place you owned forever. The reality is taxes are needed and will increase forever, which are important to keeping your state functioning (as long as the people in charge are doing a good job and actually using the funds wisely). I wonder what state they are from because I know property tax can be wildly different depending upon that. I'm sure they don't want to, but there are like 6 states that currently offer no property tax to seniors over 65 and 10 that offer exemptions based on income and age. At the same time it is good to see them complain because maybe they can try to sway the state to also offer the no property tax benefit to seniors as well. Still if he is hurting that much, then it's probably easier to sell the place and move to another place that will allow him to be better off with less worrying. It's a valid option even if he doesn't agree with it.
his point is that his income should have increased to reflect inflation, since his taxes did. it's actually obscene that half his check goes to property tax on land he's had forever, and people are talking down about him for it.
Yeah, that makes much more sense. I absolutely agree, sadly most places draw the line on ever allowing that to happen. Although I do remember reading that some states have minimum wage tied to it which was pretty shocking, despite making perfect sense.
I'm not going to offer numbers and percentages but I would propose an overall cap on state property taxes. That would force the state to spend less or finally get rid of funding for things that are not providing the desired results. I would shift the percentage of property tax levied more on commercial than residential. And finally I would have a lower rate for those who own the house and live there as opposed to an owner who is renting out the house.
Property tax is the big thing that forces people to engage with capitalism against their will.
Without property tax, you could live off-grid for eternity. But with property tax, you always have to earn money, and the people that control that money therefore control you.
He could also just be in an area that was decently outside a major metro area when he bought his house, and urban sprawl and real estate speculation has massively raised the value of his property.
When my parents bought my childhood home in the 80s, the road ended about a mile down from the house and they had to park at the lake and carry things up. There's a hunting preserve just on the other side of the train tracks to the north, and when I was growing up, farms with cows, horses, and a shitload of corn.
These days, I don't know anyone I grew up with who can afford to live there any more, as it's become yet another commuter town in the country for the higher paid employees in the nearest major city. When they sold the house, I'm pretty sure it had to be knocked down completely (we had squirrels in the walls, and the previous owner had done a hack job on the electrical wiring to convert it from a summer cottage to a full-time residence) yet a half acre of land and a house you couldn't legally sell for occupation was still close to $500,000.
I can actually rent a two bedroom apartment in NYC for less than it would cost me to rent a studio in my home town, which has no public transport, and it was a two mile walk to the nearest gas station, one way.
It's kind of messed up that entire communities can be destroyed, through nothing they actually did and developments they had no way of predicting 40 years ago.
You'd have to earn the money to purchase your off-grid setup in the first place.
Outside of fantasy no that is just nonsense
They dangle the carrot of "home ownership" as if anyone ever owns a home that can be taken away for not paying taxes.
TBH, property taxes could be a necessary evil, like only imposing them above a certain number of owned homes, to curb some companies buying up homes en masse to control the rent market, but I have a weird feeling they might not be the ones paying these taxes.
Lots of countries have property taxes that are more reasonable because they focus on city services like trash pickup and stuff. The problem is property taxes are tied to education in the US and in many states the higher the property taxes the better the schools, the more exclusive the neighborhood, etc.
Agreed with # of homes owned as well as square footage/meters. A mansion should be hit hard by taxes.
I don't think taxes negate ownership.
If you rent you need permission for every modification, every pet, even for something like planting a garden.
Ownership can be conditional; you can own a domain, but if you don't pay the renewal fee it can be taken away; you can own a car, but if you drive it without paying your registration it can be impounded; you can own a business, but if you don't pay your license renewal it can be revoked.
Owning something doesn't mean it can never be taken away or that you don't need to do anything to keep it.
Property taxes also aren't egregious if you don't live in an expensive house in an expensive area.
The problem is that most of ya'll have been conditioned to think "that's not good enough for you" even when you can't afford more. Then entitlement kicks in where you think you deserve more before others who have less and before you know it, Bernie loses the nomination and we're stuck with a trump presidency.
You could take the interpretation of "ownership" to many ridiculous conclusions, from "all ownership is theft" to "nothing is owned" to "all governent is crime" to "all taxation is theft" etc...
From a practical standpoint, "ownership" is an arbitrary threshold of exclusivity that is generally respected by society under appropriate conditions. Where that threshold and what the conditions are will vary by the type of property and general social sensibilities.
It's not meaningless, it's about who controls a thing. What makes you think ownership must not have conditions?
That would mean all taxes are theft.
You're welcome to have that perspective, but it doesn't map well onto any modern legal framework for ownership.
Exchange for goods and services no! Give goods and services yes!
Here the increases are capped at 3% per year if you live in the house. I lived in a shitty house we bought for 35k in the 1990s crash, and property taxes when we sold it in the breakup 20 years later were still under 1k a year, though insurance was crazy high. With husband we had to buy a much more expensive house, there are no shitty ones for sale anymore, all are snatched by corps to flip and rent. So now it's high but in 20 years maybe it will seem low again. Especially if the market crashes and it's re-assessed more reasonably.
It's just inflation, I do think someone owning a home costs the city in roads, trash, transit, other services, Is not crazy to tax on property ownership.
Inflation is also not what the guy with the sign is taking into account in his complaint. He’s at least 40 years older in that picture than he was when he bought his property if he’s getting social security. The real purchasing power of whatever he paid back then is much smaller than the same number of dollars is now.
$5000 in January 1985 would be the same as $15,055.50 now according to the inflation calculator on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website
Also, it’s only every three years that he’s paying that much. Honestly, he’s not making the point he thinks he is.
We need taxes to fund emergency services and local government in general. The problem isn’t that taxes go up in dollar amount. The problem is that the 1% take everything for themselves, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs. Our pay and public benefits (like social security) don’t rise with inflation because of the actions of the rich.
The solution is so obvious, but we spend so much time arguing about everything but the real problem.
Yeah, if you are comparing the house you bought in 1980 for 10k dollars and say you pay 5k in tax every three years, using 2025 dollars then that is totally useless as a statement.
I wonder if there should be an exemption for those on Social Security.
That said, I don't know of a good way to ensure that an exemption like that wouldn't be abused.
My city has a senior discount on property taxes, where seniors that have a net worth and income both below certain numbers pay reduced or as low as 0% of their regularly assessed property tax. I'm not sure how they verify net worth, but it seems like a good system to me as long as they have figured out a way to do that efficiently and effectively
I think most places have a senior freeze, so once you qualify it doesn't go up anymore.
Property taxes go towards education. More right-wing bullshit attacking schools.
But this is a bad idea.
Areas with high property value have higher quality schooling. Area with low property value have lower quality schooling. The rich stay rich. The poor stay poor.
Maybe education money shouldn't come from property taxes. Maybe corporations should pay for the education they require their workers to have visa corporate taxes
Generally the best option is for all property taxes for education to go into one pot to by divided up fairly across all school districts in the state, that way wealthy areas don't end up with over funded schools while rural areas and poor areas get poorly funded schools
Then why do the schools in my town look like they're from 1970 and never updated. Over 10k in property taxes here.
Edit. I'm all for giving my property taxes to help make kids smarter but it doesn't seem like it's working
I was wondering if the US is property taxes were like 33%/year but it said original value, so I'm guessing it was dirt cheap then
when that guy was 25, house prices were probably in the $20k for a good house. If he built it, even cheaper. He's equating two things that don't really have relevance to anything but his memory
he's also not taking advantage of his options for being a senior on fixed income nor did he prepare for his retirement properly if all he has is social security
I get what you're saying.
But the last half of that last sentence reads "poor people are poor because they deserve to be poor".
it's too bad you can't see what I said, because that's not it. sometimes people do stuff that on the surface might sound one way, how are we to know what the man did with the next part of his life.
But let's consider he built his own house. And owned it by 25.
I'm of the age that I know a lot of people my parents age faced with situations similar to what is being presented in the picture.
I've also been homeless with my family and lived a pretty typical native American not living on a rez life. i know what being poor is. i know what it's like for old people who are poor
My parents bought a house for $14k in the mid 70s.
Yea, it's super location dependant. Generally the more rural the lower the taxes. But it also varies by state. States with low or no income tax tend to have higher property tax.
So property tax I am ok with, in theory. The people with property in a city should pay for services like fire, schools, police, road maintenance..... What gets me is when the city wants more and more for stupid shit like iPads for all students.... Every 3 years due to forced upgrades or just old style deprecation over 3 years.
The amount my taxes go up each year is more than any raise I get. Then add on insurance which has gone insane. I paid off my house to avoid a 20k female flood insurance bill because a 1 foot piece of concrete touched a high risk flood zone. A technicality because if I took down a screen patio, then I wouldn't have to pay.
It's insane how expensive owning a house has become
This isn't a discussion on property tax, it's more about social security. There is no reason we cannot scale taxes/fines to income. Many countries pull this off...
bUt tHeN nO oNe wOuLd bE iNcEnTiViSeD tO wOrK oR bEcOmE wEaLtHy
We would need to make sure all loopholes are closed for wealthy people just using investments to harvest losses... Trump only needed to pay $750 in taxes on his "taxable" income one year.
Interesting use of quotes. I wonder how it was "paid for"
I think he means that he paid for it, but never truly owns it when your forced to pay tax or they take your house away.
If you want to get reductive, you never truly own it even if you live in a society where there is no tax.
The rule of law that allows the concept of private ownership to be upheld in society runs on tax dollars. If you take away all of the tax dollars, the mechanisms that define and enforce the rule of law go with it.
In a completely tax free society someone can just kick in your door of your house and shoot you, and now they own your house. Who will stop the thief/murderer? There's no police, no courts, no judges, no jails. If instead of an individual its a foreign nation, there's no military to defend your nation's borders. All of that comes from tax dollars. So even then you never really own your own house because someone can take it (and your life) away from you.
there have been entire civilizations that didn't rely on taxes and cops, and they managed just fine. this is a Western/colonial mindset.
Feel free to name one for discussion.
Any “civilization” without some form of taxation is either primitive hunter gatherers, or a despotism where the chief already owns everything and everyone.
Old people tend to use quotation marks as emphasis.
Remember - america is not a country, it's a business.
If you can't make it - noone gonna do shit
There are a lot of people suffering right now to the extent that his plight seems so frivolous.
I'll bet hes a republican voting for deficit which results in raised taxes on people like himself and cuts for people far richer than him.
🤣 the fact that he's lying about how much he pays in taxes to reduce taxes might be a clue.
Here in the United States, this issue and this sign are advocating for what? This man is where? At his county commissioner meeting? This sign implies we want the federal government in our local tax policy? I mean really? GTFO with this garbage. Stay the F out of my busniess, if I don't like property tax, that comes with my local vote, and has nothing to do with the federal government. I could bet someone paid this tool to stand with this sign because someone who doesn't understand decentralized local government power wants to make a point about something that has nothing to do with social security.
Where do you read this implication from?
I'm really asking because I might be missing something, because my background is so different.
To me it reads like he thinks local taxes should work differently, either be lower, or be raised based on a different factor other than property value. But I can't see the federal connection.
Or it could be argued that the local county or city is taxing them so much they can't survive and they are essentially taking federal money even though they claim to not need federal money.
But hey I'm just a guy who knows plenty of people who look like this who advocate for better social programs. In most places that have county commissioners, their salary is paid by a percentage of the property tax. This may explain the increase in tax or the increase in allowing too many high density locations that have a property tax associated with them.
Do the American thing and chuck it in the harbor until the taxes stop
If tea is to tea party, are you suggesting that we throw a house party?
My dad literally went to the city and argued against them raising the book value of his home, which would cause him to have to pay more in property tax.
He won too.
That loon.
Yes, we can cover the resulting tax shortfall by increasing the tax on single mothers, first-generation low-income homebuyers, and renters.
Look at the result of California's tax policy (which was designed with aims similar to yours): an entire generation of young people will never be able to afford a home in the place they grew up in, while millionaire retirees get a huge tax break while making thousands renting out spare rooms in their massive houses on AirBnB.
These kinds of special tax carve outs sound nice in theory, because it seems like you are just "not taking money from old and disabled people", but that tax burden falls on everyone else, as does the massive distortion of the market. You are in fact taking more money from other people, who may be hurting even more.
And don't tell me, "We'll fund it by a tax on the rich". If that's your proposal, get that tax on the rich passed, and dole out the proceeds to elderly at risk of homelessness. Have it officially be budgeted, so that we can decide if keeping an elderly person in their $2.1m 5 bedroom home is worth cuts elsewhere. As of now, such policies are mostly robbing middle class young people blind.
Solution build excess housing at a loss, intentionally until real estate prices go down.
I like that idea, but it'd have to come with some mechanism to prevent parasites from buying a bunch of them up and renting them out.
fuck if I know what such a mechanism would look like though..
Government Owned Social Housing Program
Tax homes based on how many you own, and how many are vacant. Allow two homes at a regular rate; Enough for a summer and winter home. Then ratchet tax rates up as the person buys more.
And if the third, fourth, fifth, etc home sits vacant for more than a few months out of the year? The tax rate goes up even more, so giant corporations can’t just buy entire neighborhoods and sit on them to remove them from the market and increase property values for the other homes they own across town. Because that’s what’s happening now; Giant corps are buying homes and letting them sit vacant, just to remove them from the market so they can charge higher rates elsewhere. Allow a few months of grace for renovations and finding tenants… But after a ~3 month grace period, that tax rate skyrockets.
And then take the revenue from these increased taxes, and use them to fund First Time Homebuyer programs, so home ownership becomes more available to the people who are renting. Incentivize the corporations to actually flip the houses and resell or rent them, instead of just sitting on them.
Nobody needs a summer and winter home tax the living shit out of rich fuckers with 2
Alternate take: If we actually implemented my above plan, you wouldn’t need to be stupidly rich to own two homes. Home prices would be reasonable, because there wouldn’t be giant corporations hoarding all of the real estate.
We have over two vacant houses for every single homeless person in the country. We could give every single homeless person a house, and still have plenty to act as summer cabins. And that’s before you even factor in the fact that the market would be flooded with houses (at least in the short term) from corporations trying to avoid the increased taxes.
It will NEVER be so that owning two houses in America doesn't involve being well into the 1% This is just an absurd take that has become true nowhere on planet earth.
I propose exempting high-density apartment and condo buildings from the taxes. Developers may be building those residences for their own cynical profit motives, but it does happen to greatly benefit society.
Severely impede sale of all houses purchased by people who cannot strongly demonstrate they intend to live in them.
Rent control tied to bottom quintile income. Everyone should be able to afford a home. If construction companies can't afford to build homes at that cost, look at their material and labor costs; in China they invest in education and have state-run steel and concrete companies to keep the private ones competitive. It costs them avg ~50K to make a 900 sqft 2bd house or apartment in the major cities. Much less elsewhere.
I'm gonna have to agree with you here.
There's a better special tax carve out: Don't require tax for the primary residence. The owner MUST be registered as living at that address. Not a family member. The owner.
Okay if you have family you can have a few more homes, but realistically, if you own 10 or 20 homes, how many people can you REALLY trust to have full ownership of them instead of you? You're going to have to start paying tax at some point.
at the primary residence up to .25 acres. Anything more than that should be taxed as normal. Credits should be non transferrable, as in if you're renting your landlord shouldn't be able to claim you for tax exempt status.
Farms & ranches would have to be exempt. There are some cases where it's legit important to have a large land area.
If you're retired or disabled, you're not working a farm.
If you are working a farm, then you should be paying taxes anyway.
Yeah but not the same level of taxes as some rich dude with a country estate. Farms serve an important function.
Land is land. We don't get any more. Some land is inherently more valuable than other. We should be disincentivizing ownership of land unless it's being cultivated or contributing in some way.
By saying that farms don't pay property tax, we're creating an avenue for billionaires to create "farms" and skirt taxes.
Instead what we should be doing is guaranteeing that crops will sell. Pay the property tax, use the land, and if your harvest fails at market, then the government covers the gap. But not before. I'm even cool with the government buying the seed and feed. That's all renewable and contributes to a bountiful harvest. Having taxes to pay on the value of the land encourages it's use, and pushes the wealthy billionaires away from wanting to own it just cuz. They'll naturally look for the least valuable land if they just want a big ass estate. Who cares if they build a mansion on a pile of worthless rock?
That's literally how it already works.
.25 acres? Can we up that to at least an acre. I need a place for my chickens to roam and to plant my gardens, and I prefer to have a fire pit with outdoor patio furniture and a grill. Many places an acre is the standard plot size. Not good for everyone, but preferred by many
If that was satire, it was incredibly well done. If it's red sincere, it's a great example of why property taxes should still apply at a certain point, and that point should be very narrow.
Reject urb-spreading!
High density, mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods for whoever wants to actually live a healthy urban life.
That's great and all, but you do realize that in the end that ends up being pro large corporations and limiting freedoms of the people. Cities and towns would be best built that way I agree but the chances that we can completely revoke capitalism is verryyy slim. In such every convenient/grocery store in those neighborhoods would be bought up by money and reduce prices to run out small owners. People not being able to grow their own food or raise their own chickens reduces ones ability to feed themselves independently. Communal neighborhood farms are an alternative which I have seen before, but they are rare and require space as well
You realize there are literally dozens of examples of dense urban environments flooded with small private businesses right?
Is this a joke or did you just state these places exist without naming any?
To be fair this dude could have gotten his house 45 years ago for 50K. So adjusting for inflation and overall development of his area, it could make sense. Comparing current payments to cost of money 40 years ago is comparing apples to oranges.
Now all that being said....there is a serious issue with cost and availability of housing, and I am not dismissing that. I'm just saying context is needed for this ragebait post.
California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Property tax is assessed when there's a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It's a controversial measure.
Which induces a lot of absentee landlordism, as property is held in trust and financialized rather than being bought/sold at the retail level.
Right, that's a huge downside for sure.
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it's a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate --- which often means middle class homeowners.
So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as "good" in that folks don't get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.
It's...complicated.
The problem is in how its assessed. A market-based tax will be vulnerable to market manipulation. A tax accessed by the agents of lobbyists and kleptocrats will be administered to the benefit of their patrons.
This isn't a policy failure quite so much as it is a democratic failure.
Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence --- investment real estate would be subject to a "wealth tax," but folks wouldn't get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.
Prop 13 should also not apply to inherited houses. It's creating a class of landed gentry who were lucky enough to have parents living near the housing boom, and pricing out anyone who moved here in the last 20 years.
That's the thing about increasing home prices nobody talks about. It increases the "value" of your home, so you're taked more.
When my parents retired, they didn't move out to the country to get away from the city life. They did it because it saved them 40 grand a year in property taxes.
Where the fuck did they live? What was the home value and tax rate? That's insane.
It's really not that crazy in some areas.
They had municipal taxes, county taxes, school district taxes (when massive school bonds pass every single year without fail that one can really add up), emergency service district taxes, Water District taxes, Healthcare District taxes.
That shit adds up when the value of your property doubles every 3 years like it has been doing in Texas.
No, $40k/yr in property taxes is insane unless your parents own several mansions, even for Texas where the highest property tax rates are around 2.5%. Even if you tack on millages and bonds and other things there's no way it gets near that.
There's a lot of bad takes and clear misinformation from disaffected people in this thread. Stuff like this should be obvious.
For the city. Then double the city rate for the school district, then add some more for the MUDs and the County and the Health district and the Emergency services district. Shit adds up fast, and when you buy a house new for 180 grand and a few years later it's valued at 700 grand, you have to move because you can no longer afford to pay the taxes.
It sounds like your parents just don't want you to know that they suck with money.
I work for a city where the stupid-rich live. Their houses are NUTS. I recently approved construction of a 5,000sft guest house with a rooftop tennis court. We have over a dozen houses in active construction that cost over 15 million dollars, and no new structures being built under 4 million.
We actually have standards in our development code regarding servant's quarters. And the most important thing to know about those standards is that they're required to be smaller than the minimum allowable size for guest quarters. Can't have the Servant's getting all uppity.
But the thing is, they pay very little in taxes as a portion of their wealth. They have enough political power that they founded a 4mi^2 enclave as its own city entirely surrounded by a major city. They also managed to get their own school district. As a result, they have some of the lowest taxes in the state. Someone with a 7 million dollar house here will pay the same amount of money in property taxes as someone with a half-million dollar condo 2 miles away, because the rates for the school district and city for the wealthy are so low.
For utility districys, they get out of paying property tax by having the city provide it directly without a WCID by contracting to the major city next door that gives them the utilities at a loss to keep the rich assholes happy and supplying campaign donations.
All that to say, then people that are hurt by property taxes aren't the rich. It's people living in areas where the value of homes go up faster than income can keep up with the taxes. My parents eventually had to sell and move. And yeah, they made a nice profit off their house, but they still had to move away from the city they'd lived in for 60 years, and now live 30 minutes from the nearest gas station even though they used to be solidly urbanites.
Depending on area 40k property tax means a 3-4M house. Poor rich people!
The house was about 180 when they bought it, then climbed in value over time to the point they had to move due to taxes. The combination of city, county, 2 separate MUDs, school, ESD, health district, and other taxes didn't help either.
The school taxes alone were nearly 2% of the value of their home. When your home quaruples in valueshoppingthe area around you gets ritzy, that adds up.
I don't know his situation but I think primary residence up to certain value shouldn't be taxed at all. There's a huge difference between an old man living alone in a house he had built for his family 60 years ago and an "investor" who owns entire neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, where I live a property tax on as far as I remember 4th and all above residential properties has been proposed and people who oppose it the most are pensioners who live in the only property they own. Right wing media can just outright lie to people telling them the tax is going to be on every property and people go on vote against their own interests.
Agreed. I'd vote to drop property tax for those over 65 and under a certain income limit.
tying it to income means in a few decades inflation just shrinks the number of people who can actually benefit
If you own one residential property and also live in it, no taxes on that. Multiple properties? That's taxes. Unfortunately, most primary education is funded by property tax, so you'd have to change how that works (and maybe actually pay teachers while your at it). Fortunately, none of this has any chance of ever getting implemented.
Have the income limit adjust to the cpi every year? It's not perfect, but it works
How big is his house? How much is it worth now?
How much did he pay for the land it sits on? Or did he inherit that?
Who does he think maintains road networks and all the other infrastructure he relies on?
Property taxes are based on the assessed value of the land. So if you bought vacant land in the 1970s, improved it with a home, and then lived in it for the next 50 years, you'd see a piece of land that sold for several thousand dollars accrue to hundreds of thousands of dollars. If this guy is living in Texas, he's likely paying 1-2% of the assessed value of the home, which could easily be north of $2-4k/year. That's on land that was practically being given away half a century earlier.
The tax rate is fully disconnected from the cost of construction/maintenance. So if my house accrues from $50k to $200k over the course of ten years, I don't see 4x as much construction/maintenance of my local infrastructure. I just see my tax bill go up 4x while my potholes continue to go unfilled, my lines unburied, and my flood control underdeveloped.
And that's setting aside the habit of municipal governments to invest in "improvements" (sports stadiums, convention centers, police surveillance that's focused around corporate properties, twelve lane highways that induce demand rather than improve traffick flow) that benefit private industry over public welfare. City and state officials serving larger and larger constituencies routinely become disconnected from lay voters and increasingly complicit in graft and other kickbacks, as elections revolve more around partisan affiliation than any actual domestic management agenda.
There is a very real and meaningful disconnect between what politicians do at the municipal/state level and what residents actually demand at the retail level. If this guy was perched in a penthouse overlooking Cowboy's stadium, you could reasonably tell him to fuck off. But I guarantee he's not.
He's likely towing the Libertarian party line. We'd be fine without these taxes and all that government waste.
When you start asking about public services, they start, slowly, carefully re-inventing taxes while downplaying corporate greed while putting themselves in a decision-making role where they get to decide what is right for everyone else.
I'm sure he can hardly afford to live in his ancestral home. That SS he paid into all those years doesn't hit the same as a paycheck and might stop altogether soon. If you don't squirrel away your own retirement, you have to make concessions.
While these are fair questions, I think it's a reasonable stance to take that you shouldn't literally get taxed out of your home if you come into poverty, which unfortunately can include Social Security recipients. I know we all need to pay taxes and contribute to society to the extent that we're reasonably able to, but I'm not so sure this is the best way to make it happen. For property beyond your primary residence, sure, but for your only home, I don't super like it.
If your home is now worth millions, you're now rich and can afford the taxes. If you have no income, sell the house. If you want to live in it, do a reverse mortgage. If you want to pass on your house to your heirs, creating generational wealth while not paying your share of taxes now, fuck you, pay up.
Assuming the house is worth millions is a faulty premise. Housing prices have exploded in the last 5-10 years, and that can mean that a home bought decades ago is worth many times its original value, causing a huge increase in property taxes, but still being in line with other regular homes. People who bought decades ago might have had the home appreciate to 10x the value of initial purchase, just to end up still in line with median home prices. Selling their house won't fix the tax rate, it'll just add some leftover mortgage value after they pay taxes on the profit from selling their massively value-inflated home. So now, instead of just paying property taxes, they pay comparable property taxes and the remainder of a new mortgage.
I can agree on inheritance taxes, but I don't think it's super fair to heavily tax the owner a primary home of a reasonable value when they're not selling the home, giving it away, allocating it through inheritance, or otherwise transferring it. Maybe if it's a mansion, but a simple, normal home, maybe on some farm land? I don't see a problem with a family having the security of knowing that come hell or high water, they have a home they won't lose to anything but a natural disaster. We all need to contribute to society as it contributes to us, but I don't think that should come at the expense of security in basic essentials like housing.
Like I said, do a reverse mortgage. You shouldn't get to lock in minuscule tax rates forever.
And I just don't agree with that. I don't think we should have to pay property taxes at all on a reasonably priced primary residence, as set by local and national standards. Housing should be considered more of a right. We all need to contribute to taxes, yes, no dispute there, but I don't see this as a fair way to do so. Now, if it's an extra property or a particularly lavish home, yeah, tax the piss out of them. But taxing someone into homelessness should never happen because one of the state's core goals at least should be seeing that everyone's basic needs are met, and that includes housing.
I agree it's reasonable for housing to be a right, but I disagree that home ownership should be a right.
Okay, but how do you intend to accomplish that without costing the government more tax money? The most cost effective first step seems to me to be to just not tax a reasonable primary residence. Providing housing the inhabitants don't own costs someone money in building and maintaining that property, and since we're agreeing that housing should be a right, the only way I can see to guarantee that would be through government funding. And we probably should do that for some people, at least those most in need, but what's the sense in forcing people in poverty out of their home of decades just because they can't afford the property taxes, especially when that means pushing them into housing the government is actively paying for? Why is it that we can agree that everyone deserves housing, but we can't agree that they should be able to own that housing? There are other ways to raise that tax money, and the obvious choice is to increase taxes on those with a gross excess, not those who have managed to achieve stability after decades of work.
Property tax rates are based on how much your city/county needs to operate. Property values change, but so do mill rates. Most cities aren't allowed to take surplus tax, so they tweak the mill rate when property values fluctuate.
The government gets to decide how much the government is allowed to fuck you. Seems fair.
Theoretically, in a democracy, we ARE the government.
I think an issue is that taxes are not seen for what they are. The government and agency work on our behalf but don't get paid until I pay my taxes. Maybe the local government just needs to send these bills to people's houses instead and get rid of taxes altogether.
I disagree that it's an issue. I believe vast majority of people understand what a tax is, even if they feel taxes are shitty and respond with blame-y frustration. All words will be misunderstood by some people. Sometimes more and sometimes fewer. If we kept changing the name of things because a vocal minority of people can't read a dictionary, then we will end up with a handful of generic words that don't actually mean anything. I believe a better solution is to envest in education more broadly.
Something I'm beginning to learn is that what I thought was originally the minority is actually the majority and vice versa
Yeah, that guy could sell his house for 5 times what he built it for
5? I bought my house a decade ago and it has almost doubled. If he built his house for less than his current property taxes, he would easily get 10x if not higher.
the sign says that property tax each year is a third of his original house cost. Assume he lives in a place with insane 15% property tax:
x*0.15*3=1
x=3*6
x=18
His house is worth 18x or more what he paid to build it.
And then where is going to afford to buy another house to live in?
Maybe he should stop eating avocado toast
Property taxes always made me think that you don't actually own it, rather its a different form of rent based on property value. I know its the not the same as renting as you have stored value if you sell, but its difficult to call it "ownership"
Sorry, oh the irony is rich.
i mean, this is less of a property tax issue and more of a social security thing.
Though i am pretty fundamentally against property tax, it's a physical thing that i can own, i don't see why i should pay taxes on it. If you want to tax me just hit me with income tax.
the wealthy dodge this by a bunch of schemes that don't count as 'income'.
I hate paying property tax, but reckon it's the only way to get money out of the fortunate ones that are lucky enough to own a chunk.
It's a wealth tax on wealth that's very difficult to hide.
except for the fact that it's a wealth tax on wealth that's not really consequential. An income tax by definition must tax ALL income earned by an individual, you cannot hide from that, it's definitionally, evasion.
How is real estate wealth not consequential?Real estate wealth is real wealth, it's why it's literally in the name.
Personal income tax is not a wealth tax, and there are myriad ways to avoid it without evading it.
it's pretty fundamental, there is only a fixed amount of land that exists in the country. A billionaire has roughly 1 billion more dollars than i do. I have roughly one billion dollars less than them, they, weirdly enough, don't have one billion more times land than me.
Theoretically they should have "1 billion times more property tax" than i do, but i'm going to imagine that's not even possible under current tax law.
yeah, because then it's not income.
Killing time are you being intentionally obtuse just to kill time?
very observant, yes that is arguably part of the shtick.
Property has infrastructure like water, roads, electrical, sewers, etc running to it that needs to be maintained. It also has things like fire fighting police surveyors etc that need to be paid in order to maintain society. Everyone could work in a city therefore the city/county/state would collect the income tax but the local town you live in doesn't get any of that money.
Cause you don't own it. You are borrowing it from the government.
People need to stop thinking about property like it's any other regular thing like a vehicle.
Land is not a thing it is a limited resource.
If someone owns a piece of land in a city it doesn't matter what they are currently doing with it, even if they do nothing with it, that's wasting potential that someone else could be doing with it and affects everyone around that piece of land.
If his math is right, and assuming that his property tax is about 1-2% of his home's value per year, then the value of his home has increased about 15-30x the original value.
Its hard to be sympathetic.
It's difficult to be sympathetic because you are viewing the property as an asset financially. And not as a place to live, he likely does not give a shit that it's appreciated in value because he has absolutely no intention whatsoever of selling and he plans to live there till he dies and that's how housing should be viewed
Thank you. Not everything in life is an asset to be leveraged to prop up your own position above those around you.
This psychotic way of thinking has led us to this sorry state. And I don't just mean the USA.
I agree with your sentement but sometimes places become gentrified and the original inhabitants can no longer afford to live there.
I'm not saying that it's good or the way things should be but it is a reality.
If you learn skills such as how to fix shit yourself, owning a house is very obtainable.
Probably harder to build than just fixing an existing house, but do you...
The average household income where I live is ~$80k. Excluding the top 5%, it drops to ~$50k. That’s (on average) two full-time workers per household, each making ~$12/hour. Their annual (pre-tax) income would be about $480 per week, or ~$2080 per month each. After taxes, that would be closer to $1450. So likely around $3000 for the household’s monthly budget.
The cheapest homes near me start at $300k. A 30 year mortgage with a 6.5% interest rate and 10% down payment would be almost $2100 per month. That’s assuming they’re able to save the 10% in the first place, and get approved for the loan. It also leaves them with only ~$900 for the entire monthly budget. That’s food, utilities, car payment(s), insurance, childcare, etc…
Yeah I mean I guess I'm biased, pgh housing market hasn't really be affected and there aren't massive new housing plans like there are in the west. Here you can buy a house with good bones that needs cosmetic remodeling for 60,000
Why doesn't he homestead his home. I know Texas you can and it reduces your taxes. Used to be almost 0 but think that part changed.
The Guardian just did an article on this subject
Link
I can't even afford a dingy studio where I'm at... tf
I wish someone had told me this 4 years ago…
Counterpoint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism from the original progressive
Marx was not a fan.
America is such a shitshow (at least one person thinks it isn't, which is wild).
If you pay property taxes then the property isn't yours.
In my town, the land belongs to the local government.
Certified psycho. If you think owning a plot of land within a country does not have an opportunity cost you are wrong. If you think people imposing costs on others shouldn't pay for it say it out loud.
Just go and found your own country already, you just need a gun in order to enforce your ownership. In the end a state is just the monopoly of force in a place.
Yeah, this is one of the meanings of "property is theft". To own land is deny all others that piece of land.
I agree with the point that land is owned by the one strong enough to enforce ownership.
I also think you agree with my point that we don't own our land, or even our houses, the State owns it and we rent it from them.
We don't rent it from them. We pay for continued ownership. The difference being that eviction is not possible and you do not need permits unless you do something more involved to your property. Calling it renting discounts the complexities that renting brings with it. The costs of renting usually are much higher than property taxes.
"We pay for continued ownership" sure sounds like rent to me. Make sure you tell those that had their house/property taken away from them due to eminent domain how eviction is not possible.
At that point the term renting becomes something else entirely and therefore useless to discriminate between renters and homeowners. this discrimination is useful, hence we must not weaken our language.
It's more like a tax, you choose to purchase land from the city, you gain access to city services by living in the city, and in exchange you must pay the city annually for the privilege of owning the land, and if you don't pay for long enough the city might seize the land from you. Could even call it a property tax...
As it should. You’re telling me someone can just buy a piece of the earth and everyone born after them is just shit outta luck? Fuck that.
Well isn't that pretty much what my local government did?
Considering it's history. It was Monarch land, then took by dictator, then took by Republic, then took by dictator, then back to Monarchy for a short period during democratic transitioning. Well technically they didn't even buy it they just took it.
While the people living here, which with me it's 3 generations of my family but another three before that of another family (the ones who built it), had to paid for it the whole time.
At least the duchess land was really cheap, like 1 testimonial cent even in recent times.
If that sounds fair to you, then okay, nothing different from Absolute Monarchies time except the Monarchs.
This is such an excellent point. Exactly when do we get to stop paying for something that we already own
Using retirees as a tool to work against property taxes has historically been an effective strategy, but it's important to remember:
One-by-one:
What we're actually trying to accomplish
Seems to me that the root question is one of housing affordability, in particular for retirees, who may have a lot of assets, but limited cash flow
Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
Reducing/capping property taxes does indeed make it easier for some retirees to keep affording their homes, but reducing property taxes makes real estate a more lucrative investment, driving up the overall prices of real estate. This applies for both private persons intending to use the property to live in, for private persons looking seek rent, and corporate actors doing the same. Messing with property taxes is a large part of the housing affordability issue present in many places in the U.S and elsewhere (zoning laws being another major contributor, in particular those mandating single family homes, and lack of public housing being the other major contributor). Hence, this change would only benefit those lucky enough to have purchased a home in the past, at the expense of all retirees not already that lucky, which are now less likely to be able to do so.
Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
Apart from driving up the prices of real estate for other retirees, everyone else interested in purchasing a home will also feel this broad increase in prices. This has led to large swaths of the population being effectively priced out of home ownership. This has the second order effect of making owning rentals more lucrative, as higher rents can be charged, further exacerbating the larger problem of housing affordability, but now also for even poorer people.
Finally, reductions in real estate taxes limit what public services can be funded through their use. In the U.S, this primarily means schools, infrastructure, firefighting, transit etc, all of which are suffering a lot in quality, much as a consequence of having messed with property taxes in the past.
There's a very, very strong case to be made that the consequences have very much outweighed the benefits in this scenario. I would even say that they have been devastating, being part of the root cause of a large amount of issues seen today.
Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
There clearly are good means to tackle this problem in other ways, the principal of which I believe should be massive public investment in social housing. By building a huge supply of high quality homes affordable to everyone, we make sure no one will have to be forced to go without an acceptable home, regardless of whether they are retired or not.
The second strategy should be to entirely remove the kind of zoning laws that have contributed to the kind of increase in housing prices seen today - mandating that only single family homes should be allowed to be built on massive lots with low utilization is hugely harmful to housing affordability.
These two measures would address housing prices having gone up in the way they have historically, which would also lead to property taxes not rising in such a dramatic fashion.
What should never be done, however, is reducing or capping property taxes.
You make it sound like it's either or. The resonable thing to do would be to reduce property taxes for the property the owner lives in and tax even more the additional properties. The goal is for people to be able to afford their homes and at the same time making properties not so attractive as an investment.
Please refer to the section about the negative effects of reducing property taxes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that applies to reducing property taxes as a whole. I'm talking about a mixed approach.
There's potential for mitigating some of the negative impacts using a mixed approach, although I'm not convinced it's going to be straightforward or even worthwhile.
What type of community will his home exist in if everyone stops paying taxes?
Boomers underfunded the schools and shit around here to get out of taxes. Now that they’re ready to move to Florida, they don’t understand why no one wants to buy their house.
Nobody tell him that in Communist China you pay a small land tax once every 70 years or so.
Actually someone do tell him. I bet that little factoid will flip his entire worldview on its head.
Property tax hurts landlords and I'm here for that.
What did this guy pay for his house, like 20k?
Eh, probably paid like 25k for a house that's worth 500k now or something. Really what we need to do is make property taxes scale more aggressively, so it isn't economical to hoard more resources than you can actually use. Maybe something like annual tax owed = (value of all real estate owned by one person)^2/10,000,000. Perhaps with a grace period for new construction/renovations.
As for appraisal, let people declare what their property is worth, and force them to sell if someone offers 20% more than their claimed value.
Ah yes, force people to move out of their homes. What's lemmy's obsession with uprooting families lately?
Land is a natural resource, and like air or sunlight, nobody deserves to own it more than anybody else.
"But my family has live here for generations!" sounds awful similar to "I deserve it because my great great grandfather killed the people that used to live here."
You get to decide how much the land is worth to you. If you value it honestly and somebody else values it higher, a trade benefits both of you.
I value your home more than you, now get the fuck out and find a new one.
In fact going by your first sentence, this system isn't even necessary. Why do you deserve to live where you do just because you paid some random person money? I deserve the land you're living on just as much as you do.
Money represents things you do deserve, like the value created by your own work, as well as things you have no moral claim to, like natural resources. What makes sense to me is that the land is owned collectively. The property taxes are effectively rent to the rest of the population, and those that consider it most valuable should get to use it. I also think there should be separate taxes for things that devalue the land, like extracting minerals. You can still make a profit from extracting minerals based on the value added by your own work, but you need to pay the rest of humanity for their share of the minerals themselves.
Have to consider both the ideal and the existing situation for the best next step. Housing is a combination of value both created by human effort, and an accumulation of natural resources. I think what I've proposed is a big step towards fair allocation of housing, but critically, also something that could actually be implemented.
Of course that means capitalists are the most deserving of all.
Has nothing to do with "uprooting families". Average American families are not the ones grossly overestimating the values of their property. It's people like Trump who use overestimated values on their properties in order to hide money and grift people into paying him more than properties are actually worth. And then readjusting to actual values, or lower, in order to dodge taxes.
Edit: my reply was not an endorsement of OP's property assessment plan. I was only speaking to our frustration with the rich who hoard wealth in the form of land and use overinflated valuations of their property to increase their wealth at the expense of everyone else. And even though OP's idea is flawed there is merit in the idea of altering the way property value is determined.
Yeah but under this system you'd HAVE to overestimate, otherwise it gets forcibly bought from you.
This is just going to drive prices way up till everyone is renting from one of 3 giant corpos.
Investment company comes in and buys literally everything because they can just offer 20% over value. Now they rent it out for twice as much as your mortgage cost. What are you going to do, not like there are any other houses left.
Think about what the investment company's tax rate would look like. They'd be bankrupt instantly. They'd have to pay 10M/year in taxes to maintain ownership of $10M in property.
Sounds like a problem for the renters.
That's not how this works. A better solution would be to tax more aggressively second+ homes and severely limit what corporations can invest into.
Why should a company be able to profit off of second hand housing? This isn't a commodity, but it's treated as such. Companies should be able to build new housing (for sale) and own housing only for the purposes of, say, housing their employees if they so wish. I simply see no benefits to allowing companies trade living spaces like stocks.
The whole point is that you get to decide how much the property is worth to you. If it's worth more to someone else, you're both better off for the trade. The only losers here are people trying to cheat on their taxes by giving a "low" appraisal, and people trying to hoard multiple properties.
Plug some numbers into that formula. If you own a $100k property, you pay 1k in taxes/year If you own 10 of those properties, you pay 100k/year. This would mean you have to charge more in rent than a mortgage would cost to buy the same property. The business model would become unprofitable.
I understand the logic of it, my point is that this is a trust/honesty based system which leaves you cornered. Here are some problems with it:
The fault in your assumption is 1. that this would discourage corporations from buying up; and 2. That you live in an equal and just society;
Did you plug in some numbers to see how much you pay when you own multiple homes? Rental units are not profitable when people can buy a house for cheaper than your property taxes on the same property. And normal people can do hostile buyouts from corporate landords too.
They can just increase rents then?
So rent is several times more expensive than a mortgage on the same property. Now what?
Now you pay the ridiculous rent because blackstone just buys up entire neighborhoods already, might as well buy up entire towns.
Why? You can force them to sell you a property and pay less on the mortgage than they pay on the same property on taxes.
Technically yes, but the problem is that they can afford to hold their investments in many small companies so they won't even have to pay that much tax.
Just adding government oversight for this idea is going to be a costly nightmare.
Socialise the housing market and make sure every person has a roof over their head. It’s the only proven solution to homelessness.
I really like the self appraisal idea