Interesting use of quotes. I wonder how it was “paid for”
Old people tend to use quotation marks as emphasis.
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.
Any “civilization” without some form of taxation is either primitive hunter gatherers, or a despotism where the chief already owns everything and everyone.
Feel free to name one for discussion.
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?
“I don’t understand how inflation works and I’m blaming government for it”
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.
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.
Remember - america is not a country, it’s a business.
If you can’t make it - noone gonna do shitSo 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
Yea generally electronics is depreciated every 3 to 5 years. But I can imagine that after 3 years of children usage they are done for. That aside though, I think what you would be more looking for is a fair tax system.
What I think that the problem with local property taxes is that if a city relies on it too much to pay for everything then this causes too many issues. For a poor city this could mean that if they don’t increase the taxes they can’t afford basic school care which people expect. So they moved to riched areas who can provide that. Or they move because of the higher taxes. This in turn lowers the property value and decreases the taxes further. Which in turn increases the problem.
So I believe the educational budget should be provided by the central government so the same kind of quality in schools is given nationwide. This can of course be applied to other costs a city is making.
In addition to this I think a property tax should be progressive and link to your overall assets. If you just own one house and you don’t have any more assets. Then why should you be taxed as much as somebody who owns a lot more (of course if the house is 2m and you’re living of social security it is a different story. L
Top down education doesn’t work, that’s how we get stuck with schools that have massive IT budgets with little to show for them. Most teachers don’t use anything beyond spreadsheets and Youtube.
I don’t think that there is an easy fix.
I’d like to think local autonomy would help, so small communities could design their own curriculum, but I’m too much of a pessimist and see such experiments failing quickly because of corruption and incompetence.
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.
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.
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
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.
Surely this man would be in favor of a greater and graduated state income tax then, right?
…right?
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:
- 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.
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.
Is this guy paid by some rich guys wanting to abolish property taxes?
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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.
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.
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.
Do you live in Michigan or is there somewhere else that was this idiotic too?
America is such a shitshow (at least one person thinks it isn’t, which is wild).
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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
