I don’t understand inflation, so as an old landowner I think I shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
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.
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.
No, that’s how American K-12 schools are funded.
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.
So you’re just doubling down on what if this and that.
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.
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
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.
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”.
Here in Canada, primary education is paid for by the province
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?
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.
that is true.
It’s this way by design
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Surely this man would be in favor of a greater and graduated state income tax then, right?
…right?
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.
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.
Is this guy paid by some rich guys wanting to abolish property taxes?
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.
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.
I think most places have a senior freeze, so once you qualify it doesn’t go up anymore.
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
Do the American thing and chuck it in the harbor until the taxes stop
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.
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=18His 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
😂
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).
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?
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.
