People that complain about taxes. I’ll agree you don’t pay taxes. But you don’t use any roads to travel. Ever again.
Or fire services.
I work with one of those people. He’s a dipshit. He thinks time is controlled by satellites and clouds are made by cloud machines. Also, the earth is flat and no one has left it because of the dome.
Mine him for Sci-fi stories.
Oh. There’s also this guy called the World Judge who controls all of the funding for all police stations in the world. He has ultimate authority and seems to be like Judge Dred where he is tge judge, jury, and executioner.
I think you’ve found the world another Karl Pilkington.
If I were Netflix I’d record everything that falls out of this guy’s mouth.
That’s the only issue with the opt-in taxes idea. But seriously, why should the rest of us be punished because they don’t want taxes? Just have the destructive people who say taxation is theft, well…live with no government services, 100% dependent on corporations. Taxes should be opt-in. And that means, those who opt out will have no medical service, no public sewage system, no disability or welfare. We can let them have the roads as gratis, just to keep the peace. They will quickly realize how stupid and evil their system really is, when they are the only ones suffering from it.
This sounds nice but in practice will backfire. You need the systems to be universal, so that everyone, including the richest, have a stake in wanting to see them improved. Otherwise you’ll get a two tiered system where the public versions are trash because they’re underfunded and the private versions (what the rich use) are great but also expensive af.
You want things to work like insurance, where everyone pays in but only the people who need them use it. I want Musk to pay a fuckton into Social Security, not nothing at all because he doesn’t use it. Even now there’s a problem with Social Security in particular because, even though everyone has to pay it, it puts a cap/limit on how much you pay, so Musk currently ends up paying his share in the first day of the year, and his contribution amounts to the same as a teacher or something.
Universal programs with progressive taxation, that’s the way. Low taxes at the bottom, high taxes at the top.
It would only work if all the privateers get sent to one specific state like Texas and the two systems are kept completely separate.
Let everyone move to Texas and pay no taxes, but every hospital visit or doctors visit is paid out of pocket or by insurance companies, no one has social security or welfare, every road is a toll road, you pay a private fire fighter company a monthly fee to be on their protective detail, police are private security firms you also need to pay a fee for protection or to investigate any thefts from your property, there’s no mayor or other elected representative for their town because where does the money come from to pay them, the army is also a private security company, the list goes on
Property tax hurts landlords and I’m here for that.
What did this guy pay for his house, like 20k?
I’m really trying to reconcile how the Chinese manage a more equal society while having a fraction of the tools we do; they don’t have property taxes, just a lease you renew every ~70 years, they can’t do QE like we do.
It’s like we have all the tools to delay the trajectory of capitalism, we just choose not to use it.
So you never own your house in China, is what I’m reading in your post.
In China, you own the house, you just don’t own the land. Technically, the land is leased to you. For residential purposes though, you get about the same rights to the land as you do in the US though, but in most cases it’s a lot cheaper because you pay a fee every 70 or so years vs. every year that we pay property taxes. That also means that the government has fewer opportunities to take your land away from you than they do in the US (if you don’t pay your property taxes in the US, your land will be sold in a tax sale after a couple years). Your heirs still inherit your lease and have the right to renew when that 70 year mark comes back around. It’s a contributing factor towards the insanely high homeownership rate in China, which is around like 96 or 97 percent I think?
So it’s literally impossible to own a house in China?
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
It doesn’t make sense that cities need to increase property taxes every year though
Property tax revenue should be increasing every year by default without changing the rate simply because houses and properties increase in value every year typically
If property tax is 5% and the town makes $100,000,000, the next year if property value increases by 5% then their revenue goes up 5% as well to $105,000,000 automatically. Why do they need to also increase the tax to 6%?
Every 3 years due to forced upgrades or just old style deprecation over 3 years.
iPads don’t deprecate in 3 years, nor require forced upgrades. They get nowhere near as much support as a regular Linux laptop (which is what schools SHOULD be using) and even less than Windows laptops pre-11, but if they’re being replaced every 3 years, that’s just policy, not an actual need. Currently the oldest supported iPad is going to hit 8 years since release in a month. The newest unsupported one is going to hit 9 in a month. So yes there’s forced upgrades, but that’s in like 8 years.
I work as a software engineer and most companies have had a minimum 3 year lifetime policy for company laptops. Reasoning being, after 3 years there’s a higher chance of failure, and there have been enough advancements in hardware that upgrading might save SOME dev time. If it fails before 3 years, you get a new one. If you want to keep it longer, you can keep it. But if you want a new one, it should be 3 years old first. I don’t get why school iPads need to be replaced this often, but I reckon there might be a lot more wear and tear and THAT could be the reason for a 3 year replacement policy. It’s simpler than just replacing individual units every now and then.
I have taught math for 4 years in my local school. The iPads were used by the 3rd and 4th grade students. And they never left the classrooms and were well supervised during use.
Starting in 5th grade, they were issued Chromebooks. Google Classroom was used for assignments and other communications. And since Mommy and Daddy had to pay for them IF they were damaged, they held up quite well. The IBM Education model is very robust. Not fast, but robust.
I paid off my house to avoid a 20k female flood insurance bill
Female flood sounds interesting
Did they mean FEMA, and autocorrect “completed” it?
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
Yea generally electronics is depreciated every 3 to 5 years.
Not really.
But I can imagine that after 3 years of children usage they are done for. That aside though
It’d be cheaper to protect the devices with cases and screen protectors.
Dont forget increased pay for public servants who more and more act like they dont work for the public
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.
You certainly can argue about your property taxes and win concessions if you have a good reason. It’s not hard to do. You just need to get off your ass and attend the annual tax assessment meeting.
It’s why that annual meeting exists.
Did he go to city council chambers, or did he just vaguely go into the city itself and start arguing with people?
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.
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.
Roads that are too big, house that are too spread out.
Police because stores refuse to hire their own security and offload it to onto your property tax.
Sewers because dumb people are too stupid to compost properly, and now we need chemicals on farm fields since the traditional method of composting is dead.
Garbage trucks and landfills because companies sell you wrappers and containers that outlive the products and are made from toxic waste.
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.
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.
And the bigger the chunk, the more they owe.
It’s pretty easy to dodge property taxes also.
Why don’t you share how?
Ask your city clerk about it. That person can tell you what the city/county/township meeting format is and how to participate. But basically, you go to the meeting, bring some photos to support your claim, and discuss the matter like a civil human being. It’s not rocket surgery. You don’t need a lawyer either.
It’s a wealth tax on wealth that’s very difficult to hide.
Sorry, oh the irony is rich.
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
I can’t even afford a dingy studio where I’m at… tf
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”
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
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.
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.
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.
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”
The Guardian just did an article on this subject
I would be more okay with property tax, IF once you reached a certain age (or disabled), you were not required to pay 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.
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…
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.
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.
Government Owned Social Housing Program
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?
.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
Yes, at least an acre. .25 is nothing.
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?
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.
Depending on area 40k property tax means a 3-4M house. Poor rich people!
That’s the part that upsets me the most. If you save up the money to fix up your house, the gov charges you more for it. How aggregating. Makes me not want to “own” property.
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.
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.
your interpretation of the concept of ownership practically renders the word meaningless.
to most people it does in fact mean that it can’t normally be taken away, even though such a thing might be physically or legally possible.
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?
If you own something, and someone takes it from you, its called theft. If its not theft when they take it from you, then you didn’t own it.
That would mean all taxes are theft, all forfeitures, all repossessions, and all seizures. It’s a simplistic understanding of the concept that reduces ownership to whoever currently possess property.
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!
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.
