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!
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.
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.
