Under this delightful bit of proposed legislation, seniors on fixed incomes, whose property taxes have continued to skyrocket - on houses some of them surely own outright - get the choice of working for peanuts for the government (possibly also paying taxes on that income) to pay down their property tax bills.
One woman in this article lives on $7440 a year (Social Security payments) yet must somehow pay $12K a year in property taxes, just to be allowed to continue to live in the house she has lived in for over 45 years. So she, 76 years old and with a failing body, has the generous option of working for the government to pay her taxes!
I believe…the purpose of the government is to oversee the welfare of its people. Not to put them on Welfare. Or on the street.
For perhaps the first time in board history, we agree on something.
Or even better, keep the property tax, if it’s a useful part of the state tax structure, but grant a deduction, locally scaled to whatever the market price of a comfortable middle-class home is in that locality, for a primary residence.
If a typical single-family house sells for $100,000 in a given taxing district, grant a property tax deduction of $100,000 on primary-residence single-family homes (and similar deductions to owner-occupied duplexes and the like). Tax Malcolm McYuppie who has to have a $500,000 mini-mansion the going tax rate on $400,000 of his assessed valuation, the Phayque Olde Englishe Luxurye Condos what the market will bear, ditto the high-profit malls and the like.
Or maybe find a way to finance local government that doesn’t involve taxing people out of house and home.
I trust that you are familiar with the expression “death and taxes.” Expecting society at large to protect a private citizen’s grown offspring’s future inheritance at the cost of reducing public expenditures for municipal infrastructure such as roads, tap water, and sewers, is a horse that won’t run.
A pensioner will be pressed to come up with the coin due to living on a fixed income in inflationary times. A middle aged person will be pressed to come up with the coin due to supporting a couple of offspring in college while at the same time trying to save for retirement. A young couple will be pressed to come up with the coin due to feeding, clothing and housing their growing family. The simple fact of the matter is that most folks have accomodations that meet their incomes. If they can afford a better home, they move up. If they can’t afford the home that they are in, they move down.
Money would be better spent subsidizing housing for low income people, of any age, rather than subsidizing people living beyond their means despite having the ability to relocate and live within their means.
I’m not honestly curious as to what you propose to pay for schools, fire protection, sewers, and local police.
I would agree that perhaps the property tax system should be adjusted to ensure people don’t get screwed due to real estate bubble pricing, but why should I pay more in tax to give old coots, as a class, free money and tax breaks?
By the way, why should the elderly get a free break on taxes? They don’t deserve one any more than anyone else does, right? They don’t “need” the tax break any more than I would if I couldn’t pay my property taxes, but if I couldn’t pay them you’d be telling me that I probably shouldn’t own property that I can’t afford to pay taxes on.
If the elderly can’t pay their property tax, they should do what the rest of us do in the same situation. Sell the property. The only people who benefit from a tax break on the elderly are their heirs. Do you really feel like the government should spend your tax money to secure someone’s inheritance?
Roads and sewers. The money for these has to come from somewhere. If you nix the property tax, it will have to come out of income tax or sales tax or some other sort of tax, unless you intend to invent some administratively burdensome user pay scheme – coin operated toilets in one’s home, a pedometer measuring one’s sidewalk use, and a GPS tracker for billing against one’s driving on municipal streets. Don’t begrudge the efficiency of municipalities. If you have a beef against property taxes, that’s fair enough, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Put forward a more effective mechanism for delivering municipal services.
What it comes down to is the difficulty of trying to find an overall balance. If you relieve personal taxation, you will have to increase the taxation of businesses, which will scare them away, and with them goes the business tax base anad the employment base. If you relieve taxation on businesses, you will have to increase the taxation of individuals, which will reduce the labour pool. If you relieve taxation on assets, you will have to increase taxation on incomes, and scare away income earners. If you relieve taxation on income earners, you will have to increase taxation on assets, and scare away capital investment, as well as driving seniors out of their homes, for they are living in their capital. Simply dropping one type of tax will not solve anything – all it will do is shift the tax burden elsewhere, where it will have ramifications. One should first ask what benefit society will receive by subsidizing the protection of senior’s homes, and decide if society’s money (or lost revenue from cut taxes – same thing) is best spent on that problem, or is best spent on other problems (water, fire, police, roads, sewer, etc.), or is best not spent at all.
We do in TN. People above the age of 65 can now have their property tax frozen at current levels. On the surface this sounds like a good idea, but it’s going to turn us into “God’s Waiting Room 2.0” and as more seniors stay/relocate here to take advantage of this, it’s going to cause problems for local municipalities who rely on the tax to pay for danged near everything. With no state/county/city income tax allowed by state constitution (and when they tried to get the constitution changed to allow that, things got ugly), the options for replacing that revenue are rather limited. We’ve already got the world’s highest sales tax (which causes residents who live close to the border to cross over into one of the neighboring states to buy food and high ticket items, thus depriving the state of money), so raising that again doesn’t look like a good idea, IMHO.
I should point out that our public schools are ranked pretty low in the nation (high 40s), with graduation rates in the low 60th percentile among high school students.
Hey, Tuckerfan. How do we go about getting that property tax frozen? Zeldar is of such an age now and I will be in July. We own the property jointly. Do both of us have to be over 65? So glad that you mentioned this!
–Your favorite old hippy known only by her earrings.
I don’t know exactly how it works (I’ve got a coupla years before I have to worry about it. ;)), but it was passed as a Constitutional amendment in ‘06 (they pretty much “stealthed” it on to the ballot as I didn’t hear a word about it until I got into the voting booth). You could probably give the ol’ county tax assessor’s office a call after the first of the year to find out the details. I do know it’s not an automatic waver (i.e. the clerk doesn’t say “Ah they turn 65 this year, so let’s freeze their taxes.”) and there might be some means testing involved, but I don’t know.
It’s funny how this old saw gets dragged out of the closet every time I get asked to pay more taxes. Yeah, that’s right,** I ** get asked to pay more taxes. I’m not the anonyomous they.
I’m not a senior quite yet, but I can relate to someone who has spent their adult life paying taxes and have seen local (property taxes are locally administered around here) politicians play shell games with the money while the property taxes increase at rates greater than inflation.
“Would somebody please think of the children?” :rolleyes:
