this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Certain things are paid for by the municipality or county and incur costs to same. People. The people that use those resources like schools roads fire safety EMS etc can play all sorts of games about where they "officially" live but they can't hide the actual house that their big fat butt sits in so it makes sense to tax that.
What you are saying is that its OK to tax someone who barely makes enough to live by taxing their income but if bob has 2M in property we shouldn't tax THAT. Do you know how much income tax we should have to charge to make up for that? It's a LOT and 95% of the benefit will accrue to those who are in the top 10% of wealth whilst much of the cost will be put on those in the folks on the lower rungs.
Shall we also forego taxing the 7 - 75th investment property?.
Can we maybe admit that having put $20,000 into a house that is now worth 2M isn't a terrible problem to have and that grandpa is still the winner even with taxes?
No, not even a little bit. What if grandpa is poor as fuck, bought that house forever ago, and intends to die in it? You want to make him homeless because he can't pay taxes? I'm not on with collateral damage, the taxes can be made up elsewhere, like places where economic activity is taking place.
If grandpa sells the 20K house hes living in for 2M, feel free to tax him for 2M and make him homeless, that's his own stupid ass fault.
If you have a 2M house the worst case scenario is selling it. There is no reason to choose to become homeless. Indeed losing it to taxes literally takes years whereas selling takes 30 days.
The government should not have the power to take your house away because some rich asshole has decided he's willing to give you a fuck load of money for it. The value of the house is imaginary until it's sold.
Your saying this person's is sitting on top of land that could make the government more money if someone else with more money was living there. You want to take away people's homes so that the government can make more money from the newer richer occupant, I don't think that's ok.
You need to tax the rich asshole so that he never gets to having 2M in disposable income in the first place, and leave poor grandpa out of it.
Taxing property is one of the most effective taxes to pay for local services because its impossible to hide the property you physically occupy within the zip code. All reasonable taxes are going to be need to be paid for by a broad spectrum of the tax base from rich to modest wealth to be at all realistic.
Taxing income to a greater degree is VERY HARD to implement both politically and legally. Can't be realistically implemented at the county level at all. Is subject to all kinds of creative accounting, and may get an unpredictable amount of money back to the federal government but may not realistically fund the existing services that are being paid for as we speak in your county. EG if the government decides to buy more airplanes with it your school and fire department might have to close.
It's just not a sound strategy to pursue. Any attempt to tax wealth is going to have to focus on property not exempt it.
You're cool with making poor people homeless when they can't pay their property taxes. That's not ok.