"The increases in property tax are inflationary, and act as an impediment to home ownership. Some of our citizens on fixed incomes are being forced to sell their homes simply because they cannot afford to pay the annual tax bill, and that is a terrible situation.
“In my personal opinion, property tax is evil and unconstitutional. Property tax makes government your permanent landlord, whether you own your home or not. Even if you rent, the owner of the property eventually must include the increase in property tax on to your monthly bill in order to maintain a profit margin. There is no way you can ever truly own your own property. You could always lose it in a tax sale.”
“While knocking on doors leading up to the election, the number one issue for the vast majority of people was the incessant, exorbitant increase in property tax each year. This is not unique to Johnson County. It is happening in many areas of the state.”
He’s right, that an individual exemption on property valued below, let’s say $200,000.00 would be absolutely reasonable and ethical and justifiable.
Someone ask him if he’s willing to compromise to get a version of that only excludes the cheapest homes (those owned by the vulnerable people he’s claiming this is for).
Most politicians won’t agree to such a simple measure, because they don’t give a shit about poor people and demand the exemption benefit their rich friends before it benefits anyone else.
But on the surface ask, I’m all for it. Taxes on poor and middle class (what’s left of it) people’s property isn’t where the bulk of the tax revenue is anyway.
It should be a scaled tax deduction to avoid creating cliffs, and it could be set at any small home amount to start, but should be targeted at zeroing property taxes on starter homes and homes owned by fixed low income empty nest retirees.
There’s a very good chance that the revenue from property taxes on the poorest people is wiped out by the costs to the public in court of arbitrating foreclosures and such. There are no winners in the public sector and population at large when a very poor person is struggling to survive.
If helping poor people is really the point, we could just get this done.
Edit: Since his job is political, I don’t trust him.
But it’s refreshing to hear a politician mention anything at all that locals might actually be directly affected by, instead of hand-waving about fixing the economy.
I’ll also note that even the bare minimum version of his plan that I’ve put forward is absolutely still going to be classist as hell in immediate impact, predominantly benefitting people who had a chance to own property at all.
It’s still worth doing - perfect vs good enough and all that. But it doesn’t count as a full win if we stop there.