If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
Man, property taxes are such a weird fucking thing.
Back in the day, they used to tax based on frontage, which was essentially how much width the front of your house took up. So naturally, people responded by building ridiculously thin, ridiculously long houses. You can still find them in older cities like Charleston and in some of the older parts of Atlanta.
Nowadays, I can’t even figure out what the actual metric or system is supposed to be.
For example, the house I own is apparently worth around $500,000 now. We bought it for $220,000 in 2016. I can assure you that my house did not magically become twice as much house simply because Zillow or the county decided it was worth $500K. And yet, I’m being taxed according to that inflated valuation.
Some states don’t even charge traditional property taxes. They have completely different mechanisms. Florida, for example, is doing some kind of financial black magic that I still haven’t entirely figured out.
And honestly, why should my property taxes be based on the superficial market value of my house in the first place? If I bought the damn thing for $220K, why can’t that be the basis for taxation? That’s basically how cars work. You buy the car, pay your ad valorem tax when you register it, and then you don’t get an annual bill based on how much some guy thinks your car is worth now.
Why do we have to pay property taxes every single year on an asset we already bought? At some point, I would like to stop paying rent to the government for the privilege of owning the property I supposedly own.
And here’s another fun one: I drive an electric car. My annual registration isn’t $20 like it is for a regular gas-powered car. It’s around $250 because the state isn’t collecting gasoline taxes from me.
So essentially, the government looked at my electric car and said, “Congratulations on driving an environmentally friendly vehicle. That’ll be $230 extra.”
I’m beginning to think the entire tax system was designed by a committee of people who were locked in a room with a calculator and told to make everything as unnecessarily complicated as humanly possible.
Humanity is not long for this world.
There’s a good chance that they chose the simplest method where “simple” means the easiest to understand change set, not the easiest to understand overall system. People usually have an easier time understanding small changes.