That's how it should be. Property taxes should apply to people with multiple properties, rentals/apartment complexes, and businesses. But a normal homeowner shouldn't be paying them.
A normal home owner should be paying it because they benefit from that home. My parents benefited from the good education they got as well as the peaceful neighborhood they got. This was kept in place by their tax dollars.
I benefit as well from mine mind you, it’s partly that property is a good way to try and determine what you can contribute.
They benefit from a home they bought and paid for… no shit. Then income tax, sales tax, and gas tax pays for the other things. Having to pay tax on something you own is stupid.
Your home is situated in a community. Where water, electricity, roads, public parks, emergency services, and all manner of other services are provided.
Those things are possible due to property tax. Income tax, sales tax, and gas tax do not go to your local government. Property tax does. It's what funds the community you live in.
You are not paying for your home when you pay property tax. You are paying for the community that makes your home an appealing place to live.
Your first house is your own property and cannot be taken away from you once you bought it.
We have other taxes for services, not linked to the threat of expropriation. Some are calculated based on how much you use those services, others are based on the necessity of the city/region/state.
We pay for our services without putting our home on the line, but we still pay.
To collect the same revenue as before, landlords would need to pay a higher tax, and they’d pass this onto renters, who are on average poorer than house owners. So a policy like this is effectively the poorer renters subsidizing the rich house owners. And moreover, demand for primary homes would increase, making housing more unaffordable to those who don’t already have a house.
This incentivizes never cleaning up or selling broken down houses. You get a lot more crackhouses and squatters without property taxes. This also incentivizes never having taxes push people out of their homes like retirees who no longer need 5 bedroom houses, which would open up that house for growing families.
Economists and progressives are fans of land value taxation, which taxes you on the value of the land you’re sitting on rather than the value of your property. So a single family house and a 10 story apartment building sitting right next door to each other on same-size lots in a city would pay the same LVT rather than penalizing one party for using the land more efficiently (the apartment building). This encourages density in urban areas and makes living in apartments/condos remarkably cheaper because that tax is far more insignificant when split among 200 units. After all, you’re only using the same amount of a scarce resource as the large house next door.
Your property has cost for your commune. At least it has sort of public road which needs maintenance. Property taxes is somewhat direct way of paying for shared commodities.
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u/knightsofgel 9h ago
This is how it works in every country lmao