Property Taxes

It's that time of year again to pay property taxes.

I'm always a bit annoyed at property taxes. I don't begrudge that I'm getting value for my taxes, or that the government needs to charge them to cover expenses. But I do think they could be more fair and efficient.

As a (previous) property owner in California, I have to say that I had mixed feelings about Prop 13, which capped the amount that property taxes could increase over the lifetime of the ownership of the property. This was an effort to avoid the situation where people (particularly seniors on fixed income) could be priced out of their own, fully-paid-for homes, by exorbitant increases in property values. Property values for a region are almost completely out of the control of an individual homeowner, and it's manifestly unfair that someone should have to move because their taxes reach unsustainable rates due to inflation, growth around them, or some other factor unrelated to the government services being provided them. Prop 13 capped property tax increases to 1.5 percent per year from the date of original purchase, or of a licensed and permitted upgrade. This did create certain market distortions (such as children living in their parents home longer than usual, or houses being used for multi-family dwellings), but the overall effect was achieved, and I think this was a good law.

That is, a property buyer could estimate their future costs, and current residents could not be priced out of their own homes. Hawaii has a patchwork of regional and county laws that try to accomplish some of the same goals (capping the increase in property taxes), without creating weird incentives (for example, incentivizing people to never move).

Now, my beef with most region's property taxes is two-fold: 1) you can be priced out of your home by value increases outside your control, and 2) there's a mismatch between the amount paid and the government services received. I don't mind paying for a local and regional government that provides police and fire protection, water resource management, road maintenance, garbage collection, libraries, and other services (some of these are bundled into property taxes and some are not, depending on where you live). But one of the biggest items that property taxes pays for is schools.

This may sound like an old man shouting at the cloud, but why should people without kids pay the cost for educating someone else's offspring.

I know that the argument is that mandatory, paid-for education of the community's children provides a social benefit that is available to all. So the argument is that I'm getting an indirect benefit from this civilizing effect of education on youth. This sounds a little bit like a hostage argument. "Pay up, or we'll let our kids develop into ignorant, feral animals. And then you'll be sorry!". There are all kinds of arguments about the cost of education being too high. And it could probably be made more efficient. But I'm more interested in the philosophical argument that one person should really not be made to pay for the service given to another person. How bad would it be to let people who choose to have children (the parents) pay for the education of their children, instead of some random person who happens to live near them. Is this simply a case of the state being unwilling to make an unfunded mandate? You have to educate your kids. That's probably a good mandate. But why should strangers pay for it?

The real injustice is that people who home-school their children, or send their children to private schools, end up paying not only for their own kids but for other people's kids also. They can't opt out of funding a system that they don't benefit (directly) from, and that they might be ideologically opposed to.

This might make me sound libertarian, but I just wish I could opt out of some of the services I'm not using.

I could go on. Any maybe I'll come back and edit this post. But that's enough for now.

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Property Taxes (date: 2025-11-12)
Space news (date: 2025-11-29)