| t | <hr size=2> | t | |
| <dl><dt> Subject</dt> | | |
| <dd> Property Taxes</dd> | | |
| <dt> Date</dt> | | |
| <dd> 2025-11-12_12:21:30.16</dd> | | |
| <dt> Tags</dt> | | |
| <dd> taxes, politics</dd> | | |
| <dt> Author</dt> | | |
| <dd> tbird20d</dd> | | |
| </dl><hr size=2> | | |
| This is one of my first | | |
| "real" blog entries, so I'm going to keep this short. | | |
| <p> | | |
| It's that time of year again to pay property taxes. | | |
| <p> | | |
| 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. | | |
| <p> | | |
| 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. | | |
| <p> | | |
| 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). | | |
| <p> | | |
| 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. | | |
| <p> | | |
| 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. | | |
| <p> | | |
| 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? | | |
| <p> | | |
| 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. | | |
| <p> | | |
| This might make me sound libertarian, but I just wish I could opt out of | | |
| some of the services I'm not using. | | |
| <p> | | |
| I could go on. Any maybe I'll come back and edit this post. But that's enough for now. | | |
| <p> | | |