| Do you own your home? For many of us, owning our own home is a realization of the American dream. But I say we are fooling ourselves, or rather, we allow our government to fool us. We are afforded all the responsibilities of ownership when cost is incurred, but treated as little more than a renter for all other matters. It seems we have little claim to the land, and only slightly more claim to the house itself. The reality of the system, labels aside, is that we lease the land from our government, and anything we build on that land also becomes property of the government. We pay regular rent in the form of property taxes; the more your property is worth, the higher your taxes. Just like a tenant that is delinquent with the rent, if you fail to pay property taxes, you too will be evicted, the property you supposedly own will be seized. That sounds very much like a lease. When renters experience problems, they call the landlord to affect repairs. Not so with our "owned" properties. In fact, quite the opposite. Consider the paved sidewalk that exists on most residential properties. When sections need repair you will be billed. This expense is not spread through the entire tax base of a city, it is added directly to the tax of the individual property. In other words, the upkeep is not the responsibility of the owner (the city), but the tenant (the so-called homeowner). This is "taxation without representation" that our country's founders fought so hard to avoid. How did this happen? The taxation of real estate extends in varied forms back to ancient times. Even in the relatively recent history of our country, property tax has evolved and taken many forms. It is a constant struggle between the classes for what each perceives "fair." There is a nice history of property tax in the U.S. HERE. Basically, taxing real estate was a means to try to gauge the wealth of a taxpayer. Remember, income tax was not invented until the early 1900s. How can we make it better? In order to feel like we actually own the property we THINK we own, we need to remove the lease that we call property taxes. The lost revenue is easily made up in the Overall Tax Reform Plan outlined here. |
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