Multnomah Education Service District
Patrick Lasswell versus Nels Johnson. I voted for Johnson.
I read both of the candidates’ official statements (pdf file), and wasn’t all that impressed with what either one wrote. But Lasswell seems to be a sky-is-falling type, and although I admire his outspoken opinion on how swell his mother is, I wasn’t convinced that the sky is, in fact, falling. So I voted for Johnson, who seems a nice and mainstream fellow.
Portland School District #1JT
Director, Zone 4.
Martin Gonzalez versus Steve Buel. I voted for Buel.
Candidate statements are here (pdf link). Both candidates seemed decent. Gonzalez is the more mainstream, experienced candidate, but I think Buel’s activist stand against testing-driven education is badly needed.
Director, Zone 6.
Tom Koehler versus David Morrison. I voted for Koehler.
Candidate statements are here (pdf link). Morrison is basically a one-issue candidate, and his one issue is the malicious wi-fi waves that are attacking our children. I am not persuaded that this is should be the primary issue of the school board. Koehler seems like a nice, mainstream candidate, and is unafraid of the wi-fi.
City of Portland, Ballot Measure 26-150, Renewing the five-year levy to prevent child abuse, child hunger.
This will do a little good and raise my property taxes a tad. I voted yes.
City of Portland, Ballot Measure 26-152, Local option to improve natural areas, and water quality so fishies can thrive.
This will do a little good and raise my property taxes a tad. I voted yes.
City of Portland, Ballot Measure 26-151. Add fluoride to Portland’s tap water. I voted yes.
This was the hardest issue for me to decide my vote on. Both sides are extremely passionate and one-sided, and I had a hard time feeling I could trust what either side says. The City Club of Portland’s report on the issue was invaluable.
I almost voted “no” on this one because I’d rather let controversial issues be decided by individuals, not the city government. It was almost a coin flip.
But in the end, the primary people this issue effects – children – have no say either way. And I suspect the number of children who would significantly benefit from fluoridated water, but have parents who just don’t care about this issue either way, vastly outnumber the number of children whose parents are strongly anti-fluoridation.
Furthermore, although I found neither side completely trustworthy, on the whole the science I kept hearing from the anti-fluoridation folks held up less well on examination, which gave me a bias against them.
Glad to see Amp adding some roughage to his diet.
But why no voting guide for South Carolina? ‘Cuz that race was a real toss-up for me….
As in tossing up your lunch?
I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to that election. What kind of opposition did Sanford face in the GOP primary? And what was there to recommend Colbert besides not being Sanford and having a famous brother?
Question, Amp – since you bring up that a couple of the ballot questions would bring up your property taxes a tad, I’m curious about what your tax burden is. If it’s not too personal a question, what is the assessed value of your property and what is the tax levy you’re paying?
At my end, my assessment is about $270,000 for a tri-level home with 1600 square feet of living space and 3/4 acre of land, for which I paid ~ $5,400 in property taxes.
I mailed my ballot today, but because I live in Clackamas County, it was very different from yours. :)
Due to anti-tax fanaticism in Oregon in the 90’s (and now), property taxes can not exceed a fixed percentage (0.5% for schools, 1% for everything else). Portlanders reliably vote for tax levies, so we have levied greater than the legal limit on ourselves. When we pass a new levy, some of the existing levies (and the new levy) shrink to keep the total at the limit, through a process called compression.
So we pay 0.5% less of our assessed value than you do (due to another horrid anti-tax bill from the 90’s, our effective assessed value is less than our actual assessed value, as effective assessed value can only rise by a limited amount each year- I’m not actually sure if the last 5 years of declining values has equalized the two).
Hm. So if my levy was 1.5% I’d be paying about $4,000 instead of $5,400. Good. You rail against “anti-tax fanaticism”, but the property tax is perhaps the most regressive tax there is out there. I bought my house in 1986. I did nothing to increase it’s value, but now my taxes are about 4 times what they were then. In fact, 40% of my monthly payment goes towards taxes. When I attempt to retire (more than likely I’ll end up getting forced out of my job at some point) and my income goes down, I stand a real chance of being forced out of the home that I paid for over 30 years because the State wants more money.
Here in Illinois the property tax levy works like this:
1) Various local governmental bodies with independent budgeting powers set their budget. Town/village/city, township, county, elementary school district, high school district, community college district, fire department, sanitary district, library district, park district, mosquito abatement district (really!), and others all have separate geographic boundaries, have their own boards running them and set their own budget.
2) These budgets get turned into the County.
3) The county figures out what your proportion of the total property value of each district is and assesses you your proportional part of the district’s budget.
Note, therefore, that if your property value goes down but so does everyone else’s at the same rate and the various districts raise their budgets, you can see your taxes go up as your property values go down. There have been some depressingly ignorant speeches by elected officials who have shown that they completely misunderstand this process, even as they vote on budgets. There is no limit on what percentage of your property value the levy can be. And budgets never go down ….
Ron: You seem to be confusing “regressive” with “affects me personally.” Most people in the US don’t own property, thus do not pay property tax. Furthermore, the richer you are, the more property you tend to own.
I would much rather have a wealth tax but, you know, here we are.
yrs–
–Ben
I say it’s regressive from the viewpoint that as your income goes down, the tax does not. While there is certainly a very broad correlation between wealth and property ownership, it breaks down when you start looking at the individual level. There’s lots of seniors out there that have landed in this position. Property tax that affects income property, second or vacation homes, etc., is one thing – but putting property tax on a primary residence can force someone out of it and increase their living costs (as they now have to pay rent) to the point that they end up consuming public resources.
Ben –
Everyone, other than the homeless, pays property tax. Do you think your landlord prices your housing without regard to the tax on the apartment building (or whatever), then when tax season rolls around takes the property tax on the building out of his kid’s college fund so as not to oppress the renting class? No, he or she builds the property tax into the cost model right from the beginning. If the property tax on your house goes up $100 a year, your rent goes up $100 a year, more or less.
You’re also incorrect that most people in the US don’t own property. There are about 130 million housing units in the US (with a unit being a house, a condo, an apartment, a trailer, etc.) About 75 million of those are owned by the people occupying them, a solid majority. Now, arguably, the kids of the people who own a home don’t own that home, so the number of people with a title deed in their personal possession is probably less than 50% of the total population, but in the context of property taxes, the majority of Americans live in a place where they or their household directly pays that tax.
As noted, the renters pay it too, though they are often (as in your case, apparently) unaware of it.
RonF, I like the part where you skipped the fact that one of the main reasons your property tax goes up is that THE VALUE OF YOUR HOME HAS INCREASED, PROBABLY SKYROCKETED.
So feel free to take a HELOC to pay your taxes, or sell and use that MASSIVE windfall to buy yourself a nice little condo (probably more appropriate for a senior anyway, to have something without so much upkeep) or an apartment building to live in while earning money from the other units, or whatever you like.
Yes, I live in a state with a property tax cap that has totally screwed city/county governments to the point where our infrastructure and services are falling apart, while property values have gone through the roof, and I do happen to resent the fact that I can neither hope to afford a home for myself, nor get any meaningful contribution to the cost of living in my community from the folks who bought 30 years ago when housing was more affordable.
Speaking as a past and future landlord, no. Landlords do not build the property tax into the monthly rate. Here’s how landlords set rent on their properties – they charge as much as they can get in the current market. In the mid-aughts when everybody and their imaginary friend could buy a house I was only able to rent mine for about $1200/mo. This was a loss for me. But it was less of a loss than not renting it out. Now, however, when imaginary friends and actual people have a much, much harder time getting financing I would be able to rent out my home (were I not currently living in it) for upwards of $2000/mo. The rental market is much tighter these days. Property tax is never a consideration in the rental rate. It certainly factors into whether I’m making a profit or suffering a loss, but it does not change the rate I can and do charge.
Jake –
OK, fair point, and thank you for injecting a note of economic empiricism into a theoretical discussion. You’re right that most landlords aren’t explicitly putting the tax into the rent, they charge what they can get away with charging.
That said, when the landlord pays the property tax at the end of the year (or monthly or however they do it in East Hippiestan where you live), where did the money for the property tax payment come from? Right – the tenants. I am sure there are some properties that are distressed (and distressing to their landlords) where the rental payments don’t cover all the cost of operating, including the property tax – but over the long run, those landlords go bankrupt and lose the house, or move into it themselves, or take out a nice insurance policy and play the “oopsie matches falling onto gasoline” game. Mostly, the rents from a property pay for all its expenses, including taxes, and hopefully something left over for the landlord; the cases where the landlord is working in the coal mine to keep his tenants warm and cozy are surely rare.
Yeah please don’t play the “renters pay property tax, too” game with me. My family rents a fair number of properties and apartments; I know how rental rates are set and, no, those taxes aren’t “passed on” in any meaningful way.
Then who pays them?
A number of liberal governments seem to disagree with your premise, by the way. Minnesota, Wisconsin, DC, and perhaps others have property tax credits for low-income renters, allowing them to claim the amount they indirectly pay in property tax as an offset to their local taxes.
http://www.dcfpi.org/an-unlikely-beneficiary-property-tax-credits-and-low-income-renters
The owners do, of course.
I think a liberal government will take any excuse to redistribute some pittance of money. But if you’d like to imagine that the rental housing market is somehow the only exception from market economics that’s your prerogative. You can imagine it with all your heart and maybe that’ll make it true.
Please dial it back a few notches.
In the context of this post, Ben is right – the kind of small property tax increase discussed in the post isn’t going to cause me and Charles to increase the rent at all.
On the other hand, in the long term, property taxes do have an effect on rent. If property taxes are high in a city, eventually average rents will get high enough so landlords can profit after paying taxes. And if there aren’t enough tenants at those price levels, then eventually there will be fewer people offering to rent their property. And if the same city vastly reduces its taxes, eventually rents will drop (or, more likely, they will rise slower than inflation, but it amounts to the same thing).
This doesn’t happen instantly, and it doesn’t happen after every little bond measure, but I have to agree with Robert (what a thing to say!). All else held equal, it would be very surprising if, broadly and over the long run, property taxes didn’t affect average rent.
I’d be in favor of narrowly targeted legislation to assist seniors in keeping their homes (even though, from an economic efficiency perspective, it’s probably better for more people if they move to someplace more affordable instead).
But to simply destroy the tax base of an entire city in order to address that problem, as the GOP anti-tax folks in Oregon have done, is way broader than necessary, and unreasonable. Conservatives have destroyed much of the city’s infrastructure and many of our schools, all of which does real harm to real people. And the same Conservatives who say they care about the elderly when it’s an excuse to slash property taxes, are eager to destroy Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
The owners do, of course.
OK. And the owners get their money, broadly speaking, from…?
Amp is of course right, and Jake before him, that it’s not as directly coupled a mechanism as we might see in other goods and services. I *was* wrong to flatly say a $100 increase in one meant $100 in the other; the price can be sticky, the landlord may be forced by market conditions to eat any new increment out of their profits at least temporarily, etc.
But generally speaking property taxes are paid by everybody who lives in substantial housing, and are regressive in the same way a flat income tax is regressive – which is to say, in effect. Yes, a 5% levy is equal as a proportion whether you’re barely making it on minimum wage or are living the life of Riley; minimum wage guy is hit much harder by a 5% whack.
Amp, re: your allegations on conservatives destroying all that is good and pure and infrastructure-ish, is that meant to reference Portland specifically, or some other community? Is there a citation for the tax base being destroyed, or for much of the infrastructure/many schools being destroyed?
I’m not doubting your unvarnished word, naturally, it’s just that places like Detroit took decades to experience a relatively modest decline in infrastructure and population and made national news many times over the course of those years; it seems odd I’ve missed the news stories about your bridges falling into the river, schools exploding, Godzilla attacks smashing the sewage plant, etc.
Googling around a bit, I did find this:
http://www.oregon.gov/dor/STATS/docs/303-405-11/303-405-11.pdf
Of most relevance is the chart on page 9, property tax imposed from 1970 onward. There was a bit of a dip in the 1990s, when the infrastructure started being destroyed wholesale, but it’s mostly a gradual increasing sum from there. It seems to have gone from about $500 million in 1970 to about $5 billion in 2010/2011; it doesn’t specify constant dollars so I’m assuming that’s nominal dollars. CPI calculator says that there’s a 5.75 inflationary wedge over the period, so the total in constant dollars has about doubled over the last four decades.
Now, I’ll grant you that a doubling over four decades is not a huge rate of increase, but given that your population has somewhat less than doubled over the same period, it looks to be a picture of low, but steady growth.
What am I and/or the state Department of Revenue missing?
Landlords charge what the markets will bear — i.e. they maximize their incomes — which is not dependent on tax rates in any significant way. The only way that property taxes will cause them to raise their prices is if they think that, with higher property taxes, they can get away with charging more for rent in that neighborhood (which can be the case — higher property taxes generally mean better schools and so on. Also “property taxes improve quality of life and thus rent” is not really an argument against property taxes.)
But general if a market-optimal rate brings in, say, $40,000 / month from my apartment building which I pay $10,000 / year in tax, raising that tax to $15,000 will not effect my rents. I’m not going to raise my rates to non-market optimal levels (leading to vacancies and lowering my income to, say, $35,000) just because my costs have increased. That would be stupid.
Now you can argue that raised operating costs could make it impossible to function as a landlord. This is laughable, first because property taxes simply cannot get that high*, and second because property taxes are an incredibly minor contribution to the costs of owning and operating a rental property (mortgage, maintenance, and finding tenants).
*A property tax so high that you couldn’t make profit as a landlord would drive down property values (well, spike down property values) which in turn would lower the property tax.
Whether property taxes are a minor fraction of operating cost or not is extremely location-driven. The range of property tax rates on an apartment building is simply enormous; at the low end I would agree with you, it’s not much of a factor. At the high end you’re way off.
http://www.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/significant-features-property-tax/upload/sources/ContentPages/documents/MTAdoc_NewCover.pdf
On a $600,000 apartment building, in the largest 50 cities of the US, the property tax ranges from $2,067 in Honolulu, to $26,135 in Detroit. (My own town of Colorado Springs is the 2nd-cheapest, at $3,186; New York City is the 2nd-most expensive, at $25,157.
A tax bill of four or five percent of the building’s value, every year, is a long way from being a trivial expense. That said, I will agree that the sun-kissed and mountain-crazy landlords of Honolulu and the Springs don’t even perceive their tax as a line item; it’s down there with soda machine refills and parking tickets.
Hey Amp, out of curiosity, how come Detroit’s infrastructure and urban culture isn’t exploding with wonderfulness? They’re paying huge property taxes. Ergo, their quality of life ought to ROCK, right? ;)
Hey Robert, you’re
1) Completely dodging the issue under discussion. (Which is about how tax increases do not magically increase the optimal rents.)
2) Using absolute numbers when you should be using %ages of total operating costs.
Should I take this as “I don’t want to talk about this anymore?”
I’m not dodging it; you think that property taxes are a magical expense that somehow, unlike every other expense that a business incurs, don’t get priced into the product in the long run. I think Amp summed up the flaw in your theory pretty well, and I’ve conceded that my own formulation was too strongly absolute and walked it back to something more defensible, and, I think, plainly true. (Hayes’ Law of Political Harmony: if Ampersand and Hayes agree broadly that a thing is true, it is very very likely to be true.) So what’s to discuss?
On the operating expense question, I have only been a landlord once and that briefly (and probably criminally, sue me) so I do not have operating figures. The academic study cited used property valuation as its metric, so that’s what I talked in terms of. Taking a wild stab at it, and using published real-estate prices from Craigslist, I find that an apartment in NYC has a price anywhere from $150,000 to $300,000. So a theoretical $600,000 apartment building there has maybe two, three, four units. Let’s say its four units. The property tax on the building is going to be $25k per year, or a little over $6000 per unit, about $500 per month. Rents on the same class of apartments seem to go anywhere from $1000 to $3000. The property tax bill seems like a pretty significant component of the operational budget.
Now, if you have operational figures for a $600,000 building in New York or similar environs, which show that $25,000 in property tax every year is “incredibly minor”, then I’ll walk back this argument too. I don’t think you have such figures, because your example is plainly from one of the low-tax places.
From your example ($40,000 a month in income on a building with a $10k annual tax payment), then if you were in New York City you’d have a building assessed at $240k. NYC does have a rental price premium, but I’m pretty sure you don’t pull half a million in annual rent out of a building that costs half that.
More realistically, we’re talking about somewhere like the Springs, where a tax of $10k means a building worth $2 million or so. Still seems a little optimistic on the revenue side, but maybe you got a bunch of software millionaires or something. And there, yes, $10k in property tax on your half million in income is pretty minor in the scheme of things – as I agreed.
So, help me put a frame on what “incredibly minor” means to you. The annual tax is $25k. How much rent are you collecting on how many units in a building valued at what, for that amount of tax to be “incredibly minor”?
My gracious landlords don’t charge market-bearing rents, because they rent to their friends and want to continue to do so. Thus it is considerably more likely that they’ll feel a property tax squeeze if rates go very high.
This is not the primary condition under which rents operate.
If I can pull in 40k a month from my building, and then taxes go up, so I change rents so I pull in 50k a month, why the hell wasn’t I pulling in 50k a month before the tax increase? Was I just a moron? Did it take a tax increase to cause me to efficiently price myself in the rental market?
Ben, in an efficient rental market – and most markets aren’t perfectly efficient, I admit it – the landlords were just barely making money off their apartment buildings, because competition was forcing them to keep their prices low to keep other landlords from underpricing them.
But if property taxes go up by a large amount, then all of the landlords who were just barely making money, will have to raise their prices. And since they’ll all be raising prices, competition won’t prevent any one landlord from doing so, as it would have done before the property tax increase.
ETA: Now of course, there are a lot of other factors operating, and the market is not all that efficient. But I don’t think that means that property taxes aren’t eventually reflected in rents – it’s just that it’s a slow and blurry process, not a fast and clear process. As I understand it.
Oh, and Robert: Similarly, I never claimed that property taxes were the one and only factor determining how a state does. :-p You may have a good point about Oregon’s situation, but I’m afraid I can’t take the time to look into it today.
I’d be in favor of narrowly targeted legislation to assist seniors in keeping their homes (even though, from an economic efficiency perspective, it’s probably better for more people if they move to someplace more affordable instead).
I don’t understand this.
Would you support legislation to prevent HOA fees and assessments from going up for seniors, so they can keep their condos/homes in gated communities?
Would you support legislation to prevent gas and car prices from going up for seniors, so they can keep their gas-guzzling large-format cars?
Would you support legislation to prevent food prices from going up for seniors, so they can continue to shop at Whole Foods?
Would you support legislation to prevent clothing prices from going up for seniors, so they can continue to shop at Macy’s?
I understand why seniors would *want* to be able to continue to have the same lifestyle they’ve always had (hello, I have four senior parents just at the moment, and the women in my family tend to live well into their 90s so I anticipate being a senior for quite a long while myself.) I get why a person would long to be able to continue to buy silk trousers, and organic hydroponically-raised heirloom tomatoes, and drive a Lexus SUV, and live in a 3-bedroom 2500-square-foot house with HOA-provided services.
What I don’t get is why government should subsidize that, or more accurately, why the rest of the community should subsidize that by having less income (from our merchants and our HOA fees and our sales taxes, plus what were we talking about again? oh yeah, our property taxes) to work with.
“When your income goes down, you should be responsible and cut your expenses” is a basic tenet of conservatism. “You shouldn’t have to cut out the basic needs of life; if you can’t afford them then society should help you with them” is a basic tenet of liberalism.
If your property taxes have gone up because your paid-off house has increased in value by 400%, you have the means to solve that problem for yourself, without needing government/society to solve it for you. You have a tangible asset that you own outright, that you can manage as you see fit:
– You can sell it, and use the proceeds to buy or rent something you can afford the taxes on.
– You can sell it, and use the proceeds to buy into a retirement community that will never trouble you with property taxes.*
– You can rent it out at a price that will cover your taxes and maintenance, perhaps even provide you with some steady income, and use the money you were spending on your (more affordable) taxes to rent something you can afford.
– You can stay in it and rent bedrooms to your children, or your friends from church who are in the same boat, or a nice little group of Filipina nursing program students who agree to help with the maintenance and drive you to the grocery store once a week, or anybody you like.
– You can sell it to one of your children with the understanding that you get to live out your days in the downstairs bedroom.
YOU HAVE OPTIONS. Options that do not include “I get to live my life exactly as I always have, while refusing to contribute to the maintenance and upkeep of the very community I live in, that supported me while I was developing this lifestyle I like so much, that happens also to contribute to the value of my asset I now want to sit on without paying the cost of keeping up.” Yes. That is true. But you have options.
*This is the option my mom and her husband took a couple of years ago, and while it stresses me out for other reasons – namely that it’s 2300 miles away from where I live, and I have no intention of moving back to Indiana but this leaves me wondering who on earth is going to drive them to their doctor’s appointments and errands when they can’t do it, and keep them social and mobile and etc. when their needs exceed what the community offers – at least it’s their attempt to make sure that their life is manageable and affordable on their own terms without other people having to subsidize them. Other than their Medicare, of course, which is another whole conversation but which I don’t begrudge anyone, just wish I had a hope of it being there for me.**
** My “retirement plan” is, so far, dying in a ditch, because it seems I likely won’t have children, the days of pensions are long gone, my Roth IRA laughs at me whenever I check its balance, and I’ve lost money on both efforts at buying property I’ve tried so far, and I have little faith that I’ll ever be able to afford anything in the Bay Area so I might have a vague hope of earning some equity to cash in someday. And I have a mortgage worth of student loans at age 40 anyhow, with a 30-year term and everything.
Amp – come back and fight like the we-need-more-taxes-Dembot that you are! Chicken. ;)
Elusis – What you said word for word, pretty much, other than I have a kid who I can bully into driving me around, and I wouldn’t live in the Bay Area if the bay was full of fresh, ever-renewed delicious banana cream pie, and since I’m lucky enough to have an occupation which I can do until the day I die, I plan to. Retirement? What’s that? Oh, what the LAZY people do. ;)
(No offense intended, lazy people. I’m lazy any time I can manage it myself.)
Robert, I halfway expect to die in my therapy chair.
Planning to spend half your time slacking off, eh?
Elusis:
My property taxes have increased at a higher/faster rate than my home value has.
Seriously? Take out a loan to pay my taxes? All that does is kick the can down the road – now I have to pay off the taxes and interest and next year’s taxes. That’s nuts!
It’s not that massive. The price of condos, etc. have all gone up as well. A 1-bedroom condo within a few miles of where I live would cost about what my house would sell for. I have no desire to be squeezed into such a small living unit. And then I’m right back to paying property taxes.
And I think I, not the State and not you, should have the right to decide what’s appropriate for me to live in – especially after I spent 30 years paying for what I’m in now.
1)I couldn’t come close to affording even a 3-flat based on what my home would sell for.
2) If you think that a condo would be more appropriate for a senior because there’s no upkeep, how the hell am I supposed to maintain an apartment building? I know people who are landlords. If you just own 1 or two buildings you do your own maintenance as much as possible, you can’t afford to have someone else do it.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t pay taxes so that infrastructure, etc. can be funded. I’m saying that property tax is not the way to go. Here in Chicago reliance on property taxes for funding schools, infrastructure, etc. is the major block that keeps depressed areas from reviving themselves. Bad schools and bad infrastructure leads to low property values, which leads to levy increases to try to raise funds to fix them, which leads to people avoiding property in the areas (high taxes + bad services), which leads to unoccupied structures, which leads to low tax collections, which leads to underfunded schools and infrastructure, and the cycle continues. There are numerous suburbs that are mired in poverty because it’s impossible for the local government to raise enough money to supply essential services and maintenance – there just isn’t the local tax base to support it.
Property taxes have a pretty pernicious set of effects. The irony is that they derive in part from a pretty decent idea about taxation promulgated by Henry George, a long-out-of-fashion economist but a very not-stupid guy. He wanted to tax land, but not the capital improvements on land, or the products made by people’s skill or effort. It would be a very interesting world if we had his tax system but it’s just absolutely alien to lefties and righties alike.
So here’s where this kind of thing can lead:
Illinois Senate passes bill authorizing the use of eminent domain to take property for casinos
If the State has a primary interest in funding itself through the collection of property taxes and can take your property if you don’t pay, why not just take it and give it to whoever can generate the most taxes for them from it? Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo, here’s a bill that would use the power of the State to take property from unwilling private owners and convey it to other private owners on the basis that generating more taxes is a public good. So much for the concept that the government’s justification to exist rests in part on an obligation to protect private property rights from encroachment.
I hope I die on the trail somewhere. Bury me where I fall, hopefully near a nice scenic spot near water. My daughter has strict instructions on what kind of Irish whiskey is to be provided at my wake. No cheap booze when I go.
And my choirmaster and fellow members have been told that the funeral service must have plenty of music. I want anyone I’ve ever sung with there, singing. There better be at least one motet, a Bach chorale and a good, lively spiritual.
Well, you can get a reverse. They’re designed to let seniors stay in their homes when they are house rich and cash poor.
Or you can sell, just like everyone else.
Well,
a) Why do we care if you’re within a few miles? You can drive. You can move.
b) Why do we care if you own or rent? If you own a home with a large mortgage payment now, then perhaps you just own too much house. If you own something with little or no debt then the chances are that you can invest it and use the money to pay for decades, literally, of similar rental housing.
c) If you want to overpay for a large house that’s OK. But it doesn’t mean we should subsidize that want.
yep. you decide, including the decision whether you want to live large (and be poor) or live smaller (and have more money) or live TOO large (and lose your house.)
Huh? Did the State force you to buy; force you to stay; force you to mortgage; force you to end up in that location?
This is ALL you, dude. Don’t blame the state just because you don’t like the outcome of your choices.
Them’s the breaks. It’s quite possible that those folks 30 years ago made their own sets of contributions, which you didn’t match. Someone needed to pay taxes back then, too….
A man named Stan sang bass in my parish’s choir for years. His wife sang and still sings soprano with us. Stan got stomach cancer and died. At his memorial service, was she in black in the front pews with the rest of the family and friends? Hell no. She was in her robes (along with her daughter, wh0 can sing some but does not normally sing with us) up in our little chancel singing along with us. She had a little trouble seeing the music once in a while, what with the tears and all, but she said “What else am I going to do?”
I live in an area where a significant amount of the land is used by dairy farmers, and a significant part of the economy is tourism. Part of the problem with property taxes vs. other forms of revenue is that it makes it a lot harder for farmers to make a living (farmers by definition need a good deal of land), and encourages them to subdivide their land and sell it off for homes (in many cases, second homes). This then changes the character of the landscape and could hurt the tourism part of the economy. Probably there’s a similar dynamic in California, except with fruit & vegetable farming instead of dairy farming. It may not be the best use of good farmland, since you don’t have to worry about whether a place has good soil when building a house.
We’ve also had issues with the problem RonF mentioned, some areas having low property values and having trouble funding schools and having to have higher property tax rates than areas with high property values. We’ve partially fixed this by having partial sharing of property taxes statewide.
Unsurprisingly, I have voted precisely the way that Amp demanded. Can I have my family members back now?
One of the reasons I vote for nearly every property tax levy is that my property taxes are so absurdly low. Thanks to Idiot Measure 5, my property taxes just went over $1k last year. I can afford to pay for life saving and pain saving programs with the absurdly low property taxes we endure in Oregon.