Which means he’s paying $12k in property taxes a year. That does sound quite substantial. Assuming that’s somewhat equivalent to rates in the UK, I pay around £1400.
Most places are around 1% of value with many having caps on increases in value or other differences in taxed and actual value. This means his house is worth 1,000,000 to 1,600,000
If he was really living on 24k he wouldn’t be able to pay 12,000 in property tax. He bought when it cost almost nothing and spent most of his life paying neither rent nor mortgage unlike most of us and has a reasonable retirement.
He could at any time sell and live better than you or I even if he didn’t have a dime other than the house. Instead he uses his time to whine about his good fortune.
You are making a lot of assumptions there but setting that aside, I’m not sure I’m in favour of turfing a pensioner out of their home to pay tax because they lucked out. Surely it’d be better to settle up after they die. It’s not like he’s preventing a needy young family moving in - presumably anyone buying this house would need to be pretty wealthy!
Step one make schools mostly dependent on property tax by funding them almost entirely through property tax
Step two watch the price of housing skyrocket to the point where half of them are owned by old fuckers
Step three make old fuckers fully or partially exempt from this tax
Step four wonder why your schools have basically been defunded
Lets imagine a scenario bob the old lives at 65 lives in a 2M home which isn’t exactly a castle its just in a really desirable area. Bob is cash poor but house rich. He’s going to be taxes out of his home sooner or later without relief. Suppose we provide him that relief.
Shall we let him sell his house and realize his gains. Tax those gains but leave him enough to live wealthy for the next 20 years and collect 20 years of 1% taxes or about 660k with 5% appreciation. We would also collect around 300k of that 2M in capital gains taxes.
All in all we are giving up almost a million dollars in tax revenue which will be collected by taxing people who aren’t sitting on a 1.7M pot of gold. We will be taxing lots of folks barely getting by MORE to write a million dollar check to grandpa.
Then when he dies all those capital gains that were in fact real evaporate because the new owner who inherits it gets to start fresh at present value.
To justify your position I want you to imagine going around to a bunch of poor people’s apartments and taking stuff out of their house to give to one rich guy. Yes someone who is “house rich” doesn’t SEEM rich but assets are fungible and in a good market remarkably liquid.
The real problem if that’s the scenario is that his social security check is less than $400/month.
Its almost 2000
Which means he’s paying $12k in property taxes a year. That does sound quite substantial. Assuming that’s somewhat equivalent to rates in the UK, I pay around £1400.
Most places are around 1% of value with many having caps on increases in value or other differences in taxed and actual value. This means his house is worth 1,000,000 to 1,600,000
If he was really living on 24k he wouldn’t be able to pay 12,000 in property tax. He bought when it cost almost nothing and spent most of his life paying neither rent nor mortgage unlike most of us and has a reasonable retirement.
He could at any time sell and live better than you or I even if he didn’t have a dime other than the house. Instead he uses his time to whine about his good fortune.
You are making a lot of assumptions there but setting that aside, I’m not sure I’m in favour of turfing a pensioner out of their home to pay tax because they lucked out. Surely it’d be better to settle up after they die. It’s not like he’s preventing a needy young family moving in - presumably anyone buying this house would need to be pretty wealthy!
Step one make schools mostly dependent on property tax by funding them almost entirely through property tax Step two watch the price of housing skyrocket to the point where half of them are owned by old fuckers Step three make old fuckers fully or partially exempt from this tax Step four wonder why your schools have basically been defunded
Lets imagine a scenario bob the old lives at 65 lives in a 2M home which isn’t exactly a castle its just in a really desirable area. Bob is cash poor but house rich. He’s going to be taxes out of his home sooner or later without relief. Suppose we provide him that relief.
Shall we let him sell his house and realize his gains. Tax those gains but leave him enough to live wealthy for the next 20 years and collect 20 years of 1% taxes or about 660k with 5% appreciation. We would also collect around 300k of that 2M in capital gains taxes.
All in all we are giving up almost a million dollars in tax revenue which will be collected by taxing people who aren’t sitting on a 1.7M pot of gold. We will be taxing lots of folks barely getting by MORE to write a million dollar check to grandpa.
Then when he dies all those capital gains that were in fact real evaporate because the new owner who inherits it gets to start fresh at present value.
To justify your position I want you to imagine going around to a bunch of poor people’s apartments and taking stuff out of their house to give to one rich guy. Yes someone who is “house rich” doesn’t SEEM rich but assets are fungible and in a good market remarkably liquid.