[FUBAR-BDHR]

I'm talking about people that own their home outright.  People that own money to the bank on their property normally have to pay the taxes to the bank who then pays the money to the county who distributes it back to the local government.  The older people or disabled that worked all their lived to own their home are now have the choice of paying their taxes or buying food/medicine.  A levy (and almost the entire property tax base is levy money of some kind) can mean that difference. 

[Nuke]

that would make sense, except you have to pay for garbage, sewage, water, gas, electricity, etc on a monthly basis on top of your property tax. those bills should cover their respective infrastructure. i can understand police fire and local road systems (shouldn't car taxes cover those), but you still have to pay property taxes in areas where you dont have anything. people i know in the alaskan bush get taxed big time, with no infrastructure at all for those taxes to pay for. i kinda think you should get what you pay for. if theres anything i dont like about the tax system, its the 50 million different kinds of taxes you end up paying. i very much doubt anyone can list all the taxes you could end up paying in america, theres that many of them. still the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. this is why i think the world needs to be nuked (of course then everyone would need to pay nuke tax).

The bills you pay are for service, not for infrastructure.  Look at it this way - do you think people prefer having lower utilities bills and property taxes that pay for the utilities infrastructure over paying much larger individual utility bills every month?

Property taxes only cover infrastructure in the municipality OR county OR district that you reside in.  So people who own property are essentially paying for upkeep on the systems that allow them to live there - be it the roads, the water lines, the sewer lines, the fire service, the police service (which, in areas where there is no municipal police, will pay for contracts with State/outside police).

Ultimately, property taxes are a way for municipalities to cover their costs.  As municipalities already function with enormous assistance from higher levels of government, I think a direct method of income collection is in their best interest.  I'd love to see all taxes reduced to value-added tax schemes because it is directly applied based on consumption (as opposed to income taxes, that hit you regardless of your consumption levels), but property taxes are a necessary evil.  On the plus side, they are proportional - the higher the assessed value of your property, the higher the taxes - so the premise is that each household pays according to their ability to do so (afford a more expensive home, pay more property taxes).  That can be a little problematic when the geniuses in the financial sector let people buy homes well beyond their financial reach, though *cough cough*.

im not really against taxes, i just think they need to be proportional to the services you receive from your government.

[S-99]

I see no problem. In fact I prefer that the street lights work, the roads don't look like total crap, etc. On a family trip we crossed state lines from our home into another state with lesser tax revenue, and you could literally see a demarcation along the state line because of how crappy the highway was on the other side.

Well, that's what petroleum taxes i thought were supposed to go for that maintaining road stuff. And i'm glad i only get my trash picked up only if i request a dumpster from the local sanitation company. It's cheaper to take out my own trash.

Property taxes existed since before the american revolution and have existed throughout its history, how is the country becoming more communist?

Hardy har har har. The time you speak of was when a british government was in place. I just mean property taxes in america after the revolution.

It's rather the need to own a house that's the problem I think.

In this case it's really not. But, at the same time sort of is. If you paid for the property in full, and then missed a tax payment on the land for a couple of months and you get booted off of it. Well then surely you just got booted out of your house on the land too.

Now i figured some people would just brag how good taxes are. Taxes are great to a point, but thx for missing the concept. This topic is not about what the taxes go for, it's what land taxes actually represent in a country where we have the right to own land. But i'll address the issue again.
THE LAND YOU PAID FOR IN FULL THAT YOU PAY TAXES ON IS NOT OWNED BY YOU. WHAT'S THE POINT ON PURCHASING LAND THAT YOU NEED TO PAY RENT ON AFTERWARDS TO KEEP IT?

This is what i mean by my whole communistic comment for america since in communistic government rule people don't get the right to own land. In this, paying taxes on land you own is anti-american. This would be like how suppressing free speech is anti-american.

[Ghostavo]

Property taxes existed since before the american revolution and have existed throughout its history, how is the country becoming more communist?

Hardy har har har. The time you speak of was when a british government was in place. I just mean property taxes in america after the revolution.

So I assume you want to ignore the entire history of the US then?

[NGTM-1R]

I warned you all on the first page, but nooooo

[Nuclear1]

Now i figured some people would just brag how good taxes are. Taxes are great to a point, but thx for missing the concept. This topic is not about what the taxes go for, it's what land taxes actually represent in a country where we have the right to own land. But i'll address the issue again.
THE LAND YOU PAID FOR IN FULL THAT YOU PAY TAXES ON IS NOT OWNED BY YOU. WHAT'S THE POINT ON PURCHASING LAND THAT YOU NEED TO PAY RENT ON AFTERWARDS TO KEEP IT?

This is what i mean by my whole communistic comment for america since in communistic government rule people don't get the right to own land. In this, paying taxes on land you own is anti-american. This would be like how suppressing free speech is anti-american.

Dude, paying taxes on something doesn't mean you forfeit your right to own it.

You want to own a physical part of a community? Well, then you can pay the tax that helps fund that community.

It's not communism, it's being part of a community.  Or has selfishness really gone THAT far?

Again, for God's sake, please lrn2communist.  Or at least read a book on it. You're getting it all wrong.  You're Red Scaring. 

[MP-Ryan]

I'm talking about people that own their home outright.  People that own money to the bank on their property normally have to pay the taxes to the bank who then pays the money to the county who distributes it back to the local government.  The older people or disabled that worked all their lived to own their home are now have the choice of paying their taxes or buying food/medicine.  A levy (and almost the entire property tax base is levy money of some kind) can mean that difference. 

You're still dealing with individual circumstances, though.  Eliminating certain portions of property taxes is not going to get rid of the basic problem:  that some people's incomes remain fixed while the cost of living goes up.  The fix for that isn't rebuilding the tax system - it's pension reform.  If your income never goes up and you have insufficient savings to cover the difference, then soon or later your costs are going to exceed income.  Increases in property taxes may contribute to the problem, but so are increases in everything else.  And inflation, unfortunately, is a fact of the capitalist economic system.

I feel for people facing these kinds of problems, but at the the end of the day the problem is systemic.  If there are that many facing that sort of dilemma in your area, then it sounds like it's time to turf the standing municipal/county council and elect a set of new representatives that get what their constituents are going through.

[Bobboau]

solution: don't live in a city.

granted this is only a partial solution as there are still county based property taxes, but if you do not own land in an incorporated area then it's an order of magnitude lower.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Yea all the jobs went overseas because of corporate greed.  There is nothing left here.  Almost all the good jobs are gone.  Most of the small businesses are gone.  All the good property that could house business is either brownfield or owned be people who left and guess what don't pay their taxes so there are liens on it and it can't be sold.  New businesses won't move in because of taxes and lack of infrastructure that actually exists (fiber right to the south end of town) but no one can afford.  Replacing local government won't fix any of that and since it's all a good old boys club of relatives good luck trying.  

[StarSlayer]

And you just hit my big beef with property taxes.  Schools.  I choose not to have kids so why should I have to pay for schools while a majority of the people that have kids in the school district where I live don't pay a penny in property tax because they are in low income housing?

I don't think anyone should have the right to vote on property taxes unless they pay them or pay rent to someone that does. 

Because in the long run it's extremely beneficial to you that society produces educated young people who can go on to become productive members of society and pay taxes.  Public education is probably one of the single most important things to have happened to society and the development of technology and science.  I'd wager good money the massive development humanity has made in the past few centuries compared to the rest of human history has a lot to do with the fact that the portion of the population that receives a basic education is much higher due to public schools.  On the flip side the implications towards society if it's education system was suddenly only funded by those who currently have children eligible for education and can afford it are not particularly good.  I'll assume the repercussion should be fairly self evident, and reiterate that even if you don't have children it is within your self interest that you pay for public education.  Unless of course you would much rather have an ever increasing pool of illiterate, uneducated people that you need to support for their entire lives instead.

[MP-Ryan]

So I assume you want to ignore the entire history of the US then?

Forget the US, property taxes have existed as long has there has been governance, in one form or another.  What do people think tithes were?

Now i figured some people would just brag how good taxes are. Taxes are great to a point, but thx for missing the concept. This topic is not about what the taxes go for, it's what land taxes actually represent in a country where we have the right to own land. But i'll address the issue again.
THE LAND YOU PAID FOR IN FULL THAT YOU PAY TAXES ON IS NOT OWNED BY YOU. WHAT'S THE POINT ON PURCHASING LAND THAT YOU NEED TO PAY RENT ON AFTERWARDS TO KEEP IT?

This is what i mean by my whole communistic comment for america since in communistic government rule people don't get the right to own land. In this, paying taxes on land you own is anti-american. This would be like how suppressing free speech is anti-american.

That's it, it's time you had a history lesson.

The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, establishing in part the principles upon which the United States of America was founded.  No mention was made as to the economic system it was to adopt.  Adam Smith published "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" also in 1776, arguing in favor of free market economic systems.  By and large, Smith's principles were already at work in the economic systems of the larger 'Western' world.  In essence, he described the evolution of the free-market capitalist system and its logical points of expansion.

Karl Marx didn't publish "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" until 1848, and only after he wrote The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, and Wage-Labour and Capital.  It was followed by Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and the various volumes of Das Kapital.  I say this only to illustrate the following point:  The Communist Manifesto, as it is known, was not his first, last, or most important work - AND, his descriptions of Communism cannot be understood without reading all of those works.

Here's the kicker:  Communism, as Marx saw it, was about the elimination of the inherent gap between the lower class (workers) and the upper classes (bourgeois).  He predicted that Germany or Britain would be the first countries to overthrow the inherent inequalities of the capitalist system, as it was then known, and produce a fairer society in which people returned to a connection with the things they produced (there is an extremely important connection between production and the quality of a person's life which is integral to Marx, but which I don't have the time or space to delve into here).

Any of this sound familiar?  Equal and fair society?  Elimination of exploitation of one class of people by another?  Elimination of a class-based social system?  Yeah, those would be the principles on which the United States not only strove towards but actually operated.

Marx proposed a Communist system because he didn't predict the evolution of the middle class, which gained the majority of the power in democracies like the United States and Britain shortly before the beginning of the First World War.  Communism, as Marx saw it, could only work in an advance industrial economy like Britain or Germany (at the time).  The evolution of the United States from a minor state to a global power and the evolution of the middle class within it offered a less-jarring change of social system than a complete upheaval and actually progressed significantly toward the system which Marx proposed.  Russia botched that.  Russia was a backward, agrarian country that was made infinitely worse by the "Communist" revolution that took place there.  In point of fact, the revolution was Communist in name only - the Soviet Union bore virtually no resemblance to the Communism that Marx defined.

So, to spell it out:  the United States was actually founded and operates on the same principles that are encompassed by Marxist Communist ideology.  Communism isn't about no property rights or wealth redistribution or any of that crap that comes to mind in the average person's head when they hear the world - Communism is about an equal and fair society, things the United States purports to strive towards (though there have been some serious setbacks on the equality/fairness side of things in the last 30 years).

In short:
1.  Stop saying that property taxes = no land ownership = Communist; simply not true.
2.  Stop saying Communist = anti-American, because that's also patently false.

You're relying on revisionist Cold War-era ideological nonsense, and it's making you look like even more of a fool than usual.

[SpardaSon21]

FUBAR, blame the general business environment, not anything specific to your town.  If I were a business owner who wasn't fortunate to be politically connected, right now I would be battening down the hatches and trying not to be crushed by the unknown-yet-becoming-unshrouded costs of Obamacare, and the incoming tax increases that will take effect at the end of the year and disproportionally affect small business owners, who tend to earn 250k+ gross income yet piss a lot of that money away on business expenses.

[Nuclear1]

Everything MP-Ryan said.

Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

[Kosh]

In this case it's really not. But, at the same time sort of is. If you paid for the property in full, and then missed a tax payment on the land for a couple of months and you get booted off of it. Well then surely you just got booted out of your house on the land too.

Now i figured some people would just brag how good taxes are. Taxes are great to a point, but thx for missing the concept. This topic is not about what the taxes go for, it's what land taxes actually represent in a country where we have the right to own land. But i'll address the issue again.
THE LAND YOU PAID FOR IN FULL THAT YOU PAY TAXES ON IS NOT OWNED BY YOU. WHAT'S THE POINT ON PURCHASING LAND THAT YOU NEED TO PAY RENT ON AFTERWARDS TO KEEP IT?

This is what i mean by my whole communistic comment for america since in communistic government rule people don't get the right to own land. In this, paying taxes on land you own is anti-american. This would be like how suppressing free speech is anti-american.

Communist countries dont have property taxes.


And really, property taxes do reflect services we get from the government. Public schools, as ineffectual as they are, are far better than the alternative which is no schooling at all except for the wealthy. Police and fire services are also usually paid for by property taxes, infrastructure development also is paid for by property taxes. Nothing's free.

[S-99]

My whole thought process here is that after you purchased land, that if you don't pay the taxes on it, then it can be taken away. Who really owned it then? In this case it would be the government that owns it since they can take it away if you don't pay the rent/taxes on it. In that case what was the purpose of buying said land in the first place since it's on a permanent lease system?

This isn't about how taxing things can be good based on what the taxes are used for.

[iamzack]

What's the point of purchasing your own private property if you can't even commit crimes on it?

[Solatar]

What's the point of purchasing your own private property if you can't even commit crimes on it?

In the American South I can still shoot you for trespassing. 

[Klaustrophobia]

you might not get tossed in jail, but you can get raped in civil court.

[Kosh]

My whole thought process here is that after you purchased land, that if you don't pay the taxes on it, then it can be taken away. Who really owned it then? In this case it would be the government that owns it since they can take it away if you don't pay the rent/taxes on it. In that case what was the purpose of buying said land in the first place since it's on a permanent lease system?

This isn't about how taxing things can be good based on what the taxes are used for.

So how do you suggest the states pay for the various services? People who live in a certain area generally send their kids to that area's school, use the police/fire departments when needed, etc, etc. So really, if people in those areas are going to use services, which aren't free, why shouldn't they pay for it?

[Bobboau]

it seems as though however if you are willing to do without any of these services that you should be able to find somewhere that you can avoid paying for them.