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How Our Property Tax System Robs the Poor to Pay the Wealthy
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View Reddit by TheKoolAidMan6 – View Source
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How Our Property Tax System Robs the Poor to Pay the Wealthy
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View Reddit by TheKoolAidMan6 – View Source
You want to know why wealthy people pay less per square foot in property taxes? It’s because we generally fight them – I pay a lower dollar per sqft in property taxes than my relatives in the same county do.
The difference: I hire a law firm when my home is reassessed to fight the assessment – and it nearly always results in my annual tax bill being thousands less than it otherwise would have been.
Many don’t go this route, because there is an immediate cost associated – a percentage that they end up saving you. The firm I typically go with, for instance, charges 50% of what they’ve saved.
A small price to pay – I would rather pay $1500 now than $3000 over the course of the year, or $6000 over the next couple years. But even with a far lower tax increase – the majority of the country is living with little to no disposable income, they cannot afford to drop $600 dollars to save themselves $1200 over the course of a year… so they just end up sucking it up and paying the $100/month extra.
The American dream is the search for low cost labor. Not building generational wealth, but ensuring wealth through exploitation of the workers over generations.
They are taking away the wrong message from this, property taxes shouldnt be used to pay for the bulk of cities budgets. It should transition back to commerce or we will continue our slide into economic crisis. Progressives are fucking morons.
No mention of how towns should be lowering their taxes, if the property values have skyrocketed, but their cost basis hasn’t gone up nearly as much?
robin poor
So at 5:40, they take a *single* home’s sale price and compare it to its evaluated price, which is not good statistics – the probability that a single home is so close to the norm for the group is low enough that it shouldn’t be used to definitively draw conclusions about the group, which also explains the ‘jagged’ behavior of the buckets.
Also in this graph, it shows a different between 75% and 82% of the homes’ values. This is really really close, and their choice of axes is easy to misinterpret.
Next, just the sale price is not enough. I’m not sure if they only used 2nd hand sales or not, but if they didn’t and they looked at ‘new home’ prices, that will absolutely yield a difference in fair market value vs what was paid (e.g., imagine you spend $800k building your dream home; it’s pink, with rainbow counter tops, and slides going from every upper floor. It was $800k, but that’s only what you paid, not what you’d get on the market). A contrived example, but the point is there are other factors that need to go into such comparisons, including the time between re-evaluations/sales, and the fact that higher value homes may be harder to derive market value because there’s simply less data available to build some sort of prediction model.
At 9:02, the racial disparity doesn’t account for the differing values of the homes. If they want to suggest there is disparate treatment based on race, they need to control for the values of the homes, rather than just group them by race and show the result. If $60k homes in black communities are evaluated at $55k, and $60k homes in white communities at $45k, that shows an issue. But just looking at macro level data without controlling for the price is misleading.
It’s reasonable to make a case for what they’re saying here to some degree, but this video seems to use rather sleezy methods to make their points.
Simple solution…AI unbiased Assessors. Predicting housing prices is the Hello World project in AI. This would be simple to fix.
Edit – https://www.americancityandcounty.com/2023/02/23/can-artificial-intelligence-finally-provide-a-fair-and-efficient-appraisal-process/
https://researchexchange.iaao.org/jptaa/vol18/iss2/9/
Balanced as all thing should be.
>Our
USA?
Obligatory links to Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns (source of this vid). If you liked this you can find more there:
https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes?si=qvDWIwDGe9R7ktYU
https://youtube.com/@strongtowns?si=wQOH2z2oZ-ZUDsyR
Big OFN.