State collapse is inevitable when a society’s leaders are insulated from the negative consequences of their bad decisions.
Mike Shelby
The government at ALL levels is totally addicted to “property tax” revenue. Thus they will NEVER give it up. Not going to happen. Might as well expect them to relinquish “income taxes”…that’s just as likely.
Dan is right, but we would be wise to target the root of this problem.
The government does not OWN anything. They don’t own the land they tax you for. They don’t own the house you built on it, but they tax you for it. They don’t own the water that falls from the sky, nor the land it falls on, but you have to pay if you want to use it, fish in it, boat in it. Wanna go for a hike in the wilderness? Government doesn’t own it, but you’ll have to pay them a fee and follow their rules.
We The People own the government, it was instituted to serve us, our needs, and today that relationship is entirely inverted. That is the root of the problem. Addressing one tree in the forest only takes care of that tree. Instead of targetting property taxes as a single issue, we should be addressing the greater notion we owe the government a God Damned thing. THAT is why we have the problems we have today. People fight the issue instead of the problem, then wonder why we lost the war…
Aside from the true facts noted in the above comments:
The real estate industry has an effective model for arriving at the market value of a property of any common type. It is called a comparative market analysis, and uses the sale price of recently sold comparable properties to calculate a fair market value for a given property within any common property type. EX: residential, commercial, agricultural, etc.
Anyone who has had an appraisal or a market price proposal from an appraiser or Realtor, respectively, knows how these work.
This provides a means to level the playing field between property owners, but does nothing about the fact that your local gov’t tax official/assessor may use another, more opaque method entirely, or simply deny the request for a valuation hearing.
Anyone can hire an appraiser or ask their Realtor for a fair market valuation, and it may or may not have standing with the tax man.
Taxes always come from the business end of a gun, which is the problem. It’s the 3-box problem…
In theory, but that is not how the tax assessment works. My property was assessed at $150,000 more than what I had just paid for construction. I appealed and had to face the board of over 10 people. I was told the reasoning that you gave for the valuation. I replied that there is no comparable property type in the area for an evaluation. They could not argue that so they asked the man on the board how he came to the value. He replied that he listed it as office commercial with a complete interior office buildout. In other words, he did not even go into the building if he even came out to the building. I explained the interior of the community center and they looked to one man on the board who had all of the power. He said they would lower the valuation by $50,000. It was clear that I was nothing more than a peasant in their eyes with no recourse to get a fair tax valuation. This is Cherokee County, NC.
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