I am all fired up after getting my new real estate tax assessment from the city of Philadelphia. They want $1400 more a year...on top of the 4.5% wage tax they already hit my wife and I up for. I calculated that at that current rate in combined property and wage taxes, over the next thirty years the city stands to collect over $500,000 in taxes from us. That's just the city of Philadelphia, I won't even get into what the state and Uncle Sam are lining up to take from us! The press has been all over the poor greedy idiots that had all of their 401(k)'s invested in their enron and worldcom company stocks(Hello, asset allocation!?) who now have no retirement savings. It's a wonder that anyone can ever retire given what the government bureaucracies suck from us. How come you never see that reported in the press? The Mayor of my fair city is as much a crook as Lay, Fastow, Skilling, Ebbers, Sullivan, et al.
And to think, people call liberals whiny! Geez... Brian, I just got back from Philly where I helped my parents move from their old East Falls home to a lovely 3-bedroom condo in a great building in Center City. The price they paid for this condo, while offensive to their Depression-era sensibilities, would not have bought them a refrigerator box to sleep in here in Seattle - to say nothing of LA, SF, NYC or most other major housing markets in the country. Real estate in Philly is dirt cheap - has been for a while, and if it's starting to inch up in recent years, it's still pretty far behind the national average. If your taxes are going up, it's because they were artificially low for a long time, and now that Philly is livable again, you're being asked to pay your fair share. Be a man and suck it up.
Whether the real estate tax is a good tax per se is a different discussion. Cities that rely too heavily on the real estate tax for important revenues are in a sense gambling that rising values of properties can be leveraged for additional revenue to improve city services, thereby increasing property values and revenues, etc. But it works the other way too, especially if the incomes of homeowners are not rising as fast as the assessed value of their properties, as happened in the 70s and 80s. And since the real estate tax pays for schools in Philly, declining livability and white flight led inevitably to a downward spiral of falling housing prices and rotten schools. So if you're suggesting that there's a better way to pay for needed services than the real estate tax, I might agree with you, but I suspect this is part of your deeper-rooted pathological hatred of all taxes for any reason.
In that case, I wish there was a box that you anti-tax yahoos could check to reduce your payments by a certain percentage, which would then decrease the services you receive by the same amount. How about instead of making you pay the wage tax, we put a toll-booth at the end of your street, so you can pay a "user fee" every time you drive in and out. Or put a big tip jar in the front of every police and fire station - pay 'em what you think they're worth. Hell, privatize the lot of them - let a well-run corporation like your local cable company or HMO manage the DCLU or the health department. That really seems to be solving the school situation in Philly - plus, now kids can use their lunch money to buy a few shares of Edison and still be able to afford a Tastykake for dessert!
