shadowrelm wrote:
the restriction is not what they can charge you, it is what local property appraisers can assess as a value for your home. state law dictates that your property can not be assesed more than 3 percent a year. in otherwords, your 100,000 dollar house can not be asessed more than 103,000 dollars the next year.
this restriction was part of the state income tax bill, out in as a safety to keep property taxes from causing people to loose their homes.
when the state property tax goes, so does this protection. when that happens, uncle tom, who has lived in his house for 50 years, and it is asesed for 200,000 dollars even though houses selling in his area are now selling for 700,000 dollars, could be reassed to 700,000 dollars for his local taxes overnight.
Um... I don't know about Florida, but here in California (and every state I've ever discussed property issues with someone about), property value is only assessed when it is purchased/sold. That assessment locks in the value at which you pay any taxes that are based off the assessed value of the home. I know for a *fact* that that's how it works in California. I also know that's how it works in Connecticut as well, since that was a central component to the Kelo v New London issue (homes owned for a long time generate less tax revenue so using imminent domain to shift them to new owners would force a re-assessment and grant the local and state governments more revenue).
While it's certainly possible that the laws are different in Florida, the law that affects the assessment is separate from the state taxing the property. One does not affect the other. The fact that state property taxes are changed to 0 does not magically remove all the other legal issues surrouding property ownership and property values.
I guess my problem is that you are assuming that if the state property taxes are removed that this will automaticaly remove the re-assessment restriction laws. But you've provided no evidence that this will happen. Normally, laws don't work that way. They aren't removing the law, they're just changing the state tax rate to zero. The existing laws should remain in place and be unaffected by the change.
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i agree a flat tax would be best, but, state taxes do not pay for local services. either the state would have to take over local services, or your flat tax would be hitting you from several sources, local, state and federal.
Again with the assumption that one change affects another. The whole point of our system is that we do things separately and differently at the local, state, and federal levels. How the state collects taxes has zero bearing on how local taxes are collected. Why do you think that changing state taxes to a flat sales tax would affect anything else?
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this bill is selling itself as a trade off for sales tax and property tax.
what people do not understand is, state property tax is only about half of your total property tax bill every year. and the repubs selling it dont seem inclined to explain that either.
Um... Then it's trading off half your property taxes then. Not sure what you're getting at here. The state can only affect the taxes that the state applies. Also, presumably local taxes will vary from city to city. So the property taxes your city applies may be totally different then the ones from the next county over. What exactly do you expect the state of Florida to do? Figure out what percentage of property taxes are state taxes for every municipality in the state and publish a chart?
They're not lying to anyone. They're not misleading anyone. The state can only legally address taxes collected by the state. Period. You seem to be insisting that they should take control of local taxes as well so as to make it easier for people who might be confused or something. That's silly.
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what they also dont seem real eager to explain is, that the working poor, the renters who cant afford to own property, will now be paying my property tax. they will have to pay 2 percent more for EVERYTHING, they reep nothing. it is just higher taxes for them.
Except that their rent may very well go down, since yearly property taxes are one of the things that they're paying for when they rent. Obviously, not a whole lot of folks are going to actually lower rent today, but the rate of rent increase will drop to account for that (supply and demand will cause it to happen). Over time, this will wash out for renters. They may even come out ahead.
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the only people who will really benifit will be people with really expensive houses. say, 500,000 and up. for the average homeowner, it will be a wash, and for the working poor, it is just a tax increase. the poor will be paying the property taxes of the rich.
No. It benefits people with more property who consume less. If I'm joe rich guy and I own a multi-miliion dollar home and I throw expensive parties and own expensive cars and go to the spa twice a month, and eat out a bunch, I'm paying 2% more on every single one of those things.
The people it really helps out is poor people who own property. You know. The people who've had a plot of land with a house on it for 3 generations, but they themselves do not have a lot of money. They have enough that if they live frugally, they can get buy. Property taxes are a killer for people in that situation. This tax change is designed to make it less likely for those people to lose their homes.
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the republican mantra. feed the rich and bury the poor.
Not all property owners are rich. I grew up living in a house that my family had owned since the 1930s. We were most definately not rich. And property taxes were difficult, especially after my grandfather died, since at that time the property changed to my mother and that required a re-assessment of the property value and significantly increased those taxes.
Certainly, there are a lot of people in NOLA who'd love to have this sort of system right now as well. And not rich people either...
You see what you want to see in this. Any change can be viewed negatively if you want to do so. Maybe you should look at all the possible situations first?