we need to abolish the method of setting property taxes by “progressive” tax methods, in which you pay more for getting the same city services as everyone else, just because your property has a “higher assessed value”, and whether higher or lower your taxes go up just because the assessors determine a new “assessed value” just because the POTENTIAL value of the house has gone up, if you were to sell it, acording to new “market values” - but neither of those conditions, both of which make your taxes higher, provides MORE service/services to you for the higher tax.
does the more “expensive” household in town get “better” or more police protection, better roads in front f their house, better administration of their business with the city administration, better sewers and water, etc.? No. So why should they be paying more? Because it is easier to squeeze more out of “most” of the local people if “most” of them will think in class envy and class warfare terms, and assume that “at least that guy over there with the biger house” is going to have to pay more than they will
it - property taxes - do not have to be done that way, and not doing them that way would help reign in local spending excesses, because everyone would participate EQUALLY, not proportionately to their “worth”, in any tax increases, with the totals of the cost of each kind of local city service translated into a fixed cost per household.
“progressive” taxes are not about being “fair”, they are all about making it seem easier to extract more, and getting away with through promotion of class-envy
In our city, I live in a new subdivision where a good part of the cost of the property was the state-of-the-art, Army Corps of Engineers approved sewage and drainage systems (including the wetlands). Then, the EPA clamped down on the entire city because of it’s decrepit sewer systems in the older neighborhoods. Solution? They tacked the cost of ripping the old stuff up onto the sewer bill for everyone. It takes a village, you know...