For the past eight years, regularly and magically, the county auditor has waved his magic wand, and suddenly my house was worth more! (On paper, anyway.) A house we bought for $43,000 twenty years ago topped out at $110,000. Now, all this means to me is I have the pleasure of paying nearly 3 times the property taxes to my local government for little more than good garbage pickup. If I don't plan on selling my house (and trading up to even higher taxes for a level of consumption I don't want to adopt) this supposed value, which I could never actually get for my house, means nothing to me.
Over this time, I have watched Bright Young People speculate and make a killing in realty. I have watched Greedy Wastrels Of All Ages rush in to buy sub-rate homes they couldn't afford from banks drunk with profits who should have known better than to sell homes to these people. I have watched the Democrats who dismissed Bush's perfectly sensible tax cuts as "Voodoo Economics II" pat themselves on the back for "helping the poor man own a home he couldn't afford otherwise." And I have watched ENDLESS federal and local feel-good giveaway programs funded with the ever increasing tax dollars generated by artificially low interest rates pandering to people who never thought far enough ahead to actually ponder what "variable rate" really means.
After this tsunami of spending, now my local government is pulling its collective hair out over the giveaway programs they can no longer fund...and surprise! They are insisting that not only won't my property taxes be going down because my home is worth less, they are going to need me to pass a whole BUNCH of new taxes to pay for the giveaway programs they enacted without asking me in the first place!
If anyone can find Reagan's GOP, the ones who thought we should not only cut taxes, but send nonproductive government paper pushers home permanently, please let me know!
Amen, brother.
This is the real story of how sad the whole Greenspan Bernanke real estate bubble is. What it amounts to is encouraging local governments to live beyond their means, supplying less and less for more and more costs.
Let me guess that your income did not increase by a factor of anyting like the amount of actual inflation that you are seeing.