States try to ease property-tax rise
A man’s home is his castle, but he could see himself taxed right out of that.
“Almost every state is looking at some form of property-tax cap,” says Myron Orfield, an expert on property taxes and a law professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “It’s a ‘perfect storm’ for property taxes: There are rapidly increasing home values while states are not keeping up with their contributions to school districts.”
The talk of a real estate bubble is causing additional angst because many homeowners are afraid that their taxes may be based on a market value that no longer exists. “If northern Virginia is any guide, when it does burst, no local government is going to trim spending. They didn’t when the value of their housing stock dipped in late 1989 and 1990,” says William Ahern, a spokesman for the Tax Foundation in Washington.
Some are particularly concerned about the impact of rising home values on the elderly and those living on fixed incomes.
The local Social Services is on strike to get more of what they want…but why can’t government emplyees do some of the personal belt tightening that the rest of us do? Like this “example, Al Aitken, founder of VOTORS (Virginians Over-Taxed on Residences), estimates his tax burden has increased by 45 percent, at the same time he has taken a 40 percent pay and benefits cut as a pilot at American Airlines.
“I needed to look at my personal areas and find areas to cut back,” he says. “So I have cut back on dry-cleaning my uniforms, which is costing my local merchant $1,000 a year in business.”
they’ve been used to the coffers of government providing supply, with repeated levies until they get what they want.
But at some point, someone actually has to pay, and at the expense of the elderly losing their homes, I think someone should say “Stop”.
That someone is us.
We’ve put up with the wheeling and dealing in the education sector for too long, as well. Highly paid administrators in their beautiful buildings, while the soldiering teacher gets peanuts in comparison. The student eats what’s left over from all that…and if parents want better schools? No real attempt at more efficient allocation of funds, just more demand for more money.
As it is, my husband and I will work til we die, we would like our home safeguarded from greedy tax mongerers. Yes, that is what I called them.
This isn’t a simple or easy problem. None of them are when the stakes are high all around.
How true! It’s odd that the ones responsible for the education of our children are expected to get by on so little…it’s a backwards system in so many ways.
…and we aren’t even looking at the day care issue!
I know that we need to pay premium for brain power, but really, is management qualifying as the thinkers and innovators of our day? Many administrators are simply management and not very effectual management at that.
Stop siphoning off the little wealth gain of the common person for the wallets of those safely ensconced in their bureaucratic enclaves.
Merit pay, certainly. But who is doing the real work of education? It is the teacher in the classroom with little support and almost no respect.
The fiasco of the Mifflin school situation of this last spring showed some apathetic and ineffectual examples of administrators. No, they not all that way, but the percentages of where the money goes is skewed, and you can’t keep digging into peoples property to pay for it. Not when it boots the elderly out of their homes.