Tax cutter? yeah right
 

Fellow Texans(that means you viper ;p) we are being punched in the nose by governer perry with taxes. his education bill is being sold under the false pretence of a tax cut. the property tax cut is indeed real, but we are also facing a sales tax increase, taxes on movie tickets, and taxes on liquor. tax cutter my ass, in the end we'll be paying more taxes than the 0.5% cut in property taxes will save us.

and no you do not have to be texan to reply to this

I'll tell my boss that i want a pay cut. and by "pay cut" i mean "pay increase".

You governor just screwed over poor people. The tax has of course not been decreased, it's just been moved. The people who will see savings on their property tax are going to benefit, while people who may not own property or are of a lower income bracket will see a larger percentage of their income going toward tax. The upper-middle and upper classes will benefit from this (as will the elderly, adminntedly a good thing - you should see how the elderly are screwed in Britain on the Council Tax), as less of a percentage of their income goes to consumption items than it does toward a property tax.

This is why governments should only tax one thing, say only an income tax or only VAT, so people know exactly what they're paying. It's all sleight of hand here.

i'd actually support a sales tax increase if it meant an abolishion of all other taxes and a cap thereafter on sales tax

Take it easy dude, this is what we have had to live with in Norway for over fifty years. Over seventy percent of our gas prices are taxes.

Ah, but your norwegian taxes are actually going into, you know, services.

This is merely a re-arranging of the tax code to benefit one group over another.

on the other hand, lowering property taxes encourages home ownership, which is at about 70% now. So, a significant number of "poor" people will get help in keeping their houses. An liquor and movie tickets are far less important then owning a home, dontcha think?


actually.. im not so sure getting rid property taxes would be a BAD thing. i mean, if you wanted to be completely self sufficient, what’s the one thing stopping you from buying a chunk of land, growing your own food and building your own house? Property taxes! they are a constant expense that you HAVE to pay. Almost any other expense can be eliminated or self produced.

Like back during the Industrial revolution. Farmers couldn't turn a profit... but it was property taxes (and the need/want for other shit, of course) that made them NEED to turn a profit. If farmers didn't NEED to turn the profit, they could have lived on sustenance farming, sold some of their crops at lower prices, and they could have been safe from absolute poverty, owning nothing at all. And if farmers had been able to keep their farms, they wouldn't have flocked to the cities with huge unemployment and been ripe for exploitation by factories.

Of course, farmers would leave their farms in the long run anyway, but sustenance farming isn’t even an option if you have to come up with enough profit to pay taxes. And my analysis ignored mortgages that couldn’t be paid off... but a lot of land OWNERS lost their land due to taxes.

congratulations, you make an excellent point for why property taxes suck. but i'm already against them, you're preaching to the croud. in fact you forgot to add:

with property taxes the poor have no right to own a solid gold house even if it's bought for them. they couldn't afford the taxes on it

but you see it's only getting cut and not removed, it won't solve that problem or any of the ones you named. and its not by enough to compensate for the sales tax hike alone. a tax on movies and liquor isn't important? well sure we could live dull lives and not have any fun but really though, just because it's a fun activity and not a neccessity doesn't mean it should be taxed

This is all true. Property and Council taxes, the whole lot, are a ripoff. They screw over the lower class and the elderly. In the US, there need be no taxes on property because there currently is no land shortage (this is obviously different in Britain, where we have to be much more careful about building and filling up the whole island - we don't need the entire UK to have rents like London). About the only time a person should be 'taxed' on their own property is in the form of a fine if they do something really stupid like use it to break laws or allow gross environmental damages.

I've recently become a convert to the idea of FAIR tax, http://www.fairtax.org as it does allow the lower class to go near tax-free because they won't be consuming in the same way those with more money will. This combined with the more strange idea of nationalising casino gambling should be able to pay for any destructive wars waged in Mr. Bush's possible second term, and might even have $3.50 left over for services!

I'm actually pretty suprised. i figured someone would step up to defend property taxes.