City of Chicago tax hikes
Most qualify for a reverse-mortgage. This pays out the equity of
the house over time, creating an ever-growing mortgage (except
that the evaluation goes up by definition in an improving
neighborhood.) The only persons this effects are the eventual
inheritors of the property. How much it affects them is related
to how much longer their parents live and how much the evaluation
goes up during the term of the reverse-mortage. (Since this is
considered a loan, there are no capital gains until an actual
sale after the dead of the the parents, IIRC).
Any mortgage bankers around that can comment?
His taxes paid for the sewer that's carrying Johnny-come-lately's
family's waste to the treatment plant. He wasn't even here when
the sewer was built. And he drives - if at all - about one tenth
the miles that Johnny and the three other drivers in his family do.
Johnny and family are using his sewer, and they're driving on
streets that are maintained by everybody's property taxes. And you
would tax them equally if they live on the same size lot, all the while
saying that there could be no morefair tax - your words, my
emphasis - than a tax on land value. I would really like to know what
definition of fair this is...
Whatever, it is axiomatically more fair to have the Johnnies and their
families pay a market value for their benefits, and to have the
Grannies similarly pay for what they use. If there are benefits
derived from tax expenditures, and those benefits are not distributed
in the same ratio as residential lot size, there is by definition
unfairness. This is the essence of the inequity of ad valorem taxation
of real property.