This isn't really political, but it could get that way in the responses. Anyway, the fact that people work 25+ years to pay off their house but still have to pay a yearly tax means that we never truly own our own house. It sounds like housing should be a basic human right once you paid it off. Property tax almost sounds like you're paying the government for the privilege of using their land.
shareProperty tax is just another way to fuck us over!
shareAll states collect property taxes. It's part of the social contract. If you want to oppose it, talk to your local representative. Or you could go off the grid and join the homeless or find a nice cult that will protect you from the evil "man." (Of course they'll want all your money first.)
shareSocial contract? This is typical of the logic of people who perpetuate the corrupt establishment. Usually losers who own nothing in the first place.
shareYou act like you've never heard of the term before. The "logic" of the social contract has several hundred years of successful application. To start your education, read a little J. J. Rousseau and John Locke. Get back to me when you can talk without giving me this uncomfortable elitist feeling.
shareI can't join the homeless. It's illegal to set up shop anywhere without a permit. Although there are certain roads where you pay a toll, as car owners, we don't pay a street tax just for using all the roads. I don't see how this is different.
share"we don't pay a street tax just for using all the roads"
Sure you do, it's called the gas tax...
What is this "social contract" that I apparently signed?
shareOf course it is.
shareDon't purchase real estate. Then you won't pay real estate taxes.
shareWhat BeaSouth said. But also, I like having the assurance of not having to worry about paying rent for the rest of my life. Once my house is paid off, that should be it. You can cut off my electricity if I don't pay my bills, my gas, my water, the whole shebang, but I shouldn't lose my house when I own it.
shareSo you're not going to pay your taxes once you pay off your lender? And you say you don't want to lose your house? Help me square this circle.
shareDo you pay a driveway yearly fee to park your car in front of your house? That's how I feel about having to pay a tax on a house I own. Paying car insurance is one thing, but it would be like paying a possession fee.
shareNot really. I see it as an additional convenience fee to have my electric, gas, water, and shitters continuously hooked to the town grid...
shareDont you pay for all those things separately already? Unfortunately I live in the city for now and not only has my landlord passed on property tax to my rent x50, I'm still paying for all my utilities on top of it.
shareYes and no.
I pay the service companies a fee for their services yes. But, the physical connections from the grid to everyone's homes do require maintenance, and workers to do the maintaining...so their salaries have to come from somewhere, do they not?
A blown up transformer on the pole doesn't replace itself. A broken sewer pipe doesn't dig itself out of the ground. Trash doesn't magically fly away to the dump...
Well well, I'm surprised to hear such an enlightened, one might almost say, peri-Socialist, declaration from one whose effusions on here I have frequently found to be soaked in the lowest kind of right-wing cant! Bravo!
shareThose are some brash words from a poster that often gets the vapors over the "mean words" of other posters, who often whines about blocking views he can't abide.
shareWhy would you be surprised? This has nothing to do with politics....neither "right wing" nor "left wing".
There's a big difference between men building and maintaining basic, 1st world society...and over-inflated, never-ending big government expansion.
Kindly always acknowledge the difference between the two.
blah blah right-wing blah blah
That's bullshit. I pay sewer line insurance In case it busts and has to be dug up. Fuck property tax.
Signed, million man.
That made me laugh. But isn't that all paid for with our electric, gas and water bill anyway? They provided the service and I pay for that service every month when then the dreaded monthly bill comes to harass me.
shareYou mean the property you paid for with your taxed income, that your employer is taxed on top of, by presumably driving to work in the car you paid tax to purchase, that runs on fuel that is taxed?
tl;dr: Article and section citation needed.
All you tax-haters--would you be happy with private corporations running everything, meaning no public safety officers, fire dept., schools, infrastructure, with the most profitable schools determining curriculum and student body makeup? How does the community act together, because you know it is true that "it takes a village."
shareThere is such a thing as being over-taxed. At what point does it become preposterous and detrimental to tax every single thing? I dont think anyone is saying zero taxes on everything.
shareIn my opinion we are far from being over-taxed. Why do all the higher-taxed Europeans always score better than us on those measures of "life happiness?" I'm sure that it has much to do with free health care and other generous public programs that benefit the general populace and not just the populist generals.
shareThey did, until they decided to flood their countries with unhappiness in the form of ethnic replacement.
shareAre you retarded?
shareI don't hate tax, just property tax on a house that I already own.
shareIt just doesn't end! Here in Toronto, the mayor is considering a rain tax. I'm not joking. She's claiming some nonsense like when the rain falls into the gutters, it lands on the side of our houses causing damage. I don't think it'll pass, but the fact thar she's considering it is stupid in itself.
shareWatching matters in Toronto from just over the border is depressing. The beautiful, orderly city that I knew and visited as a child is long gone and is never coming back. Who asked for that?
shareExcessive population messed it up. The average cost to buy a home in Toronto and all the surrounding cities is just over $1M. I'm not sure why our politicians keep bringing in immigrants when we don't have the infrastructure and means to do it. But it's not just immigrants, it's other people in Canada moving to Toronto because it's the biggest city.
shareWithout the immigrants, the problem doesn't exist. The number of Han and Pajeet in the GTA is staggering. Markham, Mississauga, and other areas might as well be foreign countries. I was at a work-related sister facility in Mississauga over a decade ago and the blue-collar guys that worked there, who were making a decent, middle-class wage, were mostly living in St. Catharines because that's where they could afford to buy a house. Thus, they had to subject themselves to a tedious 1+ hour commute on the QEW every day. One hour if they got lucky. It's only become exponentially worse since then.
shareI don't want this to get political, but Trudeau made a speech last year saying he had concerns about the lack of affordable housing, so he pledged to build 30,000 new homes. Great. However, in that same speech, he said that he wanted to bring in 1.5 million immigrants within the next 3 years. Doesn't he realize that he just tried to fix the problem and then took two steps back in the same speech?
I don't even recognize the city anymore. The amount of building they have added in the last 15 years is insane. It actually ruined our skyline.
It really is crazy the number of 15-30 story condos that now fan out from Oakville to Scarborough, north from the lake at ever-increasing distances. It's exactly what's happening in every decent-sized East Asian city. Tear down the old housing stock and build upwards with contractor grade, disposable high rises.
A couple years ago I was on the 401 at dinner time on a Sunday. It was December so it was already dark, and what was easily apparent from the head and tail lights on the cars was that as far as the eye could see the highway was completely full. That's a 16 lane highway! On a Sunday evening! Why on earth does Trudeau or Elaine Chao want to add a single person to that mess?
I grew up a few minutes from here. Just look at the difference 15 years makes from the exact same angle.
2009:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.6408042,-79.4014117,3a,75y,88.86h,89.26t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sc3_K9F1gJk7y-QWkQy_swA!2e0!5s20090701T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0.740254812561389%26panoid%3Dc3_K9F1gJk7y-QWkQy_swA%26yaw%3D88.85502150921116!7i13312!8i6656?coh=205410&entry=ttu
2023:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.6407802,-79.401484,3a,75y,88.86h,89.26t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sM2N4IAAuYDw430dCyuphrg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D0.740254812561389%26panoid%3DM2N4IAAuYDw430dCyuphrg%26yaw%3D88.85502150921116!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu
It's honestly depressing to me.
The one thing that drives me batty about all the new condos in the GTA is the way the architects all try to put some "quirky" spin on the exterior. They have offset cubes, or a twisty shape, or some other geometric anomaly. Because everything has to express its own personality, just the same way everyone today rebels by getting a tattoo, a piercing, and dying their hair. "See, they're all unique in their uniformity!" It makes the cityscape look like the land of misfit toys. At least in Asia they build them with a fairly conservative exterior, so they won't look dated quite so quickly.
shareI started a post about this in the general discussion months ago. And what makes it worse is that many big cities around the world do it and they're no way to tell which city looks like which anymore.
shareYes, yes I do. There shouldn't be a tax to merely own something, when that something can be taken away if you don't.
shareYou idiot, the tax is for providing all the services needed to bring said "thing" to market. Have you never heard of the expression "There's no such thing as a free lunch?" You sound barbaric, if you don't mind me saying so.
shareThere's no need to be so angry.
shareNo shit, Sherlock. I know what property tax is and what it pays for. My issue is twofold:
A) The fact that your home that you bought and paid for can be seized by the government. In some states, you can be a few months delinquent on the tax on a million dollar property that is completely paid off and the government can auction off your property over a $2000 tax bill.
B) That it is based on the value of your property, which has not a fucking thing to do with your usage of said "services".
So throttle back on the condescension and government-apologist bullshit.
Especially something as basic as a roof over your head. This shouldn't even be something a person has to worry about..and the funny thing is that if you can't afford your property tax and you end up on the street, the government doesn't like you living on their street. Oddly enough, they don't tax the homeless for living on the street.
shareExactly!
shareI'm not averse to the basic notion of a property tax. We're going to have a government one way or the other, and that government will need a source of funding for the services it's constituted to provide. Whether that revenue comes from a property tax, a GST, income tax, tariffs, or anywhere else should always be a matter of debate, but the principle of taxes isn't controversial.
Our problem is that we have delegated to our various governments far too many responsibilities and endowed our officials with far too many perquisites. It's not that any one or the other of the various modes of taxation are illegitimate, but that we have long since entered a taxation regime that immorally extracts from the productive and redistributes to both grifters and derelicts.
But I don't think you should have to pay for something you own and lose it because you can't afford the continuous tax on it. It would be like me owning a car and having to pay driveway parking tax because my car is sitting there in front of my house. The concept to me feels like we're being taken advantage of just for living.
shareExactly! The fact that it's a tax levied against your property is leverage to ensure you pay it. Rather than just sending you a bill like anything else. It's extortion at gun point.
share