When purchasing their first home, buyers rarely factor in the annually increasing property taxes. Funding the most powerful organization in the United States, public education, property taxes go nowhere but up. Yearly increases of 4% are usual. Often, more; rarely, less.
With 4% annual increases, property taxes double every 18 years. So, if a first-time home buyer has a child, by the time that child is in college, his home’s property taxes are twice what they were when the child was born.
Every home-owner’s disposable income is also reduced every year, by a far larger percentage. Owning a home is made to seem “the American dream” because it forces every home-owner into an ever greater subsidization of public education.
To ensure that houses are far more expensive, therefore paying even more taxes, battalions of inspectors, permit issuers, and ever more onerous building codes are continually imposed. Every step of building a house has become tightly regulated, and each regulator knows that his only chance to make money on any given home is to make things as expensive as possible for the initial purchaser.
That, as intended, has the effect of increasing property taxes. A hundred thousand dollar home that could have been built and sold for fifty thousand will generate, with compound interest, three or four times more taxes over its life. So, the powerful forces behind funding public education make all home owners far poorer than we realize.
It’s easy to understand what they are doing to us. It’s easy to see why they’re doing it to us. The hard part is to love those who do it.
