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points by Sparkle-san 1 day ago | 0 comments
The tax is the same regardless of the equity or "wealth". I can be underwater on my mortgage with a negative net-worth and still owe the same property taxes on someone with a comparable house and $2 million in the bank.
[–] labcomputer 1 day ago
The tax is levied on the amount of wealth you have stored in real property.

Many taxes have exemptions. You get a "personal exemption" on your income tax. You don't pay tax on 100% of social security income because of another exemption.

A "property tax" is a wealth tax that simply has exemptions for all of your wealth stored in stocks/bonds/anything-that-isn't-real-estate.

[–] Sparkle-san 1 day ago
> The tax is levied on the amount of wealth you have stored in real property.

It's not though, it's levied on the assessed value of the house regardless of the stored value. A fully paid off house and a mortgage a month old at 90% LTV have the same property taxes if they are assessed at the same price. It would have been disingenuous to tell everyone who was underwater on their mortgages after the housing collapse in 2008 that they had so much wealth in the their houses based on the fact that they still had to pay property taxes.

[–] hocusPokeUs 1 day ago
Yeah? And? You don't get a mortgage and pay the tax in the first place without being wealthy enough; poor people don't get to own a home and don't pay property tax (excepting for those in rentals who proportionally subsidize the payments the landlord makes).

It's fundamentally a tax on wealthier people among a community.

We really going to sit here in 2026 and pretend the people who wrote down all these rhetorical circumlocutions weren't just making up language to justify their supposed expertise/their social moat? The entire American system is rich families manipulating the legal system to screw have nots. Whole lot of have nots defend a system that doesn't care they exist.

Strip away the ornamental language of the law and just see the ground truth; a person with means to buy the house pays a tax on it all. A poor person never pays a tax because they never own a home.

What is this? Why does everyone feel like they stepped out of the middle ages where dark tongues still exist and the ornate incantations of superstitious people still rule?

It doesn't need to be logically as complicated and intentionally obscured (in my opinion legalese has been to manipulate the illiterate which were the majority back in the day).

Such social conservatism is holding society back.

[–] Sparkle-san 1 day ago
By your logic, everything is wealth tax. Bought a $5 item and paid sales tax on it that at least one person couldn't afford? Wealth tax! Got groceries while someone was going hungry? Wealth tax! And as you acknowledged, poor people are still paying property taxes, they're just baked into their rent. You're out here decrying "rhetorical circumlocutions" and "ornamental language" while ignoring the argument at hand and engaging in the same discourse you denounce.
[–] hocusPokeUs 1 day ago
Happy to end our chat as your flip flopping between "save the Byzantine but essential legal rhetoric that is the tax code" while complaining my 3-4 paragraph argument to reduce legal sprawl and assess via simpler terms is itself sprawling nonsense...that cognitive dissonance is confusing.

Like side by side my posts and tax code ... the tax code would look less verbose?

Legal obfuscation often conjured back in the day by local rich politicians and a judge who bbq on weekends, colluded to convince an innumerate illiterate local they best accept just being screwed by the local political feifdom...is somehow preferable to defining our own social norms; history makes it clear of course the people of the past had it all correct!

Functional illiteracy in the raw; no ability to reason outside the tropes of your childhood education.

Without a new JS framework or devops tool to babble about and leverage as a social moat in the job market this forum is no different than Reddit and X; incurious worker bees dancing like monkeys for coin jangling around grandpa billionaires pocket.

[–] Sparkle-san 1 day ago
I get it, you've got some big feelings about taxation and a thesaurus to go along with it. I'm certainly not going to defend the tax code as a whole, it's a mess to say the least. But we're having two parallel conversations with little overlap. I'm speaking only about whether property taxes meet the definition and spirit of a wealth tax which I don't think they do. You're erring grievances about the tax code as a whole (and also trying to appear above everyone else in your galaxy brained intellect) and only engaging long enough with my argument to construct a straw man. I wish you the best of luck with your manifesto.