My mom paid off her house in 2003.
Thought that was it. Thought she was done. Thought it was finally hers.
Property taxes were $1,800 a year back then.
She’s retired now. Fixed income. Same house. Same neighborhood.
Property taxes are $24,000 a year.
That’s $2,000 a month.
On a house she already paid for.
She’s 71 years old and the government sends her a bill every year just to stay in her own home.
You never really own anything in America.
You just make payments to a different landlord.
Trump walked out of Meet the Press and the press is outraged. Good. A network that spent years pushing Russia hoaxes, burying Hunter's laptop, and cheerleading open borders doesn't get to lecture anyone about credibility.
Call it what it is.
Property taxes on primary residences are a tax on unrealized gains, and the double standard around it is glaring.
You buy a house for $300k with your after-tax dollars. Years later the market rises and the assessor says it’s now worth $600k. Your tax bill goes up—even though you didn’t sell, didn’t refinance, didn’t pull out a dime of equity. You’re paying higher taxes every single year on “wealth” that exists only on paper. That is the literal definition of taxing unrealized appreciation.
Politicians and pundits scream bloody murder when anyone suggests doing the exact same thing to billionaires’ unrealized stock gains. “It’s unfair! They’ll be forced to sell assets!” Yet the same logic is applied to your family home without a second thought. If the principle is wrong for Elon Musk’s Tesla shares, it’s wrong for grandma’s paid-off house.
The common defense—“It pays for schools and roads”—doesn’t hold up as justification for this specific mechanism. Those services are valuable, but tying their funding to the fluctuating paper value of your home creates a system where success (a nicer neighborhood, inflation, or simple supply and demand) is punished with a higher bill. Once the mortgage is gone, you still don’t truly own it. You’re a tenant with extra paperwork, paying annual rent to the government based on an assessment you don’t control.
This isn’t about hating government services. It’s about honest funding. Tax actual economic activity—consumption via a broad sales tax, realized capital gains, or user fees for specific services. Shift the burden to people who are actively spending or transacting in the economy instead of penalizing ownership itself. Other countries and even some U.S. localities have shown you can fund local government without treating primary homes like perpetual leaseholds from the state.
Ownership should mean ownership. Not “you own it until the county decides your paper equity went up.” Abolish property taxes on primary residences. The current system is a wealth tax dressed up as a service fee, and it’s long past time we called it what it is.