POLITICO (“Do You Really Own Your Home? A Tax Revolt Says No.“):
A rebellion sweeping the nation gathered adherents in the parking lot outside northeast Ohio’s largest flea market on the Saturday before Memorial Day. Before making their way to stalls selling whirligigs, handmade soap, and peanut-butter Buckeye brownies, dozens of people stopped at folding tables where volunteers hawked petitions to abolish property taxes. Few needed much convincing before adding their names.
“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident wearing a Cleveland Browns coat to fend off the damp chill. “Why would I pay property tax?”
It is, on its surface, not an unreasonable question. In the popular imagination, the elderly are living on a “fixed income.” They’ve worked their whole lives and paid off their homes, which often constitute their only meaningful asset. Why should they have to pay taxes—often at a rate that exceeds what their mortgage payment used to be—in order to keep living in them?
In the last two years alone, plans to substantially reduce or altogether repeal property taxes have emerged in more than two dozen states. Georgia, Indiana and Wyoming already sliced residents’ tax bills by billions of dollars. Republican governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have Florida or Texas competing to see who can lower property taxes the most. Gubernatorial candidates elsewhere are putting tax reform at the center of their campaigns in the hopes of staving off insurgencies that risk overrunning their tenures. Public figures as disparate as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Francesca Hong, the socialist who narrowly lost the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, have joined the cause.
Just as it was 50 years ago, the movement appears organic, driven more by meme than political machine, and coming at a moment dominated by consumer concerns around affordability. A surge in home values — up an average of 50% nationwide since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic — has boosted property assessments. Those increases have translated to tax bills that have shocked homeowners and left them worried about the growing burdens of maintaining an asset at the heart of the American dream.
Most of the focus, rightly, has been on younger Americans who fear they will never be able to afford to own a home at these prices. The property tax issue has gotten comparatively less attention, at least at the national level.
The uprising’s most pitched battles are being fought in Red States where the issue has emerged as yet another dividing line on the right. Traditional conservatives, who believe property taxes foster local decision-making and fund the police, fear they’re losing to the populist rebels dominating the debate.
The “stake in society” theory has long provenance in conservative circles. And, yes, it turns out that we have to pay for things even conservatives think government ought to fund, and, well, that means we have to tax something or someone.
It’s now common for many Republicans to question the morality of property taxes entirely, said Judge Glock, an economic historian who serves as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Anti-tax activists contend that the levies turn homeowners into vassals who pay rent to the government for the use of their own house — one that could be seized after an unpaid bill.
“That branding has been one of the most successful political slogans in modern memory,” Glock said. “It is incredible how powerful that language has become on the right to strike down anybody who believes in any sort of property taxes.”
It’s a powerful argument. And one that’s not entirely wrong. Way back in 1819, albeit in a different context, Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” At the margins at least, older Americans may be forced to vacate the homes they spent their working lives to own because they can’t afford the tax burden. For that matter, high property taxes raise the cost of entry for prospective new homeowners.
For as long as there has been property, there have been property taxes. Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia are said to have documented the stores of grain and livestock their owners owed as tribute.
“I joke in my class that it’s the ‘Ur tax’,” said David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School tracking the tax revolt. “Because they taxed it in Ur.”
I bet that one never gets old!
Then again, Ur likely didn’t have income taxes, sales taxes, FICA and Medicare taxes, bag taxes, and various and sundry other government-imposed fees and taxes on top of their property taxes.
Debates over property taxes have been around since the founding of the United States, too, with Alexander Hamilton (pro) and Thomas Jefferson (con) sparring over them in the late 18th century.
Since then, property taxes have become the financial engine powering American cities and schools. Rates vary widely across the nation’s patchwork of cities, counties, townships and other bespoke units of local government. Generally, homeowners who occupy their properties owe between half a percent to just under 2% of their home value in taxes each year depending on where they live, according to the Tax Foundation.
This translates to U.S. state and local governments taking in about $800 billion a year — an amount higher than the annual GDP of Sweden. The levy accounts for about 70% of local tax collections, the Tax Foundation found, with the remainder deriving largely from sales taxes.
Again: this is the rub. Our system distributes governmental responsibilities across multiple levels, each of which needs revenue to fund them. For localities, schools, police forces, and incarceration systems are the main line items.
If not property taxes, where would they get the money? Sales taxes are even more unpopular than property taxes, are wildly regressive, and are much less predictable.
Many academics believe this reliance on property taxes is a good thing. Land can’t be moved or hidden. The tax base is stable, less subject to the whims of the economy. And the tax links government services with the home values those services help create: All else equal, a home in a community with quality schools and little crime is worth more than the exact same structure elsewhere.
“Anything that a government does that’s good will increase property values,” Schleicher said. “And by doing that they’ll increase their budget.”
That’s hard to argue against. Old folks tend not to still have kids in school, but they often have grandkids in school. And, even if they don’t, they benefit from living in a community with good schools.
The problem is everyone who is not an economist seems to hate property taxes. They raise costs on an asset that not only provides the physical security of a roof over your family’s head, but that you count on to deliver financial security in retirement and an inheritance to your children. Plus, unlike other taxes, you can do little to stop them. Lose your job and you pay less income tax. Stop spending and you pay less sales tax. But if your neighbor’s house sells for $50,000 more than yours was worth, you might end up with a higher property tax bill.
Which, again, is a positive thing—for everyone but the property owner.
In the 1970s, inflation-driven spikes in home values led to tax bills doubling or more. In California, the epicenter of this spike, homeowners described themselves as vibrating with anger after receiving their annual statements and senior citizens feared the government was going to seize their properties and toss them onto the streets.
The result was Proposition 13, a 1978 citizens’ initiative to roll back California’s property tax rates, cap assessments and enshrine the cuts in the state Constitution. Despite the opposition of the Golden State’s political establishment, a grassroots campaign persuaded nearly two-thirds of voters to back the change. Immediately, California’s property tax receipts dropped 60%, and the constitutional mandate keeps them low to this day. Copycat measures passed in Massachusetts, Michigan and elsewhere.
And it wasn’t just the drop in revenue. It also wildly distorted the market, making younger homeowners pay a disproportionate share of the burden and strongly disincentivizing people from selling their house and buying another (unless they were going to leave the state).
Still, the popularity of cutting taxes is unassailable: no politician ever lost a vote for promising to cut taxes or increase spending—preferably at the same time.
Nationwide, the median annual property tax payment rose by 25% between 2019 and 2024, or more than $600, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Increases in Ohio’s have been worse than average, even though the state already ranked in the top 10 with the highest property taxes. Typical bills in Ohio have surged to nearly $3,000 a year, the Lincoln Institute found.
“It started out with dollars and cents,” Massie said. “Worried about grandma getting pushed out of her home.”
But getting rid of the property tax, he said, has become about more than money. To him, it restores the anti-tax energy underlying the nation’s founding. He calls the initiative Ohio’s Declaration of Independence, announcing the campaign’s signature gathering progress this spring from behind a full-sized replica of the Resolute Desk from the Oval Office.
“This is the foundation of freedom and liberty,” Massie said. “We are not going to give up that inalienable right of private property.”
In all corners of the country, Massie-like figures are forcing lawmakers to act. Legislators in Montana cut taxes for owner-occupied homes. In Iowa, they capped how much local property tax revenue can grow. Oklahoma lawmakers have placed a measure on the November ballot to restrict future property tax increases.
The article features this bumper sticker, which reportedly adorns Massie’s automobile:
As marketing goes, it’s pretty clever.
The proposals have freaked out local governments and organizations that provide or rely on public services. Cities, counties, schools, labor unions, hospitals and chambers of commerce have formed coalitions to fight back. Budget advisers to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a moderate Republican, warned this year that abolishing property taxes “would quite literally ‘defund’ the police” with the same fate befalling fire departments, schools and libraries.
“You’re actually talking the immediate forced liquidation of patrol units and the degradation of emergency response,” said Robert Butler, a past president of the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police who serves as police chief in Independence, a 7,500-person town south of Cleveland. “You’re gonna wipe them out.”
I mean, putting up a sign saying DEFUND THE POLICE is objectively way worse than depriving the police of funding, right?
Local government leaders argue that property taxes are so embedded into the structure of American government that it is hard to imagine alternatives. To replace the $24 billion lost by doing away with property taxes in Ohio, the state’s average income tax rate would have to rise to just under 13 percent, the Tax Foundation found, a levy almost as high as what millionaires pay in California.
By contrast, the top rate in my home state of Virginia (which applies to all income over $17,000) is 5.75%. But we do have a real estate tax of 1.12% of assessed value and a personal property tax of 4.57% of assessed value on our automobiles here in Fairfax County. There are also various add-ons: a refuse fee, a stormwater district fee, sales taxes, bag taxes, and all manner of others I’m sure I forget.
Massie dismissed the warnings as alarmist. (“We’re not anarchists,” he said.) Government needs to shrink, he argued, and he assumes the Legislature will find alternatives. A fairer system, he argued, would make people pay for the government services they use, but not those they don’t.
“I’m not willing to give up my home for a book or a walk in the park,” Massie said.
Which, of course, misapprehends what government is. The whole point is to provide a certain set of baseline services that the community can enjoy regardless of their individual ability to pay.
When my youngest graduates in three years, I’ll have no more personal use for the local schools. For that matter, I paid property taxes here and elsewhere for more than two decades before I had kids in schools. I make very little use of the parks now that my kids are older and can happily afford to just buy any books I want on Amazon. I don’t mind paying into the kittie for those who want those services and can’t afford them.
So far, most states have cushioned their property tax cuts by phasing them in or using other dollars to backfill lost revenue. Texas used its budget surplus. North Dakota took money from its oil-and-gas extraction tax.
But in Indiana, where last year the Legislature cut taxes for primary residences and Gov. Mike Braun, a Republican, has since mused about abolishing property taxes for senior citizens, local governments already have less in their coffers.
Charlestown, a small community on the Kentucky border, is seeing rapid growth from the redevelopment of a former ammunition plant. An influx of jobs and people normally would boost property tax revenue and public services. Instead, the city is cutting its budget.
This summer, a public park with mini golf, a splash pad and roller-skating rink went from being open seven days a week to four. For the coming winter, residents on cul-de-sacs were told their streets won’t be cleared immediately because the city could not pay snowplow drivers overtime.
Whether the baseline services provided by the taxpayer should include water parks, mini golf, and roller skating is, surely, debatable. And those who live in a cul-de-sac (as I did for the thirteen years I lived in my previous home) probably shouldn’t be the highest priority for snow removal. But, presumably, the elected representatives of the community thought doing all of those things worthwhile; they have to be paid for.
For more than a year, DeSantis has been at the vanguard of the national anti-property-tax movement. His arguments have blended rising costs and with the populist branding of the levies as unamerican. Local governments in Florida, he said, have gotten too fat on revenues from growing assessments and homeowners are right to feel affronted.
“Year after year, you’re just having to write a check just for the privilege of being able to maintain ownership of something that is supposedly yours,” DeSantis said in May as he unveiled a proposal to eliminate the tax for more than 90% of primary residences.
But fellow Republicans in the statehouse balked at jettisoning billions in tax revenue used for schools. They stripped out DeSantis’ proposed cuts to education funding before sending his property tax measure to the November ballot. Incoming House Speaker Sam Garrison said fellow Republican lawmakers agreed with DeSantis on the need for cuts but “we’ve also been frank with voters there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Yeah, but schools are dominated by woke commies. We should just homeschool all of our kids. It was good enough for Jesus.
The road to Election Day has been rocky. The state Republican Party took months to endorse the plan after U.S. Sen. Rick Scott and other GOP leaders expressed reservations about impacts to local budgets. Several Republican sheriffs have blasted the measure — one called it a “train wreck” — that could wreak havoc on their bottom lines. Even DeSantis has distanced himself, saying that while he expects to vote yes, he will not raise money or campaign for it because its reforms do not go far enough.
Even the sheriffs are against it, but they don’t go far enough?
These splits among Florida Republicans fall along emerging ruptures in the Trump-era party. In Texas, where property tax reform has been at the top of the statehouse agenda for years, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has warned that Abbott’s latest proposal to eliminate school property taxes on primary residences would force the state to hike sales taxes to unsustainable levels. In Ohio, DeWine vetoed more aggressive bills before signing a slimmed-down package focused mostly on limiting future tax hikes.
“We have to provide for our schools; we have to provide for fire, EMS, police and children’s services and many other things,” DeWine said in December. (Both DeWine and DeSantis are prohibited by term limits from seeking reelection as governor this year.)
Unlike candidates for national office, governors, mayors, and even state legislators actually have to, well, govern. Voters demand that government provide certain services. And, again, somebody has to pay for those services.
Republican lawmakers frustrated by DeWine’s reticence are salivating at what a Ramaswamy administration could bring. Ramaswamy called for “the largest property tax rollback in Ohio history” by cutting levels to what they were prior to the pandemic.
Candidates for governor—especially those with zero governing experience who think they’re qualified to be President—are, oddly, less constrained by reality than actual governors.
Deep cuts would force Ohio to consolidate local agencies — Ohio has 611 school districts and 1,308 townships in its 88 counties — an effort previously resisted because “no one wants to lose their mascot,” said state Rep. David Thomas, a Republican who has quarterbacked the Legislature’s efforts.
Yet Thomas believes Massie’s abolition initiative is too extreme. And after Ramaswamy parroted populist talking points in his campaign kickoff speech last year — “If you own land, it should not feel like it’s a lease,” he said — the candidate backed off a pledge to eliminate the tax entirely.
Massie is frustrated with the response from Ramaswamy and other politicians, whom he believes are trying to co-opt the energy behind his initiative while disavowing its goal. “We’ve declared war on our legislators, our executive and our judicial branch,” Massie said.
Insert your favorite Pogo quotation here.
While the argument that property taxes make homeowners renters to the government wins support on social media — where Musk, former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and others repeat it to the point of virality — abolition has struggled when pushed into the policymaking mainstream.
In 2024, North Dakota voters were presented with an initiative to repeal property taxes. They rejected it by a nearly 2-to-1 margin after local governments, labor unions and business leaders argued the proposed cuts were too severe without viable alternatives to replace the lost revenue.
“I actually thought after we defeated this thing so handily in North Dakota that it might die down nationally,” said Chad Oban, the head of the state’s largest teachers’ union who ran the opposition campaign against the measure. “People would be thinking that, ‘Hey if we can’t do this in North Dakota, I mean, jeez, where can we do it?’”
Where, indeed?
As to the original problem—old folks being at risk of losing their homes because they can’t afford the tax bills—there are less draconian solutions than eliminating property taxes, or even exempting retirees from them entirely. Many, if not most, states have homestead exemptions that limit tax liability on a primary residence for those of a certain age.
Beyond that, despite the mythology, the over-75 set is actually the wealthiest age cohort in the country. They’re also heavily subsidized. We should take care of the small subset living in poverty or otherwise destitute. But the overwhelming majority can afford to pay their share of the cost of living in a developed society.
