So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes

Or: "how to not turn your red state into California"

A lot of people in the Republican party have been talking about abolishing property taxes lately. This is a bad idea with unintended consequences, and they shouldn’t do it.

Doing so would undermine economic growth and housing affordability gains certain red states have recently seen. Worse, we’ve already run this experiment and know where it leads: a California-style de-growth death spiral that slams the door in the faces of young working families.

I begin by explaining why property tax elimination is a bad idea:

1. States will never actually do it

2. The alternatives are worse

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Then, I conclude by showing how to pragmatically reform property taxes in a way that delivers both meaningful tax relief and the sustainable pro-growth, pro-family, results craved by red and blue states alike.

1. States will never actually do it

The first reason eliminating property taxes is bad is that local politicians don’t have the guts to actually pull the trigger. As soon as it’s time for implementation, intra-party fighting overwhelms the legislative process, causing lawmakers to throw up their hands, slap on a band-aid, declare victory, and go home.

Why you can’t eliminate property taxes

In my home state of Texas, Republicans have tried and failed twice in back-to-back legislative sessions to eliminate property taxes. This is despite the fact that Texas has been under complete Republican domination for over twenty years.

First, it’s just too expensive. In 2024, the legislative budget board found that replacing property taxes would cost $81.5 billion dollars, more than the annual state budget of $72 billion. Read here:

“This is not something that you can find $81 billion on a per-year basis and not have a major impact on the remaining sales tax rates, because that is a huge amount of money to be able to replicate,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and [Lt. Governor Dan] Patrick’s chief lieutenant on property taxes.

Second, replacing all property taxes with sales taxes would require raising the sales tax rate to over 19%, according to the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association. Just in case state leaders don’t think prices on everyday goods have risen high enough yet, they should note that inflation is the number one most important issue¹ among Republicans.

So what did the Texas legislature wind up doing instead when total elimination predictably hit a brick wall? They used surplus state funds to directly subsidize school budgets, buy off individuals’ property tax bills, and prop up an increased homestead exemption. These measures delivered temporary relief, but they’re unsustainable because they depend on always having piles of extra money lying around.

Speaking of, where did this bountiful budget surplus come from, anyways? Turns out, the majority came from a sales tax windfall. In the words of Republican state comptroller Glenn Hegar (emphasis mine):

Unfortunately, the state’s record revenues are partly due to the highest rate of general price inflation seen in 40 years. Besides causing revenues to substantially exceed expectations, inflation also has driven up the cost of many goods and services affecting the daily lives of Texans.

Instead of rebating that windfall back to citizens equally, or reducing the sales tax rate going forward, the state instead used money which came from all Texans to selectively bail out one class of Texans, homeowners, to the exclusion of everybody else.

The other portion of the property tax bailout came from severance taxes from the state’s oil & gas fund. Again, this oil & gas windfall was supported by a spike in oil prices which all Texans paid for at the pump: Mr. Hegar wrote that piece in 2023, when Texas gas prices had risen by 65% compared to 2020 prices. As of today, they’re still up 55%, and unlikely to return to 2020 lows anytime soon.

Not many people know that Texas has a vaguely Norwegian-style state oil fund, but it does, and I’m perfectly fine with distributing Texas’ publicly owned natural resource windfall to the the rightful owners of those resources—namely, the people of Texas. The part that disappoints me is the unequal handouts of what should be the common inheritance of all Texans. This is especially so because everyone in the state pays for high gas prices, either directly through their own consumption, or indirectly through everything else that get more expensive as fuel prices rise.

The other red state with an Oil & Gas fund, Alaska, has Texas beat in this regard. The Alaska permanent fund pays out a proper citizen’s dividend to all Alaskans, regardless of class or home ownership status. Alaska hardly needs burnish its red-state credentials; it went +4.5 Republican in the last presidential election, and the aggressive structure of its oil fund was strongly supported by none other than Sarah Palin. Oh, and it’s massively popular, with 90% support.

Putting basic fairness aside, one must also consider pragmatics. Oil & gas revenues are famous for large fluctuations, and the Republican comptroller himself is clearly uncomfortable with high sales taxes in an inflationary era. How will Texas deliver property tax relief when lean budget years inevitably arrive?

To this the frustrated politician says, “Okay, but surely something must be done to get rid of property tax, after all, it’s the most hated tax!”

This is a very good point, except for the fact that it’s false.

Property taxes are less hated than you think

At least according to recent polling, the #1 most hated tax is not the property tax, but the Federal Income tax:

Note the change in the last two decades: a net 20 percentage point swing in most-hated status between property tax and federal income tax. The large drop in housing affordability over that time period has surely contributed towards that change in sentiment.

Also, this chart is somewhat misleading because Gallup dis-aggregates three different forms of income tax and presents them alongside “state sales tax,” and “local property tax,” even though there’s no federal form of the latter two. This is like asking whether people like Chocolate, Strawberry or Vanilla ice cream best, but then measuring individual responses for Chocolate and Strawberry alongside French Vanilla, Homemade Vanilla, and Vanilla Bean. Here’s another way to present the exact same findings:

Also, if property taxes are so desperately hated, why do states keep voting to keep them in place?

Every single state has some form of state or local property tax. Meanwhile, over a quarter of states opt out of at least one of sales, corporate, or income taxes.

There’s also the matter of “voting with your feet:” California has much lower property taxes than Texas, an effective rate of 0.71%, whereas Texas’s effective rate is over twice as high at 1.58%. Despite this, blue states like California have seen so much out-migration to red states like Texas, that Democrats are starting to panic about a permanently altered electoral landscape.

In short, while it is often claimed that property taxes are the least popular tax by stated preferences, if we look at revealed preferences, they could actually be the most popular local tax. Perhaps this is why every time a red state tries to abolish property taxes, strident opposition crops up from unexpected places:

Saagar Enjeti, right-populist host of Breaking Points, criticizes efforts to abolish property taxes in video titled: “Saagar RIPS Boomer Anti-Property Tax Propaganda”

But maybe you don’t care. In that case, pick an alternative.

2. The Alternatives are worse

An OECD report ranks different taxes by which are the most harmful to growth:

1. Corporate taxes (worst)

2. Personal income taxes

3. Consumption/sales taxes

4. Property taxes (best)

Overly high corporate taxes cause investment to flow to other states instead, and sufficiently high income taxes are a commonly cited driver of outmigration from blue states to red states. Modest sales taxes are the least distortionary of the three, but they’re still worse for growth overall than a well run property tax.

In conservative states like Texas, raising income and corporate taxes is already dead in the water (if not explicitly banned in the state constitution), which just leaves sales taxes. Since people say they hate property taxes more, shouldn’t we just bite the bullet and go all in on sales taxes?

The problem with this line of thinking is that the polling is based on sales taxes at current rates. The highest sales taxes in the nation cap out at 10%—rates as high as 19% are completely unprecedented. Even worse, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association found that at those levels you start triggering tax avoidance, so you will inevitably have to raise the rate even higher to compensate, pushing it well past 20%.

We don’t even need to argue about whether this is popular or not because this exact proposal has been proposed twice already in Texas and it’s failed twice. Texans do not want to replace all property taxes with 20% state-imposed inflation on goods and services.

Ironically, reducing property taxes might actually be hardest in red states like Texas, precisely because the state is so anti-tax that there just aren’t many alternatives left. It’s no surprise then that the most famous instances of states that have “succeeded” in undermining property taxes are blue states.

The results have not been good.

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Don’t California my Texas

One anti-property tax measure is not to lower tax rates so much as to completely undermine the entire system of property valuation itself, and there is no example more infamous than California’s Proposition 13. This 70’s-era reform fell far short of abolishing the property tax, settling for simply unleashing one of the most wildly unequal and unfair taxation schemes in the nation instead.

Prop 13 works like this:

• Assessed values are frozen at their 1976 valuations

• The tax rate is limited to 1%

• Increases in assessed values are limited to 2% a year

• New reassessments are allowed only for new construction or when property changes hands

Various propositions in the following decades added yet another privilege: a property’s Prop 13 status may be passed on to children and grandchildren, thereby literally establishing a class of hereditary landed gentry.

The results have been an absolute disaster for both housing affordability and any semblance of basic fairness. Side-by-side houses have wildly unequal property assessments (source):

Again, complete property tax elimination never actually arrives. What arrives instead is special treatment for one class at the expense of everyone else in the state. But that’s not all; on top of the much higher property tax burdens young working families face for the audacious crime of moving in last year, the state has extra treats in store (source):

The state’s top marginal individual income tax rate of 13.3 percent is compounded by a 1.1 percent newly uncapped payroll tax, bringing the all-in top rate to 14.4 percent. Additionally, nonresidents must file income taxes if they work even a single day in the state, and California is one of only four states to still impose an alternative minimum tax.

Don’t forget that California also has among the highest corporate taxes in the nation as well, just in case you were thinking of starting a business, or investing in one.

Honestly, the fact that it’s taken this long for California to start to bleed population really shows you what an incredible natural advantage California has long held over every other location in the United States. Even though the game has always been California’s to lose, if you spend multiple decades repeatedly punching yourself in the face, the crown eventually slips from your head.

NOTE: as much fun as it is to get high huffing California schadenfreude, Republicans would do well to remember that Prop 13 was pushed for in large part by members of their own party.

Unfortunately, California isn’t the only blue state with gorgeous weather and Edenic geography that’s been steadily sending its children into exile.

Aloha ‘Oe

The state with the lowest property taxes in the nation, at an effective tax rate of 0.27%, is Hawaii. Incidentally, Hawaii has the second highest top income tax rate at 11%. It also has the third highest net domestic outmigration rate of all US states between 2020-2024.

Even worse, the overall population “natural change” (births minus deaths) is steadily shrinking:

What’s not shrinking is the size of billionaire landholdings. Just 37 billionaires own more than 218,000 acres of Hawaii, roughly 5.3% of all land in the state, a figure equal to 11.1% of all privately held land.

Just one of those billionaires owns more than 1.27% of the entire state—Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who owns 98% of the entire island of Lānaʻi.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan have seen their landholdings in Kaua’i more than triple, from 700+ acres in 2014 to over 2,300 acres today over the last ten years. Oprah Winfrey now owns over 1,000 acres on Maui after a recent purchase, the same island on which Jeff Bezos owns 14 acres. But what Jeff lacks in quantity, he makes up for in quality: he paid $78M for his land in La Perouse Bay, a full $13M more than Zuck paid for his 1,000-acre Kawai’i purchase in 2025.

As a quick aside, this underscores another problem with rock-bottom property taxes: it turns real estate into the perfect speculative financial asset in which to park money. When so little cost to hold it, real estate becomes an attractive passive investment, and over time tends to take up an ever-increasing share of bank loans, as expertly illustrated in the paper The Great Mortgaging, by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor. This has a double-whammy effect on the economy: real estate sucks up all the loans, bidding up its price, while leaving all other sectors (like actually providing productive jobs) with less investment.

Making real estate the perfect speculative asset for the ultra-rich is never a good idea, but Hawaii faces other problems too: the top reasons cited for leaving the state include high cost of living, limited economic opportunities, housing challenges, quality of life concerns, and education. That last one is exacerbated by chronically underfunded public schools.

Hawaii’s high income taxes and low property taxes have done little to curb the island state’s steady transformation into a paradise for the rich, but a port of exile for the young working families its future depends on.

Five thousand miles away, on the cold and distant far shore of the mainland, another blue state grapples with a similar challenge.

♬ New York, New York, get the hell out of town! ♬

New York is an interesting case, because it actually has a slightly higher property tax rate than Texas, placing it 6th highest nationwide. Unfortunately, like California, the state (as well as its resident mega-city)’s property tax system is convoluted and highly unequal. Nominally high property tax rates mask absolutely bizarre assessed values:

This three bedroom house is listed for $15 million but is assessed for a mere $48,780

I’ll just quote NYC's own comptroller:

New York City’s property tax system is notoriously opaque, confusing, and inequitable. For decades, calls for reform from homeowners, advocates, and elected officials have been ignored while New York State instead layered on a patchwork of complex exemptions and abatements.

The current property tax system significantly favors wealthy New York neighborhoods over working people: homeowners in Staten Island, Southeast Queens, Eastern Brooklyn, and the Northeast Bronx sometimes pay three times the effective tax rate of homeowners in Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn.

It also favors condominiums and co-ops over multifamily rentals, taxing rentals at roughly double the median effective tax rate. These inequities disincentivize rental housing development, entrenching expensive and inefficient tax breaks like 421-a to facilitate housing production.

On top of its extremely unequal and distortionary property tax system, New York has the third highest top income tax rate in the nation, the 16th highest corporate income tax rate, and the 10th highest combined sales tax rate.

Meanwhile, New York City is losing population, housing costs are out of control, and measures meant to alleviate this, like rent control, often wind up getting exploited by millionaires as just another privilege for the Big Apple’s nobility to hoard.

We’ve bashed on three blue states in a row, so let’s now turn our eye to a red state that, alongside Texas, stands trembling on a knife’s edge between ascending to the top ranks of leading US states, or plunging downwards towards decline, decay, and death.

Florida’s “Disney Adult” death trap

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made headlines recently for two things—going after property taxes, and going after the Walt Disney corporation. Ironically, DeSantis might be on the cusp of making the exact same mistake Disney is constantly being accused of: transforming a magical kingdom originally meant for families and children into a dead-end party pad for child-free adults.

For context, the Walt Disney corporation has faced criticism for catering too much to “Disney Adults,” who are more lucrative than young families with children. Regardless of how seriously one should take these accusations, there must be enough truth to them for Disney to publicly express concerns about the increasing unaffordability of its parks division.

DeSantis should consider the same lesson. Florida is famously a destination for retirees and is now the 5th oldest state in the nation by median age. If more exemptions are carved out specifically for seniors, it is the young who must make up a proportionately higher share of taxes. When faced with escalating home prices, age-based discriminatory tax burdens, and 50 different states to choose from, young families will inevitably go to the places that actually welcome them.

DeSantis is already well into the weeds of compromising his position away from total abolishment, having recently pivoted to targeted exemptions for primary homesteads. Since he’s already shown a willing to negotiate, we’d like to widen his menu of options:

DeSantis is Half-Right About Property Taxes

In any case, whether it’s Texas, Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, or any of the other forty-five of these great United States, there’s a solution out there that meets everybody’s needs.

It delivers meaningful property tax relief to the median homeowner, without excluding renters and businesses or pitting seniors against young working families, all while driving overall economic efficiency and setting the state up for a pro-growth flywheel that keeps the budget balanced and taxes competitive.

That policy is Universal Building Exemption.

3. Universal Building Exemption is better

There is a problem with property taxes: it’s a good tax combined with a bad tax. The bad part of the tax is the portion of the tax that falls on buildings and improvements. We’re in a housing crisis, so why are we taxing houses? We’re in an age of rising unemployment, so why are we taxing workplaces? We want more construction, not less.

A universal building exemption fixes this by shifting the tax off of buildings and onto the unimproved value of land. Crucially, it’s revenue-neutral: it raises the same amount of property tax dollars as before, so it doesn’t break the budget.

Here’s why it’s the solution to the property tax debate:

1. Economists and key conservative thinkers support it

2. It balances the budget

3. It’s pro-growth and pro-natal

4. It’s better than the homestead exemption

5. It’s politically viable

Economists and key conservative thinkers support it

First of all, it comes highly recommended.

Property tax with universal building exemption—equivalent to a tax on just the unimproved value of land—is an idea with shockingly widespread support on both sides of the political aisle, and is almost universally accepted among economists as the ideal (or least bad, depending on your point of view) form of taxation. It’s also supported by key figures in the conservative and libertarian movements.

Captain Capitalism himself, the one and only Adam Smith, argued for it, as did American founding father Thomas Paine. The architect of the 20th century conservative movement, William F. Buckley, was a big fan, and across the pond the idea was supported by none other than Winston Churchill.

The idea also found favor with Albert J. Nock, the man who literally coined the term “Libertarian,” as did David Nolan, founder of the American Libertarian party. As for libertarian economists, it was famously endorsed by Milton Friedman himself.

Best of all, Karl Marx was a key opponent of the underlying philosophy behind the idea, calling it “Capitalism’s last ditch,” so you know it has to be good.

It Balances the Budget

Let’s dispel a key myth about property taxes—that exemptions on taxable value reduce aggregate property taxes. Appraisal caps and tax rate limits can do that, but exemptions alone do not. Instead, they just move them around. The easiest way to visualize it is squeezing on a balloon—if one part of it is compressed, another part of it must bulge out to compensate:

This is because the tax rate, most often called the “millage rate,” is worked out backwards from the desired budget. If we imagine that all the property in an imaginary toy model has a total value of $100,000, and our target budget is $1,000, then the property tax rate is 1%. If we cut the assessed value of everything in half so that it sums to just $50,000, the tax rate automatically rises to 2% in order to collect the same $1,000. Obviously, this is constrained by statutory limits on tax rate increases, assessment caps, etc., but you get the idea.

Since exemptions just shift the budget around, we must decide which kinds of exemption strikes the right balance between fairness and efficiency, guided by one question above all—what do we want more of?

Any state that doesn’t want to collapse in twenty years should know the answer reflexively: young working families.

It’s pro-growth and pro-natal

Fortunately, this policy has already been tried—several jurisdictions in Pennsylvania enacted this kind of policy in the 80’s and 90’s. Jurisdictions that made the change saw business establishments immediately increase by 12%, and Pittsburgh in specific saw a 13% increase in housing production.

The most recent examples are from Pennsylvania, but it’s also been tried before right here in Texas—J. J. Pastoriza, who went on to become Houston’s first Hispanic mayor, enacted a split-rate property tax in Houston in the early 1910’s. All the available evidence suggests the policy was a success, but it was short-lived, possibly because he didn’t go far enough. Ironically, because he only exempted buildings by 75%, he got in trouble with the state’s uniformity clause, which forbids differential tax rates on different classes of property. Arguably, a full universal exemption isn’t a “differential rate” on buildings—it’s just a total exemption.

Aside from the empirical results that show that universal building exemption boosts building, business, and the economy in general, the other reason to support it is that it’s pro-babies and pro-family. In a time when the entire developed world seems intent on marching down a slow spiral of voluntary decline and demographic suicide, the states destined to lead the American future will be whichever ones have the courage to say “yes” to young working families.

Young working families need certain things. They need affordable housing, they need jobs, and they need well funded schools. Property tax with universal building exemption delivers all three.

And if that’s not great enough, there’s a solid political pitch to be made—with the right configuration, the median homeowner typically saves a bit of money after the shift, which delivers more tax relief than a standard homestead exemption.

It’s Better than the Homestead Exemption

One problem with homestead exemption is that it’s exclusively for homeowners; there’s no benefit to apartment buildings or workplaces or any other kind of building, and we’ve already shown how constantly increasing only the homestead exemption comes at the direct expense of the rest of the population.

Universal Building Exemption is both cleaner and fairer—the entire value of every building is exempted. The only thing that is taxed is the value of the location it sits on. In effect, this is the way to actually abolish property taxes—let’s abolish the tax on your entire home!

But wait! Given the balloon metaphor, if we exempt all the buildings, won’t the tax rate on land have to jump massively to keep the budget balanced? Won’t that be a massive net tax increase for homeowners?

Surprisingly enough, no—even if the effective tax rate on land jumps to as high as six percent. Check it out, here’s my own Texas property tax valuation from 2024:

And here’s what I actually owed in taxes:

As you can see, the homestead exemption is a lot less impressive once you realize that it only applies to one of the line items. Here’s what a Universal Building Exemption with a “massive” 6% tax on land looks like, by contrast:

5513.47 - 3,150.00 = 2,363.47

In other words, I save over two thousand bucks versus what I’m paying now by taxing the dirt instead of the bricks. Based on this valuation, the effective tax rate on land would have to rise as high as 9.52% before I break even and start to pay more taxes than I do under the status quo.

Okay, but am I just talking my own book here, coming up with a tax shift that will just personally benefit me, a middle class Texas homeowner and father of three?

No, because the beauty of universal building exemption is that the biggest losers are the ones holding the most valuable downtown urban land out of use, and the chief beneficiaries are everybody else.

It’s politically viable

Here’s a diagram of winners and losers the CLE is modeling for an upcoming report on Spokane, Washington. As you can see, the median Single Family home parcel saves 2.5% on its taxes, and every building type denser than that saves even more—exactly the policy we need to fight the housing crisis.

Who are the losers? The big losers are surface parking lots and vacant land, particularly those situated downtown next to skyscrapers. This shifts the tax burden off of locations people actually live in, to massively valuable locations where nobody lives.

This isn’t just a handout to homeowners, developers, and landlords, either—it’s a carrot and a stick. The carrot of building exemption rewards everybody who actually contributes more of what contributes to growth in our society—namely, homes, neighborhoods, and jobs—a category which includes the best kinds of property managers and builders. The stick of a higher effective tax rate on land pokes everyone in the butt who is sitting on the most valuable locations—which includes the worst kinds of slumlords and land-banking “developers”— to either build something already, or sell it to someone who will.

Best of all, it does this without imposing regressive taxes on those still seeking the American dream: the poor, the working class, and young working families, just to bail out those who have already ascended the property ladder.

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Answers to Various Objections

Cool story, bro. It just sounds too good to be true.

I understand the skepticism. The main thing is that people have wildly wrong intuitions about where land value is concentrated, or even that land holds any value at all. Here’s a few more slides from our upcoming Spokane report; a common pattern we find in approximately all cities is that it is often the most valuable areas of a city that are the most underdeveloped relative to their potential:

Under existing property tax regimes, all these low-value surface parking lots in high-value downtown areas are effectively getting a property tax subsidy, while homes, apartments, and businesses make up the difference. Universal Building Exemption fixes this.

Won’t this cause developers to overconsume land and pave the earth?

Quite the opposite. Inefficient land use, driven by the most valuable land being chronically held out of use, is what leads directly to wasteful sprawl, leading developers to build on whatever other land is available, typically in outlying areas. This is what paves over nature, drives up the cost of farmland and wilderness, and causes development to encroach on rural areas. I made an explainer video a while back about zoning’s effect on sprawl and overconsumption of land; poor tax regimes have a similar effect:

What about renters? They don’t pay property taxes, so how do they benefit?

Renters benefit primarily from increased supply, which has been consistently shown to bring down rental prices without the damaging effects associated with well-meaning policies like rent control.

Where does this increased supply come from? Well, if you tax something, you get less of it. We’re currently taxing buildings, so we get less buildings. If we remove that tax, we will get more buildings. The only exception to this “tax something and you get less of it rule” is land. Tax land, and you don’t get less land, just less speculation. Instead, the tax on land opens up the most valuable locations for development.

And no, increased taxes on land do not get passed on to renters.

What about farmers? All they own is land, won’t they get wiped out?

When we say “building exemption” we really mean “improvement exemption.” Farms have a lot of improvements on them. For starters, crops are an improvement, as are trees, whether they be orchards, timber, or natural woodlands. Wells are an improvement, as are ponds, tilled soil, and enriched soil. On-site permanent machinery is an improvement, as is irrigation and other infrastructure. All of that stuff should be exempt.

In any case, we’re not looking to mess with existing agricultural exemptions, and besides, it’s the urban land we really care about, which is worth exponentially more. Farmland only gets bid up to development prices in the first place because we use our urban land so poorly that development spills outwards.

My kids aren’t in school anymore, or I don’t have kids, so I shouldn’t pay school taxes.

My house hasn’t burned down, but I still pay for firefighters. I’ve haven’t been murdered (yet), but I still pay for the police. I even homeschool my own kids, but I pay for the local school, because I am a good neighbor, my neighbors kids’ use the school, and I like having neighbors and living in a nice neighborhood. My neighborhood wouldn’t be nearly as nice if it didn’t have a nice school, which is a chief reason my property is even valuable in the first place.

What about poor seniors on fixed incomes?

You mean like the elderly couple who lives right next door to me? The ones whose house is valued about the same as my own, whose figures I just showed you? The ones who would therefore save money under a universal building exemption? My proposal literally saves them money, as it does for the median homeowner.

What about a senior who lives in a really, really valuable location worth millions of dollars, who would have to pay more after the change?

First, please recognize that now we’re not talking about some “poor widow,” but instead a person who by net worth is a literal millionaire. What about the poor widow who can’t afford her rent and is at risk of getting kicked out on the street? Doesn’t anybody care about her?

That said, if we-

Seniors who have paid off their homes should be able to live out their lives in their homes without paying another penny of property tax. Period.

…you know what? Deal. Let’s make it happen.

Hey, what do you know? That’s already the law in the great state of Texas. All you have to do is fill out Form 50-126, and if you’re a qualifying senior, file it with your local appraisal district and you’ll never pay property tax again for as long as you remain in your home. The taxes will be deferred with interest until you either sell the house, or until you die, at which point your estate will settle the bill.

That solves your objection right? This was all about making sure seniors can comfortably stay in their homes and not about establishing some hereditary financial privilege at the direct expense of young working families, right?

Do you have something against seniors?

Absolutely not! My parents are seniors, many of my neighbors are seniors, and I’m well on my way to becoming one myself. My chief problem with promising exclusionary benefits for seniors that trade off against young working families is that the politicians are lying.

The bill for all those benefits will come due one day, and when it does, the brutal math of population pyramids demands that you have lots of young working families in your state to pay for them, or all those generous promises will turn to ash. Then who will take care of our seniors?

It’s just way better and fairer to reform property taxes in a way that works for everybody, regardless of their social class, including seniors.

This still sounds too good to be true, I need more evidence.

Great! I wrote an entire book on the subject.

I don’t want to pay you money just to read that.

Great! I posted the same content on www.gameofrent.com entirely for free.

That doesn’t answer every single concern I can possibly think of.

Well, nobody’s perfect. Hit the subscribe button, leave a comment, and we’ll address them in future articles. Thanks for hearing us out!

1. Tied with illegal immigration.