KoboldCoterie

See, you could have just said "Oh, silly me! Thanks!", and nobody would have thought less of you, but now, everyone thinks you're a prick.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.

If you disable Javascript on the page, most of the time you can bypass paywalls (including in this case). Very simple workaround.

It also has a neat kind of crowd-sourced verification attached to it.

If someone asks a question, and someone else gives an incorrect answer, chances are good that someone will see that and correct them. If, on the other hand, everyone goes and looks up the answer, some people might get an incorrect answer and have no one to correct it, further disseminating false information.

Obviously this isn't perfect, and requires that the information is fact-based in the first place, but it's interesting to think about any time you see someone correct someone else on the internet.

They weren't responding to the original comment, they were responding to yours; I guess you could take your own advice, perhaps?

They can move and start renting like other poors have to do.

Ah, yes. Let's consolidate wealth even more heavily among the already-rich. Good suggestion.

But when you see someone with literally millions of dollars in equity complaining about an extra few hundred dollars per month, I see how it can be a little infuriating.

Yeah, I'm sure they'd have no problem paying that.

What about the people with $400k in equity, who are on fixed incomes, who were paying $2.5k in taxes, and are now paying $4k and can't afford it? Oh, yeah. Fuck them, right?

Again, equity is meaningless if you aren't selling the property (or otherwise leveraging it), which most people claiming a homestead exemption are not doing. For them, it's just less money they have each month.

This attitude that anyone who managed to buy a home is part of the 1% and fuck those people is just toxic.

It's a value increase on paper only; there's no material value being created. Again, it's only benefitting people who are selling their home.

Again, to someone who is not selling their home, there is no "actual value" being increased. It's not like someone is coming around and saying "Hey, your house is pretty run down... would you like $40k in free renovations? Please note that this will increase your property taxes due to the improvements." It's because of supply and demand, and low mortgage rates driving an increase in people buying homes, and the real thing you should be railing against are the habitual landlords buying tons of properties to rent, not the families who own a home that they live in. They are not the problem.

Edit: To add some context to this, there are currently ~28 vacant homes in the US for every homeless person. It's not a matter of there not being enough homes out there - there would be plenty, if every home was owned by one family. Far more than enough. It's folks buying up swaths of land to rent out, and price fixing those rentals, that are causing the problems, both for families who can afford to buy homes, and for people who are renting.

Maybe you should redirect this irritation and channel it into lobbying for legislation that would cap rent increases, too, to also insulate the other half of the population from the effects of increased property values? It doesn't have to be a matter of "It's bad for me therefore it must be bad for everyone else, too" unless you make it one.

Sure, and railing against those property tax rebates is one thing, but as what you quoted says, that's not the norm. Property taxes are a problem across the country right now, not just in Georgia (as the article notes), and other states are also passing measures to help.

This also is part of a homestead exemption, so it's not stopping people who own multiple properties from paying higher taxes.

A family owning a home and passing it on to their kids is not a problem, and I'm not sure why you're framing it as one. It's also not like it's just one family's home that's rising in value while everything else stagnates; that hypothetical family who chooses to sell is not getting rich from the decision. Either they're moving to renting, and paying high rental rates, or they're buying elsewhere and paying the current market value of that property.

That's not really fair.

First off, we're talking thousands of dollars per year, not $7.79. Secondly, the value of the property doesn't matter unless they're selling (or getting a reverse mortgage or something else). If it's someone who bought a house to live in and they aren't planning to sell, it doesn't matter if it's valued at $50k or $500k or $5M... except where property taxes are concerned.

And if some family in Georgia is used to paying, and has budgeted for, $5000-$7500 per year in taxes, and suddenly that rises to $7000-$10500 because of something they have no control over and aren't benefitting from for the above reasons, that is bad.

If you modify the thought experiment slightly, it becomes an interesting trolley problem.

Let's assume the spell you're using is all or nothing - either it cures everyone, or no one. What if some subset of people explicitly do not consent? How many people would it have to be, or what percentage, before you would consider not doing it? Obviously if only 1 person doesn't want it, who cares, greater good, but what if it was 99% of people? Where's the line?