In yet another example of tax funds that can be cut from the budget, people who want to upgrade their homes at taxpayer expense are angry that the state isn’t taking your money and giving it to them.
That’s $280 million per year that is stolen from one set of homeowners and given to another. A married couple with two kids who make more than $27 per hour, can’t receive your money.
That budget money is $30 taken from each household in Florida. Just one program. How many more can be cut?
As I have posted before, property taxes in Florida are easy to understand, mostly.
In Florida, the county property appraiser is an elected position that estimates what your house is worth each year, called your “market value.” If your house is your primary residence, you can take a deduction called the “homestead exemption” of $25,000 from that market value if your home has a market value of more than $50,000. If your home has a market value of over $100,000, you can take another $25,000 exemption. This second exemption doesn’t apply to school taxes. The result is called your “assessed value.” Because of the second homestead exemption, this means that your home gets two assessed values: one for property taxes, and the second assessed value for school board taxes.
Each July, the property appraiser mails out the proposed value of each property to the property owner. If you don’t think that the value is fair, you have 30 days to appeal that valuation. Most people want it to be as low as possible, because that is the value that your taxes are based on.
It seems complicated, but it really isn’t. For example, let’s say that your house has been deemed by the property appraiser’s office to have a fair market value of $125,000, and your county charges a property tax rate of ten mills, plus the school board charges of 6 mils. You would take the $125,000 market value and subtract your homestead exemption to arrive at an assessed value of $75,000 for property taxes, and $100,000 for school board taxes. The tax of ten mills would make your property taxes $750 and $600 for the school board taxes, making your total property tax bill $1350. Clear so far? Good, because it gets a bit more complicated.
Back in 1995, the voters of Florida passed an Amendment to the state Constitution that limits the annual increase in the assessed value of your homestead to the lesser of 3% or the consumer price index. Since real estate increases more than that in value each year, the longer you own your home, the less you pay in taxes. The gap between the market value and the assessed value is called your “Save Our Homes” credit.
In most cases, you want the property appraiser to set your assessed value as low as possible. The only reason you don’t, is if you are about to move to a more expensive home. The reason is called portability. If you are moving from an old house to a new one, you can take your Save Our Homes credit with you. That can mean a significant tax savings.
There are other tax exemptions.
The tax collector (also an elected position) charges a “millage rate” as an “ad valorem” property tax. Each “mill” is 0.1% of your home’s assessed value.
The county charges me 5 mils, the school board charges a bit over 6 mils, water control district charges half a mil; police, fire, hospital taxes, and EMS collectively charge 1.4 mils, the town charges 7.5 mils, and some other charges total up to almost 21 mils, or about 2.1%.
Some towns and counties charge fees that are part of your property taxes, but are not based on your property value. These are usually flat fees, for example each address may be taxed $150 a year for fire fees regardless of value. This is usually done so that the local taxing officials can raise taxes for social programs while blaming the increase on something palatable like the fire department. They simply take the money they were spending on fire and redirect it to whatever pet project they want to fund, then use the fire fee money to continue (or even cut) the fire department’s funding. Then they blame the fire department for the “tax increase.”
After homestead exemptions, other exemptions, and Save Our Homes are all subtracted, the result is the “Taxable Value.” The milage rate is applied to that number. If you own a $300,000 house, you would be paying $5500 a year in property taxes. I pay even more than that.
Taxes aren’t just a money grab, they are a means of social engineering when you grant carve out exemptions to favored groups like the AARP, illegal immigrants, and others. They are also a grift, in that much of this money gets directed into the pockets of politicians and their friends.
and you have to pay them, or see your property confiscated and your ass in jail.
One note about the exemption for public safety that are injured in the line of duty. If you are off duty and see an auto accident, medical emergency, or fire, the pressure to do something is large. I used to stop for those sorts of things. Until the case of Shane Kelly, that is.
Firefighter Kelly stopped to assist victims of an auto accident on the Florida Turnpike in 2002. Shane was off duty. He was killed in full view of his wife when a tractor trailer slammed into the accident vehicles. There were 2 occupants of the truck that killed Firefighter Kelly, and there was enough confusion as to which of them was driving that neither of them was ever charged.
The Federal Government ruled that Sean Kelly was acting in his capacity as a private citizen when he was killed, and since his death was not a line of duty death, his widow was not entitled to any of the benefits of the LOD status. Imagine how you would feel as an EMT, Firefighter, or other responder if you knew that helping an injured person carries the same risk of injury or death whether you are on duty or off duty, except that if you are injured, not only are you NOT paid for your time and skill, but you are not insured for that potentially career ending injury. Who will feed your family? Care for your kids?
In a meeting with my employer’s attorney, where Firefighters were attempting to get a written policy on what would be considered Line of Duty injury for off the clock employees, we were told that such decisions for off duty personnel would be made on a case by case basis by Administration AFTER the fact. I made a comment along the lines of, “So you get to decide AFTER I am injured whether or not you will pay for it. Will that decision take factors like the cost of treatment and PR benefit to you into account?” That REALLY pissed off the attorney. (I call ’em like I see ’em.)
After I learned of that case, I stopped helping out while off the clock. That policy marked the end of my stopping to help in emergencies. In fact, that policy change was a huge factor in my decision to retire.
How do I feel about fire department taxes? That is a topic for later in this week. I know what you probably THINK my feelings are, but you are probably wrong…
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says that property taxes are nonsense, in that you are essentially paying rent to the government in exchange for owning property.
“You should own your property free and clear,” DeSantis said at a recent roundtable in Jacksonville. “I think to say that someone that’s been in their house for 35 years just has to keep ponying up money — you don’t own your home, if that’s the case.”
He’s right, but at the same time, things like police, fire, and schools need to be funded. The thing that surprised me about this article was that the state’s tax on real property accounts for 18% of county revenue, 17% of municipal revenue and between 50% and 60% of school district funding.
So the elimination of property taxes would mean that counties would have to cut 18% of their expenditures. Using Orange County (where Orlando is located) as an example, they have an annual budget of $7.2 billion. (pdf alert) That would mean that the county needs to cut $1.3 billion from its annual budget. From their budget, they spend money on:
In this budget, we have purposefully allocated resources to address critical areas that are essential to ensuring the well-being of our residents by investing in affordable housing, preserving the environment, fueling economic development, strengthening public safety, improving transportation, expanding mental and behavioral health services, and enhancing children and family services programs. We will also develop a plan for expanding services to homeless people.
Orange county’s property tax proceeds total about $969 million of that budget. Can they make some cuts?
Without even trying, I have found $472.7 million in cuts. That’s halfway to eliminating property taxes. It can be done. Government shouldn’t be an endless source of pork that is being used to buy votes. Government should stay out of our pockets and provide only essential services through taxes. They should ask for donations for any extra services.
Two years ago, the Republicans caved by giving President Biden a blank check to borrow whatever and how ever much money he wanted to spend. On that day, the US debt stood at $31.46 Trillion. Within a month, the US had borrowed another Trillion dollars. Here we are with $36.21 Trillion in debt. (By the way, our national debt is the same now as it was on inauguration day, FYI)
They are borrowing money at incredible rates. We now are borrowing $1.5 Trillion each and every year.
It took this nation over 200 years to borrow a trillion dollars. Trump did it in seven months, Obama did it in only 6 months. It took Biden 9 months to borrow his first Trillion dollars, but he soon got better at it. His second trillion took three months, borrowing $2 trillion in his first year. In fact, he has increased the national debt by 118% in just two and a half years.
Biden increased the National Debt by 30% in four years, a total of $4.5 trillion.
President Trump increased the National Debt by 141% in his first four years.
Obama increased the debt by 194% in eight years.
President George W Bush borrowed his first trillion dollars in two and a half years. He borrowed his second trillion a year and a half later. Another two years, another $1 trillion. All told, President Bush borrowed $5 trillion in 8 years, increasing the national debt by 187%.
It took President Clinton 3 and a half years to borrow his first trillion dollars. All told, he borrowed $1.2 trillion in his first term, and $600 billion in his second. He increased the national debt by 140% in eight years.
George HW Bush borrowed his first trillion in 3 years, and he increased the National debt by 170% in four years.
Reagan borrowed his first trillion in 6 years, and doubled the National debt during his eight years in the White House.
Carter increased the National debt by 150%, but “only” borrowed $300 billion in 4 years. I guess that was when $1 Billion was real money.
Ford increased the debt by 147% in 3 years., Nixon by 135% in 5 years, Johnson by 116% in 6 years, Kennedy by 106% in 2 years, Eisenhower by 108% in eight years.
Democrats, and Republicans, both in a contest to see who can spend the most in our society of “how much can you give me if I vote for you.”
Remember when the Biden spokeswoman told us that borrowing trillions didn’t cost anything because it was already accounted for? Note that we weren’t really allowed to increase the debt until we divorced from the gold standard during the Nixon administration. Ever since then, spend, spend, spend. This nation creates money as fast as computers can create the 1′ and 0’s at the Fed. This can’t continue. By definition, anything that can’t continue, won’t. There is no amount of voting that will fix this.
JimmyPx makes a comment on my last post that I would like to address.
The first part is the statement that Social Security isn’t an entitlement. This is a common feeling, because many people seem to think that the term “entitlement” means free handout. That’s actually not what the term means. An entitlement is a government program guaranteeing access to some benefit, such as to welfare benefits or tax incentives, by members of a specific group and based on established rights. In other words, it’s called an entitlement because the recipient is entitled to it by law.
The second is his point that pensions are some kind of giveaway. Pensions, at least for fire personnel, I cannot speak for others, were intended as a bargain made to firefighters in lieu of pay. Back in the years following the Carter administration, fire departments were seeing lots of people leave for higher paying jobs in a private sector that was booming from the Reagan economy.
The problem is that the average hourly wage for a starting firefighter in Florida is somewhere around $17 an hour, not much more than the state’s minimum wage. Similar professions with similar education requirements get over $30 an hour. To solve this, the state kicked the can down the road by telling these employees that they could get a pension at the end of their career. This deferred the costs of higher pay.
It costs about 20% of payroll to supply a pension. This raised effective cost to about $20.40, which was still less than the cost of paying a competitive wage. The issue is that elected officials, not knowing much about economics, didn’t properly fund the pensions when they cut budgets so they could fund food pantries for illegal immigrant unwed mothers of anchor babies, as well other electoral baubles. This resulted in shortfalls that had to be made up by kicking the can down the road- just like the shortfall seen with Social Security.
So now you have people who continued working for you, even though the pay was lower, because they were looking forward to that pension. Twenty years later, they are ready to collect, and the city then tells them that they want to cut the pension because it’s too expensive. It’s akin to driving a car until it’s broken, then telling the dealer that you aren’t going to pay for it.
In my case, they took 3% of my gross pay in addition to the fact that I was paid less than my private sector counterparts. When I was approaching retirement age, they told me that they were changing the pension system. The biggest change was going to be that overtime would no longer be part of the calculation of your pension, even though they were still going to take 3% of my overtime pay. Since overtime was almost a third of what I was making, I decided to retire before the changes could take effect, even though it meant that I would get a lower pension amount. I now work as a nurse for a good deal more than I was making as a fire medic.
So we know that cutting pensions and Social Security are just ripping people off. We don’t want to cut the military. There are tons of things that the government does that one could make a good case against cutting them.
It doesn’t matter.
We are at the point where it is inevitable that the nation will collapse. All of those things will be unaffordable. They will all have to go.
It won’t happen until the collapse comes. When the checks don’t come, people will be PISSED. They will DEMAND that the government do something. History says that the something that they will wind up doing is some version of martial law.
The world’s largest bank, JPMorgan, has stated that attempts of Ukraine reconstructing their infrastructure have a 67% chance of failure. Of course, the MSM doesn’t want to hear that. They make plainly biased statements like this one:
[JPMorgan] was essentially wagering against the same Ukrainian agency that has consistently defied institutional expectations.
That statement is not only biased, but reliant on other nations continuing to borrow money that they don’t have, so they can continue to use it to bolster a failing Ukraine economy. Since the war began, the world has donated an amount equal to two years’ of Ukraine’s pre-war GDP. Since the war is only three years old, that is quite a large sum of money. I imagine if someone making $50k a year needed to borrow $100k over a three year period so they could pay their bills.
In the meantime, the nation is having its industrial and farming base systematically blown to smithereens. The only way that is going to be rebuilt is with LARGE amounts of free money. I agree with JPMorgan- any investment in Ukraine is likely to be lost.
The US isn’t far behind. Canada has been the largest of the central banks selling off US treasuries since the first of the year. In fact, just the month of January saw foreigners selling a net $13.3 billion of U.S. notes and bonds. That comes after $49.69 billion was sold in December, following sales of $34.41 billion in the month of U.S. elections, November. Before that, Central Banks had been buying for 15 straight months.
While dumping treasuries, central banks across the world have been selling before using the funds to buy gold. De-dollarization isn’t a new idea, but has taken a life of its own after the U.S. froze Russian assets. Central banks added 1,045 tons to global gold reserves in 2024, exceeding 1,000 tons of gold purchased for the third straight year. That’s why gold prices are surging. It seems that Central Banks are thinking that the US dollar isn’t the safe haven that it used to be.
With other nations, particularly China, in the middle of dumping US treasuries, the Fed is bolstering the dollar and attempting to keep the interest on the debt low. They are doing this by buying US treasuries, in other words, they are monetizing the debt- printing more money in order to pay the bills. The Fed purchased $43.6 billion in 30-year bonds during the second week of May alone.
Of the $37 in US government debt, the Fed holds about an eighth of it- 12%. The US government owns about 20% of that debt, mostly because they have to repay what they “borrowed” from the Social Security Trust fund. In other words, there is no trust fund, because they already spent it all.
The Fed is playing a game here- they are buying Treasuries when inflation is low, then selling them when inflation is high. This allows the country to pay back the debt using inflated dollars. Of course, we continue to borrow and spend at a rate that is higher than the Fed is monetizing it. That means it is in the Fed’s (and our government’s) best interests to have high inflation. Why? It allows them to spend more money, which is how they simultaneously buy votes and make themselves rich through graft, corruption, and kickbacks. As our debt gets larger, expect more of this.
That’s why the DOGE team found so much wasteful spending, yet weren’t able to get either party to cut any of it. For example, the US paid $10 million a year to fund circumcisions in Mozambique. Why are we paying for that? The powers that be claim that it’s to prevent the spread of HIV. That’s crap. For one, it isn’t in the US interest to pay for medical care for other countries, and for another, you can assume that most of that money is being wasted or redirected. We are borrowing ourselves into the poorhouse to pay for medical care for an African nation with money that we don’t have.
Yet when Elon Musk and DOGE found dozens of examples of wasteful spending, the members of both parties couldn’t find it in themselves to cut that spending. This is why Musk finally quit. His quote on Social Media was “I tried my best.” All it did was make him hated by half the country, while not doing a thing. The only thing you can conclude from this, is that the Republicans are just as crooked as the Democrats. They are all stealing us blind.
So what does all of this mean? It means that the nation’s economy, followed by its government, is going to collapse. I’ve been saying that on this blog for nearly the entire 18 years of its existence and was saying it to others for years before that. In fact, my econ professor in college, an avowed socialist, gave me low grades on a few papers for making those same claims in college papers.
Anyone who thinks that this fiscal ship can be righted is simply deluding themselves. This nation’s economic ship is going down like the Titanic, and the only question remains is what will replace it. History shows us that the new government will result in far less freedom and will be far more Orwellian, a result of the people who have lost their bread and circuses demanding that daddy government step in and restore their freebies.
Food for thought.
Global wealth manager UBS has released a report that says the government may make its growing debt more manageable by turning to additional financial repression measures that would artificially lower the yield on government bonds. The way that this works, is the government wouls be deliberately keep interest rates low and allow inflation to rise to devalue the government’s debt by paying the debt with inflated dollars.
This strategy lowers the interest rate on the debt, and makes it easier to pay the debt by making the interest rate on government debt lower than the rate of inflation, which allows the government to pay yesterday’s debt with today’s lower valued currency. This is yet another hidden tax, as savings and other assets denominated in dollars lose value to inflation faster than they gain value from returns.
“For a country as large and wealthy as the US, widespread financial repression seems feasible and could enable the government to continue financing a growing debt burden without materially increasing its risk of default.
Financial repression policies could be deployed temporarily to provide fiscal breathing room, allowing for budget consolidation and improvement, followed by a phase-out and a return to more conventional policy settings. In such a scenario, economic distortions should remain temporary and manageable.”
Yeah, right. When has the government, any government, instituted a temporary emergency measure that allowed them to spend more money? Once this begins, you will know that the fiscal ship is sinking. Physical assets that you control are the key to navigating this particular issue.
Hard times are a comin’
Last year, Sam’s Club bowed to pressure and increased their minimum wage to $16 per hour. Proving that the minimum wage is actually zero, the company announced this week that they will be eliminating all cashier and cash register positions.
The system will have customers scan items as they put them in their shopping cart, with the charges going to the customer’s credit card as they exit the store. An employee spot checks the cart of each customer as they exit. The system was rolled out in 2016, and it has been relatively popular with customers.
Other positions to be automated are automated forklifts and a pizza robot in the café.
Unskilled labor is pricing itself out of the market.
Seen on Twitter:
I freaking HATE the discourse around “useless degrees” that I’ve been seeing all day. Our society needs historians, philosophers, and English majors. Frankly, their decline is a huge reason our society lacks understanding of pol issues + the ability to scrutinize information
A useless degree is one that will likely result in its recipient not ever earning enough money to repay the costs associated with earning it. Here is a helpful guide of majors for four year degrees that are offered at University of Florida that are likely useless:
These degrees may well have value to the person taking the classes. There may even be people making a living in those fields. However, most people with these degrees won’t make enough to repay their loans, and that is the problem.
A four year degree from UF will cost you about $100,000. To repay a student loan for that amount within ten years, you would have to pay $1300 a month.
This problem is even worse when you stop talking about state colleges and look at private ones. Not only are there even more useless degrees, the cost of those degrees becomes even higher. Rollins College would cost you $340,000 for a four year degree. University of Miami, about $380,000. Imagine earning a degree in elementary education, only to graduate and find out that your teacher’s salary isn’t enough to pay your $4600 per month student loan payments. Even consolidating your loans to a 30 year repayment is a $2600 per month loan payment. A starting teacher makes $4200 per month before taxes.
Student loans should not be granted to people that will result in this kind of situation.