The American dream is slipping away for many young Americans, as life becomes increasingly unaffordable — especially home ownership. Soaring home prices and interest rates and a housing shortage bar younger generations of people from purchasing a house. Today, the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 years old.
Many ideas are being tossed around regarding how to bring home ownership back into the realm of possibility for young families — most notably President Trump’s polarizing 50-year mortgage proposal.
But Sara Gonzales, BlazeTV host of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered,” says we’re ignoring a simple solution: eliminate property taxes.
Right now in the state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) is aggressively pushing for the elimination of property taxes, condemning them as “rent to the government.”
Abolishing property taxes, says Sara, is a “standard conservative position.” “You should not have to buy a home and then spend 20, 30, 50 years paying off that home, and yet you still never truly own your home because you would still pay rent to the government,” she says.
And yet there are conservatives who oppose the elimination of property taxes, claiming it encourages older homeowners to hoard inventory.
“So you’re basically saying … we should what? Kick all the oldies out of the homes that they’ve paid for so that young people can buy them up? Like, I’m sorry, are we conservatives or are we not?” asks Sara.
Further, senior tax caps allow older homeowners to pay significantly less in property taxes than younger homeowners, meaning Boomers are already incentivized to not sell. But if we were to enforce higher taxes on our senior population, as some conservatives suggest, we’re now guilty, Sara argues, of the same thing we criticize socialists for — taxing the rich.
Another pro-property-tax argument is that the tax accounts for significant funding for education. But public schools, says Sara, aren’t something most true conservatives want to fund anyway because “they’re indoctrinating your children.”
If we really want to make sure the essentials, like police and fire services, are well funded, we should first look at eliminating all waste, fraud, and abuse. If it’s out of control at the federal level, then it’s almost certainly out of control at the local level, says Sara.
All in all, eliminating the property tax benefits everyone, says Sara. Not only will it prevent people from being forced to pay lifetime rent to the government, but when older homeowners eventually do die, younger families have a better chance of affording those vacant homes because they’re not inheriting enormous property taxes.
“Take this into consideration,” says Sara.
“Say you have parents who are wealthy because they’ve worked hard and they own a lot of land … that they would like to give to you when they die. Consider you will not even be able to keep your parents’ property or home with the astronomical property taxes that you will owe at the end of every year on land and a home that they already paid for.”
“If you’re young and you ever want to own a home, you should recognize that [property taxes are] a problem for everyone. So let’s solve the problem for everyone.”
To hear more, watch the episode above.
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Sara gonzales, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Blazetv, Blaze media, Housing crisis, Home ownership, Boomers, Property tax, Ron desantis, Abolish property tax
