Would you pay your hydro bill if it told you how much to pay, with no breakdown on how much electricity you used? So why do we pay our property tax without any idea of what you are paying for? That’s why, I have created this app. You put in your property tax dollars and it will spit out an itemized list of where your money is being spent. Try it.
I read through most of those links, only one of them indicated that a single family home was generating less revenue for the city than it cost to maintain, and even that was considered a slight discrepancy.
Where I live, there are no state income taxes, so most of the money for the state's budget comes from homeowners in the form of property taxes, and business and use taxes.
So the less somebody makes, and the more lower class that they live, the less they contribute to the overall property budget for the city county and state that they live in, and the more that they make and the more upper class that they live, the more they contribute to the overall property budget for the city, county, and state that they live in.
My boss lives in an eight million dollar house, right in the most beautiful part of the downtown area, and his property taxes are astronomical. He pays more in property tax alone than I pay on my entire mortgage each year, and he does not get anywhere near the kind of support the money he's paying would cover for that.
So, it's a very highly regional thing. If you own a home and your property taxes are 1% or less of your annual income, then you're probably not contributing enough.
But if your property taxes are 2 percent or more of your annual income, then you're paying more than enough.
And at that level, if cities, counties, and states want more money to cover their budgets, then they should work really hard to bring in new businesses that will pay employees more money so that property values would increase, so that property taxes would increase.