Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Visited Piper today, to straighten out the 2007 NYS taxes. NYS still thinks I owe another $313. I paid it in November, the check was cashed, but they don't seem to have a record of it. Piper has made some calls, and has promised to have it cleared up by Thursday.
Anyway, he and I and another guy got into a discussion of local taxes. The town (in NY, that's a subdivision of a county) budget has gone up again by 8%, and Piper has heard that the tax bills (to be mailed out this week) are that much higher.
I don't understand.
There has been an enormous amount of construction in the town in the past few years. There's a huge condominium complex opening on the edge of the village - each unit selling for $500,000 (each!). A 100-house planned village was built just east of here. There's a LOT of building going on. I don't know who's buying the units, but they are selling. The builders are responsible for putting in the roads and utilities, and yes, I understand that they increase the cost of town services --- BUT --- they also increase the tax base!
So if the budget goes up by 8%, shouldn't the increase be covered by the increased tax base? Shouldn't the individual portion of the budget be coming down? Why is it necessary to increase everyone's taxes by 8%? It doesn't make sense to me.
We get to see the details of the budget, but we never get to find out how much was actually collected. We trust that no more was collected than was approved. It seems to me that if they increase everyone's taxes by 8%, AND the tax base has increased so that properties that didn't exist are now paying, then the total amount collected will be MORE than the 8% increase approved. Is that legal? And if so, where does the overage go?
I really don't understand any of this.
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Up, and never down, seems to be the usual.
About two years ago, when the prices of real estate was getting past ridiculous, the county reappraised everybody's property for tax assessment. (Although the assessed value of my house went up by 30%, it didn't bother me because as long as everybody's went up, the actual amount of my taxes would stay the same.) Now the prices are dropping precipitously, but will the county reappraise/adjust again? Yeah, sure.
The bad part is that when a house sells now at way below the assessed value, the sales value becomes the assessed value for taxes, so eventually those of us who don't sell, and are still taxed under the old (artificially high) assessed value, will be paying a higher proportion of the taxes. Not fair.
Remember along about the '70s or so, when something nasty was going on south of the border, and coffee and chocolate became very hard to get? And the cost of a chocolate bar went from 25 cents to 75 cents, AND they got smaller? Well, when the hostilities were over, the price of chocolate didn't drop. 'Member that? Same with sugar a few years before. Sugar never came back down.
And this summer, when gas was $4 or more per gallon, and all those folks started tacking on surcharges because "the cost of transportation has gone so high"? Well gas came down (one wonders why gas, but nothing else - we accuse Exxon of gouging, but not Hershey's?), but we're still getting hit with that surcharge. I've asked people why, and they look me straight in the eye and say, "Well the cost of transportation is so high...". Nah. They just got used to that surcharge and see no reason to give it up.
Prices are coming down now, but only for discretionary purchases, things that don't wear out, that you can put off buying. I hear it's a great time to buy a car. Unfortunately, it's not a great time to cash out investments to buy that car.
Especially when I've gotta pay taxes.
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2 comments:
The only thing I know of, other than gas, that went up then down is milk. As a big fan of dairy, this makes me happy.
I pay $5K / year for the privilege of living in Pleasantville. Gah. And they've closed the library on Sundays, never plow my street, and this doesn't include garbage pickup.
I pay a hair over $6,000/yr local property taxes in this rural area. It feels worse when I realize that's $500 a month. No water, no sewer, no garbage pickup (that's another $23 a month, and I put garbage out only once a month, so that's a reduced "widow's rate"), wires are strung on poles, I have no children in school, and the tiny library is open only a random two or three hours a day on random days - whenever they can get volunteers to open it.
But the street does get plowed. Last, because it's a dead end. And because it's plowed last, the trucks dump the remainder of their salt/gravel loads. There's so much gravel on the street now, you slide on the gravel as much as on snow or ice. The excess salt is weakening the trees, which then fall on the wires.
$500 a month, and my house is average for this area, or even a bit smaller (1750 sq ft, 1.3 acres).
When I paid off the mortgage from Jay's insurance, I thought I'd be living rent/mortgage free, but this feels every bit like rent.
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