DeSantis proposes property tax relief
DeSantis has proposed providing one-time, $1,000 property-tax rebates this year to homeowners as a prelude to asking voters in 2026 to cut property taxes.
“The homestead (exemption) is great, but the homestead is limited in terms of how much benefits you get, and so your property goes up three times, you’re paying more, no question about it,” DeSantis said. “So how does it work where you’re having to pay $10,000 a year just in property taxes?”
Florida’s Homestead Exemption removes $25,000 off the assessed value of an owner-occupied home, condominium, co-op apartment or certain mobile home lots. It also provides up to another $25,000 of additional exemption off any assessed value over $50,000.
While that relief helps, DeSantis said, it’s not enough for many in the current real estate climate.
“You’re paying tax, you’re paying insurance, and then principal and interest is less than those two combined. And so this is difficult for people,” DeSantis said. “You should not be in a situation where you ever have to give up your home because you can’t afford the taxes.”
DeSantis argued that homes should function the same as other purchases, with a tax at the point of sale and no continued payments to the government after.
Of course, there’s that pesky problem of how to raise revenue for services. DeSantis is a practical sort of guy, so I assume he’s thought about that. I doubt property taxes will be abolished altogether, but perhaps for seniors and/or those who have owned their homes for a certain number of years? Or, introduce some alternative form of taxation not based on property ownership?
Property taxes are wealth taxes. It’s an extremely bad idea to tax wealth. In fairness, this particular wealth tax does a good job of targeting people connected to the community.
One of the problems with wealth taxes is that the metric for wealth is more malleable, or uncertain, than other metrics for say, income or sales. Worse, conceivably a person could experience higher taxes one year for ephemeral wealth gains that might disappear in another year.
How did we get property taxes in the first place? I’ve commented on this in the past. The Constitution does not allow for federal wealth taxes, or at least it didn’t before the income tax amendment. (Can they squeeze a loophole into the 16th amendment??) But property taxes are state or local.
We never had property taxes even at the state or local level until the panic of 1837 and the following great depression into the 1840’s. Even then, in the earlier phases there were no property taxes. The dubious solution to the debt problem that a number of states experienced was to stiff the lenders. Mostly Brits. The Brits weren’t having it, and eventually we got property taxes as a result.
While a number of states did have severe debt crises in that time period, not all of them did. Yet, we ended up with all states having property taxes. I wonder how that happened exactly? (Taxes as an infectious disease? Ha!)
America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837 Hardcover – Illustrated, April 15, 2012
by Alasdair Roberts (Author)
to be a bit more accurate, property taxes _did_ exist before 1837, but in a very different form. They were not a standard amount levied automatically over and over forever. Rather, a levy was a one-time tax that would get voted for and it was generally levied on property, land and buildings, because frankly thats the easiest thing to tax and its not something you can pick up and move somewhere else, or hide, etc. but besides poll taxes , ad-hoc levies on property did exist and were used to raise the funds for various things, as needed. they weren’t recurring rates to be paid forever, though. .
and lets never forget the other glaringly obvious difference between those days and these days: government at all levels was vastly smaller then. we need to get back to _that_ idea and the problem of onerous extractive taxation will disappear almost on its own.
Thanks for the clarification j-s-d.
As a resident of Fl I hope this goes through. The homestead exemption helps but one must wait several years for it to have a large effect. For us in a new house we are hit with a bill about 3k higher than our neighbors even though the houses are assessed similar. They’ve owned for 5 years and for the homestead there’s a depreciation.
Don’t forget that someone has to pay for local schools and local roads – both for initially producing them and regular maintenance. There are also local governing boards that have salaries that have to be paid. All paid by real estate taxes…although I’d agree that the amounts should be a flat predetermined rate, not necessarily based on the ever changing expected price of real estate.
Our PT goes up every 2 yrs, after reevaluations. Two yrs ago it was a real disaster. Rates went through the roof (I see what you did there), and a lot of protests. We have a process to go through to protest, but it really doesn’t work well. There is no real, fair way that they work out your house value. We have Homestead exemption, but it hasn’t gone up in years. Older people can be taxed out of their homes.
As for the comment about what PT pays for, yes that is true. But, they keep coming back for more without trying to cut or hold expenses. School district always asking for more money, for the kids. But the kids see little of it. Instead it seems School District keeps staffing up new departments.
Tabor is almost gone. We are really catching it in the shorts.
We’re having the same debate in Texas. There’s lots of interest in eliminating property taxes on homes, but not much attention given to how to raise funds to operate the government, since we don’t have state income tax here. Normally the idea seems to be sales tax, which at least has the advantage of being a tax on consumption rather than one on either earnings or wealth.
Property taxes are a terrible method of funding something like schools, which should be budgeting based on enrollments, not on property values.
When public schools are funded by property taxes, and property appreciates significantly (like in the Seattle metro area), they get more and more revenue which they expand their budget to spend. Property values drop, or the levy expires, and they want to keep up their bloated budgets so they soak the taxpayer again, doesn’t matter if there’s more or fewer kids enrolled. Same thing happens to our fire district, funded the same way.
In my town of 30,000, our middle school has an Astroturf field with fancy scoreboard and big lights–for 11 and 12 year olds to play flag football. Our district publishes a glossy magazine where you can see all the people who work there who have nothing to do with instruction.
@Wendy K Laubach:but not much attention given to how to raise funds to operate the government, since we don’t have state income tax here. Normally the idea seems to be sales tax
Fortunately Texas has its godawful franchise tax, on every taxable entity doing business in or formed in or organized in Texas. Texas knows quite well how to collect taxes. Online businesses find it a PITA.
I live in Washington, which also does not (yet) have state income tax, but we also have a godawful B&O tax, on gross business receipts. (Not profits, receipts.)
Physicsguy, did you perchance mean to cite Florida’s Save Our Homes program rather than the homestead exemption?
The SOH scheme was instituted many years ago, aimed at keeping seniors from being pushed out of their homes with increasing appreciation raising their taxes beyond affordable levels. I believe it mandates any yearly property tax increases can be no more than the rate of inflation or 3%, whichever is less. For those of us who have lived in the same house for over 30 years, our PT is about 35% of what it would be if we bought the same property at current market value.
Then again, our property insurance rates in FL also cover potential hurricane losses and our premiums are about double those that apply for similar structures in other states [at least in VA, MI, or MO].
I am also waiting to learn just where the replacement revenue is going to come from via DeSantis’s ideas, as FL is also a no-income-tax state [FL, TX, TN, WA, a few others] and sales taxes are generally in the 6-7% range for most counties
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While it might be nice to just pay specific fees for all of the various government services we would claim to want, that would end up being regressive for lower income folks, so the wealth oriented PT is progressive (and probably generally accepted partly on that basis).
The basic problem seems to be that “government,” wherever that government is and however it is structured, views “citizens” as Cash Cows to be forever milked.
Which, always, winds up as a one-way ratchet because there is no mechanism short of revolution by which the citizens can reduce the size and appetite of “government,” and even that drastic step usually results in just a different group performing the same dollar extractions under different labels.