Karen Collier writes: The ideal here would be to cap taxes on people at age 65. �Let them pay taxes at the same rate until they sell their home. �You can keep upping the valuation, but the taxes stay the same. �This would allow retired people to stay in their homes longer instead of being priced out of their homes by the taxes. �When they sell then the back taxes would be deducted from the proceeds of the sale.
I write: My dad is 73 and not retired. I appreciate Karen trying roughly to do what progressives always aspire to do: tax based upon ability to pay. However, age is simply too blunt an instrument to accomplish this goal. A purer progressive form of taxation (those with less pay less) would be a city income tax - but that would create some powerful incentives for rich folk to flee the city, if Minneapolis is alone in imposing such a tax. While the city's property taxes are higher than in the suburbs, the difference (for most) is not high enough to mitigate the advantages of living in high-value Minneapolis neighborhoods. I know some people believe that city taxes should be levied strictly by how the individual uses city services - more like a flat tax. Realistically, that hasn't been the case for decades, I suspect. (We do pay fees for services like sewers.) The city has long had a wealth tax...based on property (more stable) instead of income (see big disadvantage above). And of course, property taxes have their own non-progressive disparities: apartment dwellers taxed at three times the residential rate (mitigated in the recent tax bill), etc. When I first moved to Minneapolis and rented for 14 yars, I was a huge fan of the "circuit breaker" system, which back then had some real teeth. The circuit breaker imposes an income filter on a property tax base - if you paid high property taxes and had a low income, you got a bigger tax credit. (And of course, higher-income people and higher-valued commercial/non-homestead property paid more to provide that tax credit.) I'm sure there are a million workable problems with Minneapolis adopting a city-specific circuit breaker, but if you're looking to give low-income people a break, this is probably a fairer way to do it than age...if you are a make-less, pay-less progressive. As for Karen's intriguing idea about forestalling property taxes until a property is sold, I'm sure there are reverse mortgages that the elderly couple could take out. However, there are probably big fees in that. Again, it would be interesting to see if the city could set up a loan program that could do it for less. David Brauer Kingfield - Ward 10 Proud owner of a 3.8 percent property tax hike for 2002...about 80 bucks. Then again, we just refinanced and our house was appraised at more than triple what we paid in 1994. _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
