Let’s say you wee solid middle class and bought your forever home, in what was at the time, the near suburbs. Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable. The city might set a percentage of the home value as their target but now your well placed forever home is beyond your what your pension can afford. This happened a lot in Canada.

The worst part is that for all these taxes, the level of service has dropped since that home was bought.

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coryrc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Because boomers voted to defer fully funding pensions until later. Now it's later. We're paying for past work and current work.

In Washington State, Puget Sound Energy is a for-profit utility owned by mostly pension plans! Their guaranteed ROI is sucked out of the productive economy. Everywhere you look rent is being extracted either by the 0.01% or the elderly, and the working class must slave to get 1/10 what they gave themselves.

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ndriscoll an hour ago | parent [-]

At the level of an economy, I don't see how funding model can make a difference. Ultimately, there are now old people that want/vote for some level of service, and young people that provide it to them. The young people can and perhaps will at some point decide to revolt, or the old people will die.

Not an economist but I don't see how money can be anything other than an accounting tool at that level. If they had "paid for it" back in the day, young people would still be screwed.

The two big ways to increase prosperity that I see are for people to take care of their health so they need fewer medical services, and for fewer people to be devoted to administration (e.g. the medical billing quagmire, SaaS companies focused on how to better extract rent) or convincing people to buy stupid crap (c.f. the giant advertising industry that swallows up bright workers to build a surveillance and propaganda apparatus instead of e.g. industrial automation), fewer pointless wars, and more people devoted to actually doing things people need or building infrastructure (e.g. solar).

	▲	boplicity 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> there are now old people that want/vote for some level of service The problem isn't that there are old people, is that there's currently a glut of old people, which puts real strain on the system. Being old is expensive for governments. Not only do older people not typically pay nearly as much in taxes, they also require more resources to support. So many of today's problems come down to the simple demographic fact: there's a lot of baby boomers, and they're getting old.

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frmersdog an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is but one of the ways well-meaning people get displaced. And, frankly, th the is hypothetical family is the most fortunate of that class. They have equity and a pension. Playing my tiny Monoprice violin, from the 4th apartment I've lived in over the past 10 years (not including couch-surfing). And even I'm still on the "fortunate" side of the line, if just barely.

I don't think people really understand how bad it is out here. I imagine that if a dignified line on the base standard were held, there would be less of a need for this kind of middle-class pearl-clutching.

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guelo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't it better for society if retirees downsize to a retirement community and allow young families to move in to the neighborhood with schools and amenities?

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klardotsh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off, and quite well may have built up to support your own aging in place. Some people want a “forever home”, and that’s okay.

In some countries and cultures the good of the many comes before the good of the individual, no matter the sacrifices required to get there. The US (and to a slightly lesser degree, Canada) generally does not subscribe to such a cultural mantra.

Edit to add: for the cases where the societal good really does outweigh the personal good, we have a tool for that: eminent domain, which is how we build train lines and so forth.

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trylfthsk an hour ago | parent [-]

A point against: if someone was an early adopter in a community that urbanized over 30 years, in effect the increased value means their future ownership at present rates requires the collective subsidy of their neighbors. Young families subsidizing the elderly in this way is a huge issue in tax burden disparity where I live.

	▲	ndriscoll an hour ago \| parent [-]
		How so? e.g. anywhere I've looked, schools are a huge part of the budget. Special education alone is over 10% of the county budget where I live. Schools in total are over half of city+county. The elderly wouldn't be contributing to service demand there. They're likely also not going on tons of crime sprees necessitating police, generally another large budget item. Like another poster said, things like pensions and medicare might overall drain the entire economy, so the end result is the same, but that seems more diffuse than local tax bases, and wouldn't properly appear in local government budgets.

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atomicnumber3 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If we're going for a "better for society" angle, I have so many other things that are far more impactful for society and less damaging to the individuals that we will never get around to messing with evicting pensioners so younger families can use their spot to get to school.

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VLM an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Given the enrollment collapse we're not running out of space in our schools LOL such that we have to kick seniors out of their houses to make space.

They're also economically and socially viable participants in the community.

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VLM an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I live in a municipality that taxes like OP and you don't understand how OP described it. Lets try with easy numbers:

Y2K: buy an 1/8th of a million dollar house. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $1.25M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.

If your mental model is the city tax rate is 0.8%, that is ... numerically correct but its mere numerology.

2026: house is now worth 1/2 of a million dollars. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $5M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.

If your mental model is the city tax rate historically was 0.8%, then you'd have to pay $4K/yr, but it doesn't even remotely work that way, so it simply doesn't matter. Its just numerology. My fraction of total property ownership "value" times the annual village budget is what I'll be taxed, which in this case is the same old $1K.

In reality grandma gets kicked to the street because inflation raises the price of everything, including real estate, but real estate is not even remotely the problem or the solution. Grandma might have afforded a house and its taxes when a McDonalds Big Mac was 75 cents each but now that its $13.49 the village budget has gone up 10x, 20x what it was when she bought, so she better find a way to make 10x, 20x more money or not only is she not going to pay her fair share of the budget via taxes, she's not going to eat food either.

"Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable." Thats the real problem. No one can move in and pay the city budget, and the city budget explodes because now they have to pay the dog catcher at least $250K/yr to live there and nobody can afford to rob peter to pay paul quite that much...