In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund. This excludes the seperate schools tax which is property based. Health care costs drive up many costs in the US including all libality insurances. The second part of this tax mess comes from the excessive military budgets since the late 1970s most of our national debt as of the mid 1990s was from that waste of resources. I understand we shouldn't just cut abruptly but our spend on weapons needs to slowly decline while we fund the transfer of workers out of the military industrial complex. And there are a lot of structural accounting problems like how personal credit card and automobile financing isn't tax deductbable but leveraged buyout interest is. The tax exemption for share buybacks is another budget drain. My instinct is we need a universal national income tax along with a land tax that in some ways exempts housing up to some middle or upper middleclass level.

> In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund.

That is an insane statistic. Surely the state can throw some weight around to say enough is enough?

I just had my own insane encounter with healthcare. They "accidentally" billed us insurance rate which was about 4-5x more than self-pay. Why is there 4-5x overhead when dealing with insurance? (I know there's the negotiation stuff) but also seems to be quite a mess. I'm actually more mad at hospitals and clinics lately than insurance. Seems they have agreements with companies to "dispense" things at 4-5x the actual price, expecting insurance or taxpayers to pick up the tab. Seems like blatant fraud.

Sorry for the rant, I agree with everything else you mention :)

> In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund.

Chicago..hold my beer. 80% of taxes here go to funding pensions for 2% of city population. Our parking meter money goes to gulf countries because we sold them to pay for city services back in 08.