New York Town Lets Poor Seniors Work to Pay Property Taxes
December 27th, 2007This is an unusually grim story, even by my standards. What’s the innovative solution for seniors who are lonely, broke and unable to pay their property taxes? Have them work for penury for the tax man!
Of course, the ghastly Associated Press represents this as a human interest/happy ending story. The seniors get to hang out in the community (working), and everyone benefits… Sure, it’s part of a revenue collection scheme, but isn’t it nice? Of course, people can’t even remember when elders were revered and integrated into the fabric of everyday life, or know that, in many countries, any politicians who suggested something like this would be taken out and shot on the spot. No. America is different.
What’s next? Positive spin on a minimum income law? Maybe the benefits to society of debtors prisons…
Just FYI: In New Zealand, in and around the more affluent areas, people who have owned properties for generations are being rated off their land. (In NZ, property taxes are called rates.) As long as property values increase, property taxes increase. Some farmers who make modest livings on land near the big cities are seeing increasing amounts of income being swallowed up in rate payments because of the skyrocketing values of property here. This is forcing them to choose between: 1) More intensive/destructive agriculture, or 2) selling/sub-dividing their property.
Via: AP:
Audrey Davison lives alone, gets a $620 Social Security check each month and worries about the sharply rising taxes on her four-bedroom house. Davison, 76, raised her family there and after 43 years, she really doesn’t want to leave Greenburgh.
Greenburgh doesn’t want her to leave, either.
The town is pushing a program that would let seniors work part-time, for $7 an hour, to help pay off some of their property taxes.
“People shouldn’t have to sell their house, move away to a place with less taxes, leave behind their family and friends,” said Town Supervisor Paul Feiner.
He envisions retired doctors mentoring schoolchildren, retired accountants helping with the town’s finances, retired lawyers offering their services for a discount. But there are plenty of less-skilled jobs that need doing, he said.
“It’s not like we’re going to see grandma running the snowplow,” he said. “There are lots of things people can do for the town and it wouldn’t cost us that much to pay them.”
The proposal has caused a stir in Greenburgh, a town of 90,000 in Westchester County, which has the nation’s third-highest homeowner property taxes. The plan would be unusual if not unique in New York, but similar programs are considered successes in Colorado, Massachusetts, South Carolina and elsewhere.
Davison, who suffers from arthritis and sciatica and needs a walker to get around on her bad days, said she pays about $12,000 a year in property taxes — perhaps $2,000 to the town — and has already taken out a reverse mortgage to pay her bills.
Talking to Feiner last week at the town senior center, she said, “I would work as long as it was a job where I could sit.”
“You could be a receptionist!” Feiner said. “You could greet people right here, when they come in.”
“That I would love,” Davison said.
In the midst of my Happy Holi-DAZE (mother sick), family here (that was the good part) I read this story in the local newspaper this morning and my whole being went into total outrage.
How the AP could spin this into some kind of “brotherly love” story is beyond my ken. How persons in the U.S and/or New Zealand can have their homes taxed or rated away from them is beyond comprehension to me and is enough for me to get out my writing axe.
In the state of PA, US, we have a tax forgiveness program – which in the light of this article seems so very magnanimous. It always seemed that it would be so shameful to imagine that I might have to fill out that form someday. I cannot pay my taxes. Forgive me! AS if that were a freaking crime. THE TAXES ARE THE CRIME!
To insist that anyone, anywhere, at anytime, especially an elderly person that cannot live within their income because of TAXES, to me, is JUST SO DAMN CRIMINAL.
Its one thing for the US FED to tax our freaking body parts off here in the US. But for state and local taxing authorities to make up the shortfall in FED revenue to the states by increasing local and state taxes because of the neverending wars only compounds the crime.
Where is the FREAKING SHAME that the SCROOGES of this world should and ought to feel for even thinking for a second that dragging a person out of their home, or driving them off of their land, to work off TAXES, or because they have been RATED off is somehow OKAY?
I FOR ONE think that this story should have us all shaking our fists in rage.
This is NOT ACCEPTABLE public policy. This is shameless greed. Taxation without representation has been around a LONG TIME. But the tax world (as I remember it) we are experiencing in the world today began with the Reagan. He started the “trickle down effect” talk that had all the rich salivating. The George Bush pushed this policy into reality with his so “needed” tax cuts for the rich.
After years of reading the endless blabbering about how great tax cuts for the rich are, and how much better it is to contract out public services to contractors is, I have concluded the following: What trickles down from tax cuts to the rich it seems, is the public DEBT. And the contracting of public services from government entities: Service COST MUCH MORE.
Somebody has to pay for these damn wars, and its you and me bro and sis. I don’t have a house in Farmington,NY, as well as one in the Hamptons maxed out in debt. But if I did, I could write that debt off on my taxes. PAY ONLY THE MINIMUM amount of tax. NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY I MAKE!
But Mom and Pop who own their property outright? They get to pay ALL of their taxes and they can’t write any of it off.
This is Public Policy to make war profitable on the backs of the not rich gone amouk. It makes no sense to the people affected by it but makes cents on the dollar for the tax collector.
History has shown that taxation without representation, or without a brain or a heart leads to revolution. People will eventually, slowly, but surely demand to see the face of the person who makes these policies. And the whores/operators sitting behind their computers figuring out how to “manufacture money?” from the locals in order to make up money lost to the wars will have their day of conscience. I laugh to think of it.
History majors and other politicos know, this is the stuff of revolution. The Boston Tea Party, the throwing off of King George and England, The French Revolution and its guillotine are some examples.
I say BAH HUMBUG. Off with their heads. Viva le revolution!
Humanity certainly is cruel. I don’t even want to think about how bad it’s going to be by the time I get old!