The property tax is wrong. People make choices on how to spend their money. People take trips to Las Vegas every month, buy new cars every three years, go out to eat every night, or blow their money at “gentlemen’s clubs.” This is the United States of America. If that is what they want to do with their money, that is their business. But if a person chooses to spend more of their money on a house, then all of a sudden it becomes the business of the city, county and school district who tax you more because that is what you chose to do with your money.

My wife and I are building a new house and were shocked at how much the property taxes are. The estimated property tax was 48% of the payment against the loan. We will build a house with 35% less square feet than what we originally intended so that we can pay the property taxes.

Leviticus 27:30 requires a tenth of the produce of the land – “One-tenth of the produce of the land, whether grain from the fields or fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord and must be set apart to him as holy.”¹ The great thing about this is if you are required to bring in more produce, it is because you had a bigger crop. This is the good thing about income tax – if you pay more tax, it is because you made more money. That is not necessarily true of the property tax. Leviticus 23:22 instructed people to leave some grain in the field for the poor – “When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop. Leave it for the poor and the foreigners living among you. I am the Lord your God.”²

You do not see anything in the Bible resembling a property tax. God knows what Supreme Court Justice John Marshall understood – the power to tax is the power to destroy.³ The Ottoman Empire taxed based on trees; so people cut down trees to avoid paying the tax.⁴ Is it really a good idea to tax people based on the value of their property? I would gladly pay a onetime, up front, sales tax as part of the purchase of the house rather than be indebted to the government for the rest of my life for having a house.

Terry Read

1. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+27
2. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+23
3. http://www.americanminute.com/index.php?date=09-24
4. http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=3666&mn=693100&pt=msg&mid=12347218