Strange he cannot afford 134. He has articles in his house he could have sold no?
Left with Nothing
151–160 of 287 posts
Re: Left with Nothing
#152Can someone point me to the laws and regulations that allow this? Someone who owns their home completely (with no mortgage) can lose the entirety of the home due to unpaid taxes? Even if the value of the home far exceeds the tax debt? This is mindboggling to me.
The local county government can put a lien on your real property for failing to pay your property taxes, in some places, even for not mowing your lawn (an exaggeration of property maint. codes). In Texas, investors can buy a "Tax Deed" at auction. The property owner has two years to buy the lien back, for a defined price, IIRC the taxes owed + 50% for each year. After the 2 yr repayment window, the purchaser of the t…
Are tax liens different from other kinds? It's my impression that if e.g. a lender repossesses, they sell the house, pocket what you owe plus fees, and have to give you the rest back. It's strange to think it would be different for unpaid property taxes. Was Coleman truly "left with nothing" or did he get a portion of the sale proceeds?
Re: Left with Nothing
#153I don't mean to be taking the wrong side here but I'd be interested to know why didn't he didn't pay the money (It seems he was given warning).
If he couldn't pay then I'm surprised he didn't sell his TV/remorgage his house/borrow money/ask friends or family to help or something. Perhaps I'm naive and he really couldn't do anything about this but it would have been nice if the article had covered this.
Yes this is awful but I don't like the suggestions from some that the government simply shouldn't try to collect small debts. Surely no one would pay small debts they have then?
Re: Left with Nothing
#154Sorry but WTH?!! 134/197000 is 0.068%. And if this was not enough, I read this - A 95-year-old church choir leader lost her family home to a Maryland investor over a tax debt of $44.79 while she was struggling with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with people in the world.
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Re: Left with Nothing
#155How is there not a huge angry thread about this not being appropriate for hacker news. Seriously guys. Flag this.
Re: Left with Nothing
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, maybe the difference is that I live in a democracy, where we vote for people who set budgets, and often vote directly on the taxes ourselves. So the only people threatened by force here are those who try to be free riders on the system that the people have jointly set up. It may be different where you are.
No difference. Why do US citizens have to pay for wars and killing a great number of innocent people in them, or Guantanamo, or NSA, or TSA... when the majority clearly opposes it? Democracy is a nice myth, which gives surfs a false feeling of satisfaction and control, obscuring the reality, which is that you are being robbed. "You can always leave", as has been noted before, is another myth: yes, spend 5-6 years on…
In a democracy, the government and the citizens are not different parties; they are citizens and their incentive is that they have to live here as well even after they're no longer in power. To say governments never care about their citizens is silly, a government is not one mind, it's a collection of said citizens.
Re: Left with Nothing
#157Sorry but WTH?!! 134/197000 is 0.068%. And if this was not enough, I read this - A 95-year-old church choir leader lost her family home to a Maryland investor over a tax debt of $44.79 while she was struggling with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with people in the world.
Not in the world. Only in the "Land of the free".
Re: Left with Nothing
#158The article doesn't come out and say it, but the impetus for tax sales is that foreclosure proceedings are pretty onerous and take forever. At the same time, property taxes are the primary source of revenue for the local government and must be collected. So it doesn't seem ridiculous at face value to sell the debt to private investors and let them do the collection while being able to recoup the fees involved in foreclosure which can legitimately run into the thousands because the foreclosure is a process that drags on for six months or more (with various redemption windows after that which can be a year or more).
I'm skeptical of the "lien holder gets the equity" claim because it doesn't work that way outside of DC or in foreclosure generally, so I'd be very surprised it it wasn't a misunderstanding on the part of the author.
This article talks about DC tax lien sales, and doesn't mention keeping equity: http://taxlieninvestingpro.com/category/statebystateguides/d.... It looks like a regular judicial foreclosure.
Re: Left with Nothing
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Property taxes are very progressive and we should absolutely have more of them. The naivete, here, is of course, that the wealthy don't have more resources to protect themselves against property taxes or reduce their burden, or deal with enforcement, or mitigate corruption by the state. In reality though, there is no "rules scheme" you can construct that will be as progressive as you want . You'll tack on more rules…
Property is harder to hide than other forms of wealth. You can hide your money in an offshore bank account. It's pretty hard to hide land. If there's a piece of land, someone should be paying the land tax on it (if whoever owns it is hiding, the people can grab it back). So land tax is fair and progressive (the more land you own, the more tax you pay).
Gaming the property tax system is not a binary proposition. How do you assess its value? How does the state choose whom to go after?
Did you even read the WaPo article? Do you not see how the existence of a property tax has come around to hurt exactly the most vulnerable population (and in this case, through no directed malice) I promise you, people living in Palisades (the richest part of DC) are not worried about property tax liens because they can pay people to deal with paying the taxes (either legally, say hiring an admin, or extralegally). It's not progressive because the bureaucracy and the hammer of the state causes a greater fundamental inconvenience to those of less means than to those of greater means.
As to the hammer, do you think the DC government would have sent "armed US marshals" to recover the house if it were in the Palisades? Why or why not?
Re: Left with Nothing
#160How is there not a huge angry thread about this not being appropriate for hacker news. Seriously guys. Flag this.
Start your own forum if you don't like what the community votes for.