Don't be upset. Real men are tough enough to go to a salon and get the full up hand and pedi. If you get some comments like "sorry your vag is sore..." f*ck 'em. You do what you want.
Yup, that's how it works. Some places have property tax north of 3%! With property tax, the government siphons off a large percentage of your appreciation... and if you don't pay them, they take your house! Where I live in Colorado, property taxes mostly run ~0.5%
When the government has "first claim" on you property, you don't really "own" it... now do you? The government is there to support itself. The people are just slaves and tax donkeys.
Well it's significant because allows me to make a comparison with owning stocks. If you own property in the US, this level of taxation means effectively your assets depreciate by 0.5-3% per year. With stocks your asset APPRECIATES by 0.5-3% per year (dividend yield). It's far-fetched connection but maybe there's a perverse feedback loop between stock prices and the ever-depreciating value of property. Ignoring labor as source of money, how do you pay for property taxes? Well sort of use your property as collateral to get a loan to buy stocks to get dividends to pay for taxes for the otherwise depreciating property value. So there's an incentive for the stock prices to keep going up forever, but in fact the overall value remains the same. Inflation in other words. Anywayz, what I found out is that Americans consider normal to lose 3% of their capital every year, good to know for when I'll be selling investment advice
Honestly, I don't think most Americans see it as the government sucking-off their appreciation. Then again, most Americans are financially naive. Still, you have to live some place. If you're a property "owner", you pay the tax or else. If you rent, the property tax in factored into your rent by your landlord... so you pay it anyway whether or not you recognize it.
Not sure I can really agree with this... the money to pay property tax comes out of your pocket, or from your wages, or from rental income collected on the property itself. It does not reduce the value of the property. Historically, in most parts of the USA, during most periods of history, real estate values have gone up over time--not down. BMK