Complimentary Story
Editor, Wisconsin Christian News:March 2026
The property tax is exploding again. You can never retire if you have to pay $7,982.80 a year in property taxes. You certainly can’t retire in a state that has a four percent per year school funding increase for 400 years. How is it, that in a house I paid off in 1998, in a free country, I have to pay eight thousand dollars a year to a bunch of greedy socialists?
In 2025, my property tax is $7,982.80, because the City of Milwaukee raised my assessment from $273,900 to $387,900, and all of my combined property taxes, thus were increased by 25 to 30 percent. I did not build an addition, nor did any remodeling. My 150-year-old house increased in “worth” by $114,00 dollars at the whim of a Democrat-Socialist bureaucrat.
Regarding affordability, that home value is a number you rent from the city. None of this is random. If you remodel, your assessment, and your property taxes increase. If a home-flipper remodels on your block, your “fair-market value” increases, not according to the market, but according to the assessor. It varies from town to town, but in most places, remodeling is something you and everyone who owns your home after you rents from city hall, and the rehabber is a threat to your existence. Home improvements should not be taxed annually in a free country.
When selling your house, the first thing a real estate agent asks is, “What is it assessed at?” And then that agent’s job is to top that number. Then the assessor ups that number. I have known former assessors who call it the “auction effect” and I have written about this criminal practice in the past. Who wins? the realtor, who makes a bigger commission, and the tax man. Both are vested interests engaging in legal plunder. Your home is where you live, and any man who wants to turn your home into a poker chip is the enemy. Your enemy, the enemy of America and the enemy of God. I agree with Trump’s statement, “people live in homes, not corporations.”
When Scott Walker capped property taxes at the rate of inflation, he left a loop hole called “the local referendum.” Referendums are direct democracy. Most referendums pass, and the pain is piling up. One of the lawless features of the mobocracy referendum is that all voters in a jurisdiction get to vote to increase the taxes of home-owners. That allows renters to “stick it to the home-owners,” or “landlords.” It is taxation with representation, when people who resent you, and are not directly subject to a tax increase can vote to raise your taxes, hence the old saw, direct democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.
Then there is the 50 year, 75 year, Century long, million-year mortgage which will inflate home prices to an astronomical total. A mortgage is something you are expected to repay, but when interest rates, and money down requirements were eased up, under Bush 43, that allowed filthy people to take out more filthy debt, thus ballooning housing prices. Even when the subprime mortgage crisis hit, and many debtors lost their homes, housing prices didn’t come down.
It will take a return to a thrifty, family-based capitalism, with old-fashioned sensible loan requirements, and the criminalization of inflammatory pricing practices to solve this problem. And remember, this problem was caused by socialists on the one hand, and libertarians on the other hand. If the property tax were to be abolished, this problem could be solved much quicker.
-Riley J. Hood, Milwaukee, Wis.
