Tuesday, June 12, 2007

TampaBay Talks Taxes at TroxBlog

Over a hundred TampaBay readers weighed in at this week's Live chat at TroxBlog. The topic was property taxes and Howard Troxler led discussions from Tallahassee. The transcript is well worth the read.
Here are a few highlights:
Dave
One of the problems that residents perhaps are unaware of is that overseas buyers have lost most of their gains due to the fall in the value of the dollar. My property has appreciated perhaps 70 pct but with the fall in the dollar that an increase of 45% over 8 years just about the rate of inflation and that's before cap gains taxes.

Carolyn Fay Gee, Howard, I can't wait to see what the legislature does with property tax cuts now that I know what they did for homeowner's insurance! I just received my homeowner's refund from Universal Property & Casualty (based in Ft. Lauderdale) for the grand sum of $1.00! You're reading that right, my discount for April 2007 through April 2008 is $1.00 on a $774.00 policy, so I've gotten a .00129% reduction.

PattyP. I've tried the last few months to follow the property tax debate and freely confess that I'm as lost as ever, which I'm sure is probably the whole point on the part of FL's state legislators. However, I can't help but think this is simply a scam by the Republican-controlled Legislature to starve cities and counties of needed tax revenue by keeping local taxes from them, while redistributing funds from the state to the local levels, with naturally more funds going to Republican-controlled localities regardless of whether it's needed there or not.


The talk is intelligent, backed by facts and civil. Read the entire transcript.

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