There’s an AI-generated, 30-track album dedicated to abolishing Ohio’s property taxes. In New Jersey, citizens are breakdancing at town meetings to protest tax hikes. These aren't isolated incidents; they're data points suggesting a coordinated, emotionally charged revolt against one of the oldest and most functional forms of taxation in the country.
The narrative is simple and compelling: Baby Boomers, many on fixed incomes, are being priced out of their long-held homes by skyrocketing property values and the corresponding tax bills. Their illiquid net worth is soaring, but their cash flow is not. The proposed solution, championed by activists like Ohio’s Brian Massie, is equally simple: "starve the beast" and eliminate the tax entirely.
But this is a dangerously simplistic solution to a complex liquidity problem. The movement, fueled by a potent mix of genuine financial pain and generational resentment, fundamentally misdiagnoses the illness. It’s akin to treating a fever with decapitation—effective, perhaps, but the side effects are catastrophic. The push to axe the property tax isn't a brave stand for the common man; it's a fiscally incoherent proposal that would trigger a systemic breakdown in local governance and execute a massive, one-sided wealth transfer from the young to the old. This is the central argument in reports like Boomers Push to Eliminate Property Taxes Would Hurt Millennials, Gen Z.
The Anatomy of a Flawed Revolt
Let's be clear about the numbers. Property taxes are not a rounding error in municipal budgets. According to the Tax Foundation, they account for 27.4% of all state and local tax collections, making them the largest single source of revenue. At the local level, the dependency is far more acute, with property taxes funding approximately 70% of all local revenue nationwide (in many states, it's 80% or 90%). This is the money that pays for schools, fire departments, police, road maintenance, and libraries.
To suggest replacing this is, to put it mildly, fanciful. Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation notes that doing so is "virtually impossible in most states, at least without avoiding substantial economic harm." The sheer scale of the revenue hole would require impossibly high sales or income taxes, which are far more volatile and economically distorting. And this is the part of the analysis that I find genuinely puzzling: The proponents of abolition rarely present a credible, scaled replacement. The argument begins and ends with "stop taking my money."
The current frustration is understandable. Home values have increased by an inflation-adjusted nearly 27%—to be more exact, 26.8%—since 2020 alone. For a retiree on a fixed income, a sudden 25% increase in their tax bill feels abstract and punitive. They are, as the argument goes, sitting in the same house with the same leaky faucet, yet the government claims it’s suddenly worth more and demands a larger check.
This is where the diagnosis goes wrong. The problem isn't the tax; it's the mismatch between asset valuation and cash flow. The anger is directed at the tax bill because it's the most visible, tangible part of the equation. As tax policy expert Kyle Pomerleau notes, you "internalize the tax burden" when you have to write a check directly to the government, unlike income taxes which are quietly siphoned from your paycheck. But eliminating the tax doesn't fix the underlying issue. It simply transfers the cost of the problem onto everyone else.
A Predictable Intergenerational Collision
This isn't a new experiment. We have a case study for what happens when a generation successfully revolts against property taxes: California’s Proposition 13, passed in the 1970s. It capped property tax collections and limited assessment increases until a property is sold. The result? A massive distortion in the housing market and a stark generational divide.
The data shows that Prop 13 created a powerful incentive for older homeowners to never move. Why would you, when your assessed property value is a fraction of your neighbor's, who just bought their home? This policy has been directly linked to California’s housing shortage. It chokes supply by keeping empty-nesters in large family homes, which in turn drives up prices for younger buyers. Across the country, we see a similar trend, with 40% of older homeowners now staying in their homes for 20 years or more. This bottleneck has helped push the median age of a first-time homebuyer to a record 38 years old.
The current movement seeks to replicate this effect on a national scale, but with a more extreme demand: not a cap, but total abolition. This is a direct attack on the social contract. The argument from activists like Massie—"I've been in this house 20 years, and I've paid over a hundred thousand dollars for local education. I've never sent a child"—is a perfect encapsulation of the "radical individualistic" mindset historian Seth Coltar describes. It fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of communal taxation.
You don't pay school taxes as a fee-for-service for your own children. You pay them as an investment in the community that makes your property valuable in the first place. Good schools, safe streets, and reliable infrastructure are precisely why land appreciates in value. To demand the benefit of that appreciation while refusing to fund its source is a demand for a free lunch.
The irony is that younger generations are already propping up a system that disproportionately benefits the old. A 27-year-old like Cameron Mulvey pays Social Security taxes he may never see, funding a system for the same retirees who resent paying for the local schools his future children might attend. You can argue about the long-term solvency of Social Security, but you can't argue that property taxes are a one-way street. They are the primary mechanism by which property wealth is recycled back into the community that creates it. Severing that link doesn't "starve the beast"; it starves the ecosystem.
More sensible solutions exist. "Circuit breakers" can provide tax relief when a bill exceeds a certain percentage of a low-income household's earnings. Levy limits can control the overall revenue a locality collects, forcing fiscal discipline without the market-distorting effects of individual caps. These are nuanced tools for a nuanced problem. A sledgehammer is not.
An Inevitable Zero-Sum Game
My analysis suggests this movement isn't truly about tax policy. It's an attempt to solve a personal balance sheet problem by rewriting public fiscal policy for an entire country. The proposal to eliminate property taxes is a declaration that one generation's cash-flow convenience is more important than the public infrastructure, educational systems, and social fabric that all other generations rely on. It is a shortsighted and selfish attempt to pull up the civic ladder, converting decades of shared public investment into a private, untaxed windfall for a select group. The numbers don't support it, and the second-order consequences—gutted public services and cratering property values—would be an economic self-immolation.
