A tax on a home not deriving income does not fit any normal person's definition of a wealth tax.
It's fundamentally a tax on wealthier people among a community.
We really going to sit here in 2026 and pretend the people who wrote down all these rhetorical circumlocutions weren't just making up language to justify their supposed expertise/their social moat? All of the legal system was wielded by generationally rich families to screw have nots. The entire American system of history.
Strip away the ornamental language of the law and just see the ground truth; a person with means to buy the house pays a tax on it all. A poor person never pays a tax because they never own a home.
What is this? Why does everyone feel like they stepped out of the middle ages where dark tongues still exist and the ornate incantations of superstitious people still rule?
It doesn't need to be logically as complicated and intentionally obscured (in my opinion legalese has been to manipulate the illiterate which were the majority back in the day).
Such social conservatism is holding society back.
Also, how are you gonna be complaining about "rhetorical circumlocutions" and posting that diatribe at the same time.
Like side by side my posts and tax code ... the tax code would look less verbose?
Legal obfuscation often conjured back in the day by local rich politicians and a judge who bbq on weekends, colluded to convince an innumerate illiterate local they best accept just being screwed by the local political feifdom...is somehow preferable to defining our own social norms; history makes it clear of course the people of the past had it all correct!
Functional illiteracy in the raw; no ability to reason outside the tropes of your childhood education.
Without a new JS framework or devops tool to babble about and leverage as a social moat in the job market this forum is no different than Reddit and X; incurious worker bees dancing like monkeys for coin jangling around grandpa billionaires pocket.
Many taxes have exemptions. You get a "personal exemption" on your income tax. You don't pay tax on 100% of social security income because of another exemption.
A "property tax" is a wealth tax that simply has exemptions for all of your wealth stored in stocks/bonds/anything-that-isn't-real-estate.
It's not though, it's levied on the assessed value of the house regardless of the stored value. A fully paid off house and a mortgage a month old at 90% LTV have the same property taxes if they are assessed at the same price. It would have been disingenuous to tell everyone who was underwater on their mortgages after the housing collapse in 2008 that they had so much wealth in the their houses based on the fact that they still had to pay property taxes.
People determined not wealthy enough to get a mortgage do not pay property taxes on a house they are not wealthy enough to own.
Those wealthy enough to own a house pay property taxes; ergo wealth tax.
Over the years different explanations were written down as legal justifications "why it's different than this other very similar scenario" but people of the past were just making something up to not look hypocritical; someone with the means is taxed more for the privilege is how it goes. Poor people don't pay taxes.
Poor people (typically) don't pay income taxes.
This is why it's worth knowing the difference between progressive and regressive taxes.
It's like scaffolding out the Windows pipes screensaver in your head; endless bends and bends while no pipes actually exist. There is no spoon; it's just primates parroting the bird song they have been whistling since youth.
At least it closes the loop hole where you borrow against your stock and never pay taxes on it because you never sold it.
If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield.
People bring up a loophole that does exist, and assume that everyone uses it. Welp, like most of these "1%" discourse, its pretty damn rare.
https://taxprofblog.aals.org/2026/06/16/fox-and-liscow-the-r...
> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.
> Buy-borrow-die is a real loophole, and in absolute terms the rich borrow a lot...
Also, not all states apply property taxes the same. In my state, my house is assessed often by the government and then my taxes rise based on the value of my house.
Property tax is a tax on specific property (usually we are talking about real property, but I've paid e.g. property tax on a car). It is usually irrespective of wealth.
Someone who buys a house with cash and their neighbor who is underwater on their mortgage and at risk of insolvency will pay the same tax.
Note also that you rarely see property taxes on e.g. valuable jewelry because unlike real property and cars, both of which have ownership centrally registered, jewelry is not centrally registered.