The Post and Courier has a story out today about one of the losers in the state’s property tax cap plan. Approved in 2006, the law applies a 15 percent cap on the reassessment of property. In doing so, the state approved an immediate reassessment to full market value when a property is sold, providing county’s with an opportunity to quickly capture the property tax dollars lost under the cap.

While I disagreed with the cap personally, I understand that there are sympathetic losers in the game of rising property values. Of all those losers, the least sympathetic is the guy who spent $267,000 on his home, but assumed that he’d be able to sneak through a few years of paying taxes for only $180,000 (what the previous property owner was paying).

We bought our house last year and, while we left the ins and outs of the property taxes to the escrow folks, we in no way assumed that the home would be valued for taxing purposes at anything less than what we bought it for! To complain about having to pay the taxes on your home based on what it is actually worth is ridiculous.

But the P&C finds a guy.

“We understand the need to pay our fair share of taxes, and we readily do that because we appreciate the services, but it’s difficult to understand why we would pay more than our neighbors,” Jay Lutz said.

The problem is that, under a cap system, there is no such thing as a “fair share.” The days of similar houses on the same street having the same tax bill have gone the way of the dodo so that the little old lady on the block doesn’t pay an exploding  tax bill on a home she expects to die in (a truly sympathetic figure).

But, fortunately for Jay, there’s another benefactor from the tax cap plan: the couple who bought their home as a longterm investment, factoring in a certain amount for their tax bill with expectations that it won’t climb to a point where they’re pinched. That’s not Jay right now, but it will be in a few years and he’ll be grateful.

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