You’ve likely listened to countless emotional and deeply expressive ballads — songs that pour their souls into tales of passion, heartbreak, and longing. Yet, it’s far less common to encounter a performer serenading the audience about something as dry and bureaucratic as property taxes. Imagine, however, a crooner earnestly singing lines like, “In a world full of noise, hear the love choir sing / Together in unity, we’re reclaiming our wings,” before turning that heartfelt tone toward a rallying cry: “Sign a petition, join the fight, let’s axe the taxes, and bring wrongs to the right.” This unusual song, aptly titled *Uplift the Dream*, stands among twenty AI-generated tracks deliberately engineered to energize listeners around one cause — abolishing property taxes in Ohio. And that’s not counting an additional ten bonus tracks released later to amplify the same message. What at first glance appears to be a bizarrely specific musical crusade is, in fact, the artistic reflection of a broader populist movement coursing through the United States — a swelling tide of resentment toward surging property taxes.
While Ohio’s campaign has taken the form of impassioned melodies, similar waves of protest have manifested elsewhere in more theatrical civic moments. In New Jersey, activists have turned town meetings into performance spaces, complete with breakdancing protests against local tax hikes. Across the country in Washington state, community gatherings have featured raffles promising an eye-catching prize: the chance to have one’s property tax bill paid in full. These demonstrations coincide with rhetoric at the national level, where figures such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have called for abolishing property taxes nationwide. Even Elon Musk has joined the conversation, declaring that the tax system effectively makes property ownership akin to leasing one’s home from the government itself. Underneath these growing expressions of dissent lies a shared demographic engine — older Americans, particularly baby boomers, who dominate the cohorts of both home buyers and established homeowners. They are increasingly vocal about what they see as an unsustainable burden tied to rising property values.
The frustration is understandable on a surface level. In recent years, property valuations across much of the country have soared, and that appreciation has translated directly into higher tax bills — sometimes escalating by hundreds or even thousands of dollars annually. Many homeowners, especially retirees on fixed incomes, have felt blindsided by the sudden increases. One such individual is Brian Massie, a retired Ohio resident spearheading the anti-tax movement that gave birth to the AI-produced protest album. Feeling dismissed by elected officials, Massie and his peers adopted the rallying phrase “starve the beast,” arguing that if local governments refused to acknowledge their grievances, citizens themselves would have to force systemic change — in this case, by initiating a statewide push to eliminate property taxes altogether.
Yet this revolt unfolds amid deeper generational tensions. On one flank, aging boomers occupy homes whose values have skyrocketed even as their active income streams wane. On the other, millions of younger Americans — millennial and Gen Z renters alike — find themselves excluded from homeownership but still dependent on the local infrastructure and public services financed by those very property taxes. Schools, emergency response departments, public works — all these depend on tax revenues from properties that younger generations cannot afford to buy. The conflict, therefore, isn’t merely philosophical; it strikes at the financial architecture supporting American communities. Efforts to dismantle property taxes may feel emotionally justifiable to those writing ever-larger checks, but doing so would disrupt the core funding mechanism that underpins daily civic life.
Property taxes, after all, form one of the most essential and longstanding pillars of the American tax system. Younger workers contribute payroll taxes to sustain Social Security — benefits they may not receive for decades — while older citizens, many now retired, continue to fund community institutions like schools, libraries, and public safety departments through property assessments. According to the Tax Foundation, property taxes accounted for 27.4 percent of all state and local tax collections in fiscal year 2022, making them the single largest source of local revenue. Jared Walczak, the organization’s vice president of state projects, notes that roughly 70 percent of local tax revenue nationwide originates from property taxes, a figure that can climb far higher in certain regions. Replacing this income stream, he warns, without inflicting substantial economic harm would be virtually impossible.
Part of what makes property taxes distinct — and, paradoxically, controversial — is their simplicity. Unlike the tangled web of federal income brackets or the opaque array of excise fees, a property tax derives from a relatively direct formula: a percentage applied to the appraised value of land and buildings. Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow specializing in tax policy at the American Enterprise Institute, explains that this clarity makes the tax highly efficient and difficult to evade. Nonetheless, simplicity does not equate to fairness. Homeowners can make modest upgrades or renovations, but they cannot easily control macroeconomic forces like inflation, zoning constraints, or population shifts. When market values climb rapidly, tax bills rise in lockstep, regardless of whether an owner’s income has kept pace. Over the last few years alone, home prices have increased nearly 27 percent after adjusting for inflation — pushing many property taxes sharply upward.
These realities produce understandable distress. As Walczak points out, if one’s property value ascends by 50 percent while local rates remain constant, the resulting tax bill also increases by half. Even after accounting for inflation, the homeowner is paying roughly a quarter more in real terms. It’s little wonder that such scenarios prompt anxious phone calls to legislators demanding relief. Yet political responses born of financial frustration can sometimes yield poorly designed policies. While appreciating property boosts a household’s paper wealth and can increase borrowing power, that wealth remains illiquid; a homeowner cannot spend home equity on groceries or utilities. The disconnect between rising property valuations and stagnant wages underscores why people experience resentment toward local taxation.
Visibility compounds that irritation. As Pomerleau observes, income and payroll taxes disappear into automatic withholding, while sales taxes disperse through daily purchases; property taxes, by contrast, are tangible and periodic. Homeowners often must write physical checks or witness the amount deducted from their mortgage escrow accounts. Each payment serves as a tangible reminder of governmental cost — magnified when coupled with deteriorating infrastructure, creaky floors, or the same leaky faucets that were there before the assessment jumped. The land gains value, but the structure ages, creating a sense that the taxpayer is being charged for invisible benefits. To counter this frustration, analysts such as Rita Jefferson at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy argue that the debate must focus on housing affordability itself, not merely on trimming taxes. Curtailing revenue without curing the underlying shortage of accessible housing, she warns, would only worsen the systemic imbalance.
Historically, battles over property taxation are nothing new. The current uprising, however, carries a sharper generational edge. In the 1970s, surging property prices sparked reforms across the nation, most famously California’s Proposition 13. That initiative capped property tax assessments and limited yearly increases to two percent until a property changed hands. While such measures protected many long-term owners from skyrocketing bills, they also froze inequities into place — long-term occupants today often pay a fraction of what newer neighbors owe for similar homes. The unintended consequence is a housing market skewed toward entrenchment: older individuals retain large homes because moving would reset their tax rates, while younger families remain renters longer. Nationwide, roughly forty percent of older homeowners have occupied their residences for two decades or more, contributing to a record median age of thirty-eight for first-time buyers. This entrenchment breeds resentment across generations: older taxpayers balk at funding schools they no longer use, while younger citizens see themselves subsidizing a system designed to protect their elders’ comfort.
Jefferson labels the call to abolish property taxes entirely as shortsighted — an attempt to treat symptoms rather than causes. The escalation of home values, she notes, stems primarily from limited housing supply and structural barriers to new development. Eliminating the tax would not resolve those pressures; it would simply deprive communities of funds needed to manage them. Nevertheless, voices like Massie’s persist in pressing for repeal. Though he expresses sympathy for younger generations burdened by student debt and astronomical housing prices, he resents being expected to finance public education from which he believes he has derived no benefit. After two decades in his home and more than a hundred thousand dollars paid toward local schooling, he asks bitterly whether the system demands that he go bankrupt for programs unrelated to his household.
Some states have experimented with relief measures. Indiana, for instance, recently passed legislation granting homeowners a ten-percent property tax credit. While welcomed by many, such policies trigger fiscal trade-offs: diminished local revenues compel governments to lean more heavily on income or sales taxes, potentially cutting funding for essential public services. In Fort Wayne, school districts anticipate multimillion-dollar shortfalls that may force borrowing simply to stay operational. Jefferson contends that broad tax cuts indiscriminately benefit even affluent households that could easily afford their obligations, while undermining the intergenerational transfer of wealth that sustains community welfare. Pomerleau echoes that sentiment, reminding critics that current workers’ earnings finance benefits for retirees — the very group now rebelling against their share of civic costs.
This reasoning resonates with younger professionals like Cameron Mulvey, a twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur from Massachusetts. Once sympathetic to anti-tax arguments, he now views them as narrowly self-serving. He points out that although he may never personally collect Social Security, his contributions keep the system functioning, just as property taxes maintain public institutions most of us may not individually use. Taxes, he argues, are expressions of collective responsibility: a mechanism through which societies fund shared goods irrespective of personal utilization. Labeling them unfair because one does not directly benefit misunderstands the social contract at the heart of modern governance. In Mulvey’s words, to claim exemption on that basis is “a frankly delusional argument.”
Massie remains unconvinced. Drawing upon his own modest Social Security income, he insists that retirees are not living lavishly on public funds and balks at any suggestion that wealthier neighbors should determine his fair contribution for roads or police services merely because their properties are appraised differently. The fairness debate, then, extends beyond economics into ethics — into competing visions of community obligation. Yet across ideological lines, economists agree on one thing: eradicating property taxes outright would render state and local budgets untenable. Even advocates acknowledge that sustaining infrastructure, schools, and safety without replacements for this enormous revenue source is financially implausible.
However, reform is possible. Walczak highlights levy limits — caps on the aggregate revenue localities can draw from existing properties — as one potential model. Unlike rate freezes on individual parcels, these controls distribute constraints more equitably and prevent distortions akin to those produced by California’s Proposition 13. Jefferson proposes another approach: property tax circuit breakers, policies that trigger relief when tax bills surpass a set proportion of household income or for residents below certain thresholds. Such systems inject nuance, directing assistance to those in genuine need while preserving the fiscal foundation of local governments. Though more intricate to administer, they target affordability without dismantling the communal framework of shared responsibility.
As debates continue, deeper undercurrents emerge. The struggle over property taxes mirrors widening social distrust, particularly between generations that perceive the other as either entitled or ungrateful. If baby boomers succeed in amending systems that mainly burden them for a few remaining years, historians like Seth Coltar argue, it may signal an erosion of collective faith — a triumph of radical individualism over civic solidarity. By undermining a tax that sustains public goods for everyone, society risks hollowing out the very sense of mutual obligation that binds communities together.
Jefferson’s warning encapsulates the moral heart of the issue: when homeowners who already possess stability refuse to contribute to the public infrastructure sustaining their surroundings, they neglect a fundamental civic duty. The convenience of a short-term financial reprieve could ultimately produce long-term societal fractures. For a nation built upon the premise of shared prosperity, the question is no longer simply how much property tax costs — but what abandoning it would make us lose.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-boomers-eliminate-property-taxes-real-estate-hurt-millennials-genz-2025-10
