My property was reassessed this year and they actually came down for next year. We pay our taxes in arrears down here, and mine came in at a healthy [estimated] 1,228.00. I am on septic, but I still pay millage for the wastewater treatment plant upgrades and the recent addition to the county bypass system and several lift stations. It isn't much, and I really don't begrudge it because the truth of it is that I would rather have this infrastructure than have the entire county on septic. I have been to a few of the central counties with no sewerage plants and in the summer, after a lot of heavy rain when the water table comes close to the surface, it can get quite nasty and ripe, so a few bucks is just fine with me.
My taxes work out to be less than one percent, which is a far, far cry from what folks in the north east pay, especially folks like Penn ion his area, and folks in New Jersey, New York and that general area. The taxes are freaking absurd. Illinois is downright retarded with their usurious taxation. In Massachusetts, if you own a car, you pay something on the order of five percent of the cars assessed value EVERY SINGLE YEAR just to get a sticker issued for the tag. That's fucking ridiculous. The people who vote for this shit are truly insane.
In Florida we may have more than our fair share of crazy people, but we don't have a state income tax, our property taxes are pretty damn low and I pay 6.1% sales tax at the store on everything but food. That is to say everything but food that isn't prepared food, like regular groceries that aren't cooked to order. If I want an herb roasted, lemon rotisserie chicken, as long as it isn't still hot, and as long as it's packaged in a sealed box or package, there's no tax.
Same with medicine, no tax. So how do we pay for stuff? We wax the tourists, that's how. We have a bed tax. We tax booze and cigarettes as well. We have casinos on all the reservations that generate billions of dollars as well. All that money goes in to general revenue. How much gets siphoned off I do not know, but the money is there. We also have the lottery, much of which is placed in to general revenue, but a lot of which gets tossed in to the education fund. In my area, we just approved a half cent or a penny sales tax increase for schools. I don't begrudge that either, because I would rather have the little fuckers sitting in a classroom driving a teacher crazy than hanging out in the neighborhood all day looking for something to do, which might include getting in to trouble.