Generational Conflict and Taxation in America

Trump at Davos, on housing affordability:

Every time you make it more affordable for somebody to own a house cheaply, you are actually hurting the value of those houses. I don't want to do anything to hurt the value of their house.

If I wanted to crush the housing market, I could do that so fast that people could buy houses. But you would destroy people who already have houses.

This is just one of many ways that our economic questions intersect with generational issues. Trump is saying that protecting existing homeowners, most of whom are over 40, is more important than helping young people buy homes. You see claims like this being thrown around a lot in "affordibility" debates.

The question also comes up over property taxes. If property taxes are assessed on actual valuation, then people who own houses in areas where property values rise can get hit with high tax bills, and they hate this. The most famous response is California's Proposition 13, which drastically limits how much the assessed value of houses can rise under one owner. But that means the tax burden falls much more heavily on those who have bought their homes more recently, that is, the young.

But even that is not enough for some grouchy oldsters, who are campaigning to avoid paying property taxes altogether. According to Google's AI, sixteen states have programs to reduce or eliminate the property taxes of people over 65. I have seem several online comments to the effect that it is "unfair" for people who have paid off their mortgages to have to keep paying property taxes, which strikes me as bizarre; why should you not have to pay taxes on your property now that you actually own it?

All of this seems to assume that old people are poor, which is simply not true. Some old people are poor, but on the whole people over 65 have vastly greater wealth than those under 35. The notion that the nation's richest cohort should have their property taxes slashed strikes me as absurd.

A compromise approach that has gained steam recently is called the "circuit breaker," which limits the property taxes of those over 65 to a certain percentage of their incomes, protecting them if their incomes collapse. Which makes some sense to me, but why should this only apply to people over 65?

But basically I just hate it when people launch campaigns on the assumption that they and people like them suffer in some unique way that demands the government's attention. We are all Americans and we should all ask, first, what is the best policy for everyone.