You went to the closing. Signed the papers. Got the keys. Maybe you even paid the whole thing off. zero balance, the bank completely out of the picture. And somewhere along the way you started thinking of yourself as a real homeowner. Nobody sending you a bill. Nobody with a claim on the place you sleep every night.
Except that’s not really true.
I know that lands wrong for some people. But once you actually see what’s going on, you can’t unsee it. So here it is: you are renting your property from the government. Every year. Forever. Mortgage paid off or not. And if you stop paying that annual bill, they will take your house. They don’t care that you owe zero to any bank. They don’t care that you’ve lived there thirty years. Stop paying property taxes and watch what happens. the government takes it. That’s not ownership. That’s a forever subscription to the place you call home, and the government is the one holding the cancel button.
Right now in Ohio, there’s a constitutional amendment being pushed for the November 2026 ballot that could abolish property taxes in the state completely. I want to walk through why this matters, who it’s grinding down the hardest, and what the numbers actually look like when you stop letting politicians summarize them for you.
The Principle That’s Driving Me Crazy
My own property tax isn’t the thing killing me. I bought a cheap house on purpose. paid $60,000 for a fixer upper, and I pay maybe a thousand bucks a year. It’s not breaking me. But I made that choice intentionally because I understood the system going in. I knew the bill never stops. So I minimized it. Most people don’t think about it that way. Most people don’t think about it at all, honestly, until they’re already stuck.
Most people buy the nicest house they can afford, get hit with tax bills that go up every single year, and just… get stuck. Kind of by design, you know what I mean?
Think about the car thing for a second. You buy a car, pay it completely off, and then Ford starts sending you a bill every year. just for the privilege of owning something you already own. And if you don’t pay, they come repossess it. You’d be furious. You’d call it insane. But we’ve accepted that exact same logic for houses. We just shrugged and went along with it.
Why?
Honestly? Because we were raised to. Because our parents accepted it. Because the government has been very deliberate about making sure the bill arrives in a way that feels normal. bundled into your escrow so you barely notice it leaving. They made it invisible on purpose. If every homeowner in Ohio had to physically write a check to the government every single month, this amendment would’ve passed twenty years ago. Instead they make it disappear and count on you staying asleep.
I woke up to this when I was running the numbers on my own financial situation a few years back. Looking at what I actually needed to survive indefinitely. what’s my real minimum monthly cost. and the property tax line hit different when I framed it that way. A permanent, non-negotiable, government-controlled bill that never goes away and only ever goes up. That realization changed how I thought about the whole thing. I can’t think about it the old way anymore.
Real People Getting Crushed By This
This isn’t abstract. This is happening to people I actually know.
My grandmother. who just passed. spent her entire adult life paying off her house. Decades of payments. She finally owned it free and clear. And then she ended up in a trailer park. Not because she wanted to. Because she needed to move closer to family and couldn’t afford to buy another place on a fixed income. Her pension from twenty years ago doesn’t stretch the way it used to. Property taxes on any decent place kept going up, but her income didn’t. She got priced out of home ownership entirely because the government kept telling her that her property was worth more. so she owed more.
Sit with that for a second. She worked her whole adult life. Made her payments. Did everything right. And the reward for doing everything right was getting taxed out of her home in retirement. The house was paid off. She didn’t owe anyone a dime. But the government still had its hand out, the amount kept climbing, and eventually the math stopped working. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the system doing exactly what it was built to do.
There are two teachers at my son’s school. both single women, older, one retired and one still working. An extra $500 a year in property taxes is genuinely a real hit for them. That’s groceries. That’s utility bills. That’s the line between comfortable and stressed every single month. These are teachers. The exact people politicians are constantly out here claiming to care about. The system is slowly grinding them down.
And I think about single dads like me too. Most dads weren’t taught to really look at the total cost of owning a house. They buy thinking they’re building something for their kids. stability, equity, a foundation. And then they get hammered by taxes that never stop rising. You think you’re buying security for your family and you’re actually signing up for a lifetime subscription to your own house. A subscription the government can yank the moment you fall behind.
When you’re a single dad. and I’m saying this from actual experience. you’re already doing math on every dollar six different ways. What happens if business slows down. What happens if the car breaks down the same week as the water heater. Whether you can swing travel baseball and still make rent. Property taxes are this fixed, mandatory, rising cost sitting in the corner of your spreadsheet that doesn’t care about any of that. It just comes.
And seniors on fixed income? That’s honestly the worst version of this. Your income doesn’t go up. Property taxes do. You spend forty years paying off a house and then get priced out of the neighborhood you’ve lived in your whole life because the government keeps raising your bill based on what your house is worth on paper. Where’s the security in that? My grandmother’s story isn’t some rare sad edge case anymore. it’s becoming a pretty normal outcome for people who did everything right and still got squeezed out.
The Numbers, Because This Is Where It Gets Ugly
Ohio collects about $24 billion a year in property taxes. Over half of that. roughly $13 billion. goes to schools. And the pitch is always the same: without property taxes, the schools fall apart. Kids suffer. You don’t want to be the person who hurt the schools, do you?
Here’s what actually happened though. In 2009, Ohio passed a constitutional amendment to allow casinos. The whole promise was that gambling revenue would fund schools and take pressure off property taxes. You know what schools actually get from casino revenue? About $66 per student. Sixty-six dollars. That’s the whole payoff.
Meanwhile, property taxes went from $8.7 billion in 2011 to over $12 billion in 2022. So the casinos came in, the gambling money showed up, and property taxes still went up by more than 50%. They let you vote to bring in a new revenue source, kept the original tax, added the new money on top, and called it a win. It’s a shell game. Always has been.
Put it in real terms. If you owned a house in Ohio worth $200,000 in 2011, you might’ve been paying somewhere around $2,000 to $3,000 a year in property taxes. By 2022, that same house might be assessed at $280,000 or $300,000 because property values went up. and your tax bill went right along with it. Even if your income didn’t. Even if you’re retired. Even if you’re on disability. Even if you’re a teacher whose salary has barely kept pace. The assessment goes up, the rate gets applied, your bill goes up. Nobody at the county assessor’s office is asking whether you can actually afford it.
And when you zoom all the way out. property tax, income tax, sales tax, gas tax, all the little hidden taxes baked into everything you buy and every utility you pay. Americans are paying around 62% of their income in total taxes. You work until August just to start keeping your own money. Eight months a year, you’re working for the government. That should sound insane to you. It is insane.
Think about that 62% in your actual daily life. You wake up and make coffee. sales taxes on those beans. You drive to work. gas tax, plus more taxes buried in the price at the pump. You buy lunch. sales tax. Your paycheck arrives with income tax already gone before you ever see it. You get home and there’s a letter from the county because your property is assessed higher this year. Every transaction. Every asset. Every dollar you earn. There’s a hand in your pocket at every single step.
Meanwhile, consumer credit card debt just hit a record. over $1.2 trillion according to the New York Fed. I don’t think those two things are unrelated. People are drowning in debt because they can’t keep up after taxes take their cut first. And the government’s response is to tell you that you need to pay more or the schools will suffer. That’s emotional blackmail. It’s not consumerism killing American families. It’s the tax burden.
The Governor’s Playbook (Same As It Always Is)
Governor DeWine is already out here saying if property taxes go away, sales tax will have to jump to 20% and schools and police and fire departments will all collapse. Same fear-mongering script every single time someone threatens the status quo. Scare enough people so they don’t actually look at the numbers and ask questions.
But think about this. DOGE found trillions in waste at the federal level. Trillions with a T. And we’re supposed to believe that state and local governments are somehow running lean, efficient, nothing-to-cut operations? Come on.
My mom worked at a school for years and she told me about watching janitors and teachers and administrators throw away boxes of brand new school supplies at the end of every year. Unopened crayons. Notebooks. Markers. All going in the dumpster. When she asked why, they said parents were going to donate new supplies next year anyway. So they tossed the old ones rather than store them.
That’s your money. That’s the system that’ll allegedly fall apart if it gets one dollar less.
And it’s not just school supplies. I’ve heard the same story from people in local government, county offices, township administration. departments that spend down their full budget every single year regardless of whether they actually need to, because if they don’t spend it all, next year’s budget gets cut. So they buy stuff they don’t need just to protect their allocation. That’s not a secret. Everybody in it knows that’s how it works. And then the governor gets on TV and tells you kids won’t have pencils if you vote the wrong way.
Show me an honest accounting of where the $24 billion actually goes. Show me it’s being spent well. Then we can have a real conversation about whether more is needed. Until then. no.
The Shell Game Has Been Running for Decades
The casino thing is a perfect example because it’s recent and documented. But this isn’t new. Governments have been running this play forever. introduce a new revenue source with the promise it’ll reduce an existing burden, collect both, and count on people forgetting what was promised by the time they figure out what happened.
Ohio’s lottery has been around since 1974. The original pitch was that lottery proceeds would go to education and take the heat off property taxes. Fifty-plus years later, property taxes are the highest they’ve ever been and lottery revenue just layers on top. The lottery brought in over $1 billion for education in fiscal year 2023 alone. And property taxes still went up. So where did the billion go? Not to your tax bill, that’s for sure.
Run the same story through any state that added gaming, expanded the lottery, legalized weed. all of it. The new tax comes with a promise to relieve pressure on the old one. The new tax arrives. The pressure doesn’t go anywhere. It goes up. And they’re already sketching out the next new tax with a fresh set of promises attached.
At some point you have to recognize the pattern. It’s not incompetence. It’s not bad luck. It’s the playbook. And if you keep falling for it. honestly, that’s on you at this point, not them. They’re being completely consistent.
What Would Actually Work
I’m not just complaining here. I think there’s a better way, and it’s not that complicated.
A 30% flat tax on all income. That’s it. No property tax. No sales tax. No gas tax. No hidden taxes buried in your phone bill or baked into the price of your groceries. One number. Everyone sees it. Everyone pays it. You vote on whether to raise or lower it.
People will say 30% is high. But you’re already paying way more than that when you stack up all the little taxes you’re currently paying. you just can’t see them all in one place. At least with a flat tax you know exactly what’s leaving your hands. Politicians can’t run shell games when there’s only one lever to pull.
Here’s the part that actually makes sense to me: under a flat tax, if the government wants more revenue, they have to make the economy bigger. They have to help people earn more. Because 30% of a larger economy is more money than 30% of a smaller one. For once their incentives would actually line up with yours. That’s how it should work.
There’s also a fairness argument that gets ignored. Right now, a retired teacher living in a house she paid off thirty years ago and a tech worker who just moved in next door pay basically the same property tax. even if the tech worker is making five times as much. Property taxes hit hardest on people who own property and have the least cash flow. Income taxes hit based on what you actually earn. Tax what people make, not what they own. Tax income, not existence.
I’m not naive enough to think this happens at the federal level anytime soon. But Ohio doing it would be a real start. It’d be the first domino. And other states would pay attention.
Four Things You Actually Need to Do
Okay. Talking about it is good. Doing something is what matters.
First, sign the petition at ax.com. They need about 413,000 signatures by July 1st to get this on the November 2026 ballot. And you can’t do it online. you have to physically go find a signing center near you. The government makes it hard on purpose. That friction is intentional. But this is the bare minimum if you want any say in what happens. Go to ax.com, find a location, go do it. Drag a friend. The whole process is supposed to work exactly this way. citizens collecting signatures to get something on the ballot. and they’re counting on enough people being too busy or too worn out to follow through.
Second, talk to actual people. Not posting a rant online. Real conversations. Your barber. Your kid’s teacher. The woman at the Kroger checkout. Make it personal. tell them about your grandmother, or your own tax bill, or whatever version of this hits closest to home for you. You don’t need to memorize the numbers. Just say something like, “Hey, did you know Ohio’s trying to abolish property taxes? I signed the petition because my grandma got priced out of her own house after forty years of payments.” Personal stories move people. Statistics put them to sleep.
I’ve had this conversation with people who’ve been homeowners for thirty years and never once thought about the fact that their property taxes doubled while their income didn’t. Once it lands, it lands hard. You just have to be the one to bring it up. You can’t outsource that to a post. It has to be you, saying it out loud, to someone who trusts you.
Third, vote every single time. Not just presidential elections. the local stuff especially. Because when the response to abolishing property taxes is a massive sales tax hike, you need to be in the room to vote it down. The DeWine playbook is going to be exactly that. let the amendment pass if it has to, then come back six months later saying we have no choice but to raise sales tax to 20%. If you’re not showing up for that vote, you handed them the win.
Local Ohio elections get decided by a few hundred votes all the time. Sometimes less. Your school district, your township, your county. turnout is low and your vote carries more weight than it ever does in a presidential race. Show up for those. They matter more than most people realize.
Fourth, start living like you mean it. Cut your own grass. Teach your kid to change a tire. Fix your own porch light when it burns out. The more you depend on the government to solve every small problem, the more power you hand over. Independence is a muscle. stop using it and it atrophies. And a population that can’t take care of itself will accept any level of taxation because it believes it needs the government to survive. I don’t believe that. I don’t want to raise a kid who believes it either.
This one isn’t directly about property taxes, but it connects to the same root. Government expands into the space you leave for it. Stop leaving so much space.
This Is Bigger Than Property Taxes
The Boston Tea Party didn’t happen because taxes were high. It happened because people finally decided they’d had enough. There’s a point in every civilization where the government pushes too far and people push back. The colonists weren’t paying taxes anywhere close to what we pay now. they were fighting the principle, not the dollar amount. And they were right.
I genuinely think Ohio has a shot at this. The infrastructure is there. The anger is there. My grandmother’s story isn’t unusual. it’s common. The teachers at my son’s school getting squeezed, that’s common. Single parents doing the math on whether they can afford to keep the house they’re in. very common. This isn’t a niche political position. This affects nearly every homeowner in the state and most of them just haven’t connected the dots yet.
If one state actually abolishes property taxes, other states will want the same thing. Politicians watching their approval ratings will start paying attention real fast. And then people start asking about all the other taxes too. That conversation. the real one, about what the government actually needs versus what it’s been taking. is one we are way overdue for as a country.
Maybe nothing comes of this. Maybe the amendment fails. Maybe the fear-mongering works and enough people vote against their own interests. That’s possible. But the alternative. just accepting that you’ll pay rent to the government on a house you own for the rest of your life because that’s how it’s always been. that’s not something I can accept. Shouldn’t be something you accept either.
Sign the petition. Have the conversations. Vote every time. Take your life back, piece by piece.
This isn’t really about property taxes. It’s about whether you actually own your property, or the government does. And I think the answer to that should be obvious.
If you found this useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it. a homeowner friend, a parent, a teacher, anyone who’s been paying this bill their whole life without ever really asking why. That’s how this moves.
Related reading: