Property taxes

Marlowe Hamerston is extremely knowledgeable about our Minnesota property tax concept. I found his articles in Senior News very polite criticisms of our Minnesota legislature. Similar issues in similar manner have been written and talked about in the past. One would think that the legislature would have gotten the message by now. However, it is not so. The legislators are completely deaf to this issue.

Today we have the issue of our economy that is blamed on predatory lending. All legislators seem to understand that predatory lending is bad or criminal and therefore new laws must be enacted to correct the bad or criminal situation. But at the same time, why aren’t they correcting predatory taxing?

Most people don’t understand our predatory taxing in Minnesota. It is called the Minnesota homestead property tax. Of course, there will be people who will disagree with my new label for our property tax system. However, for all the believers that our present predatory tax (sorry - property tax) is OK, consider the following law (Minnesota statute):

No matter how low the value of your home is, if one does not pay taxes on it because one does not have the income to do so, the government can take the home away from you, sell it at an auction, collect their taxes and give you the difference while you sit on the street.

I wish there was a similar law (Minnesota statute) where the citizens could throw the legislators out on the street for aiding a criminal act. In “my book,” predatory lending and predatory taxing are alike because they achieve similar results.
Juris Curiskis, Minneapolis