Let’s get one thing straight. If your political movement’s anthem is a 20-track, AI-generated album about property taxes, you’ve already lost the plot. I’m not even joking. Somewhere in Ohio, a group of retirees, led by a guy named Brian Massie, decided the best way to protest their tax bill was to have a computer churn out ballads with lyrics like, "So sign a petition/come join the fight/let's axe the taxes/bring wrongs to the right."
It’s the kind of cringe that makes you physically recoil. It’s also the perfect, laughably absurd mascot for a movement that is, at its core, profoundly serious and deeply corrosive. We’re watching a generation that reaped the benefits of the greatest economic expansion in human history decide to set the whole system on fire on their way out the door.
And for what? Because their Zillow estimate went up and now they have to write a bigger check to the town that keeps their streets paved and their fires put out. Give me a break.
This whole "starve the beast" rhetoric is nothing new, but the target this time is brutally specific. They’re not going after some vague federal bureaucracy. They’re aiming a bazooka at the funding for their local schools, libraries, fire departments, and police. The very things that make a community livable and, ironically, keep their property values high in the first place.
This is just bad policy. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—it's societal arson. Jared Walczak from the Tax Foundation, a guy who actually understands this stuff, points out that property taxes make up about 70% of all local tax revenue. He says replacing it is "virtually impossible." Of course it is. What’s the alternative? A bake sale to buy a new firetruck? A GoFundMe every time a school roof leaks?
The argument from people like Massie boils down to a single, petulant complaint: "I've been in this house 20 years... I've never sent a child [to school]. I've never benefited from the services at all."
Let’s deconstruct that masterpiece of civic illiteracy. You’ve never benefited? Do you enjoy driving on roads that aren’t riddled with potholes? Do you appreciate that the local high school graduates kids who are literate enough to work at the grocery store or the bank you use? Do you like the fact that your house is less likely to be burglarized because there's a funded police force? That ain't how civilization works, pal. It’s a group project. You don’t get to stop paying for the project just because your part is mostly done.
This is the ultimate "pulling up the ladder" maneuver. It’s a generation sitting on mountains of illiquid home equity, wealth that exploded precisely because of the stable communities their parents’ and their own taxes built, who now refuse to pay it forward. They want all the benefits of a functioning community without any of the costs, and I just...
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening while Millennials and Gen Z are getting absolutely crushed. One recent analysis put it bluntly: the Boomers Push to Eliminate Property Taxes Would Hurt Millennials, Gen Z. The median age of a first-time homebuyer is a record 38 years old. Young people are staring down the barrel of a housing market that feels like a cruel joke, while simultaneously being told they have to fund the Social Security benefits for the very same people trying to defund their local schools.
As 27-year-old Cameron Mulvey put it, it's a "delusional argument." He’s paying into Social Security right now, a system he might never see a dime from, to support the retirees who are complaining about paying taxes that fund the here and now. The hypocrisy is staggering.
The whole thing is like a game of Monopoly where one player got to buy up Boardwalk and Park Place for a hundred bucks back in 1975, and now, with a board full of hotels, they’re demanding to abolish the Luxury Tax and get rid of the Community Chest cards that might help anyone else. Everyone else, offcourse, is stuck trying to survive on Mediterranean Avenue.
And what about the proposed "solutions"? Experts talk about "property tax circuit breakers" or "levy limits." Please. That's bureaucratic shuffling. It’s like offering cough drops to a patient with stage-four cancer. The disease here isn't the tax code; it's a profound, curdling selfishness, a "radically individualistic and antisocial attitude," as one historian put it. When a generation decides its only remaining civic duty is to itself, no amount of policy tweaking is going to fix the rot. The social contract has been shredded, and they're using the scraps as kindling.
Let's be brutally honest. This isn't a debate about tax efficiency. It's a declaration of war by one generation against the next. It's the logical conclusion of a half-century of "I got mine." They cashed the checks from a stable, prosperous society and are now refusing to pay the bill, leaving it for a generation with less wealth, less opportunity, and a whole lot more resentment. This isn't just shortsighted; it's a deliberate act of generational sabotage. And no AI-generated power ballad is going to be able to sing our way out of the mess they're making.
