Hello Darkness! The Official Blog of Helen Keller

Picture this: You're at BestBuy, shopping around for presents. You spy, with your little eye, that they've finally decided to drop the price of an iPad from $1,000 to $500.

*Editor's Note: Yes, I know that iPads aren't $1,000 nor $500. Math is coming up and I want to keep the numbers simple in case Sarah Palin is cruising my writing and wants to attack the concept while she guts a moose on her show.*

You decide that's a fantastic price and tuck one under your arm a la Fred Jackson and dodge tackles to the cashier. Meanwhile, you notice rookie phenom CJ Spiller has dropped 4 iPads and is crying...again. Fuck you Spiller, stop dropping whatever you catch.

When you get to the front of the line, the cashier rings in your purchase. She announces you owe $630. You gawk.

"Excuse pardon what the fuck me?" you ask.

"Would you like a gift receipt?" she replies.

"Why am I paying $630? The iPad is $500 and the HST in Ontario is 13%. I should be paying $565."

The cashier adopts a smug look. "Well, you see, other people paid $1,000 for their iPads back in January. It just wouldn't be fair to have them pay $130 for their iPads when you're buying the exact same one and paying less tax, would it?"

"Yeah, but it's on sale. I don't care what some idiot paid back in January. Fuck him and his iPad. Early adopting douche. I paid $500 for mine and I want to be taxed on $500."

"Mmmmmmm no. We're mandated to make sure people pay fair taxes. And by fair taxes we mean jacked-up fuck you taxes. Smart shopping won't save you."

"Byoooooooooooooooooorg," you say as you spike the iPad off the impulse Coca-Cola Zero display by the register.

Municipal taxes in Ontario at least, work on that principle. What other people pay for their houses are what you are assumed to have paid for your's. So, they'll tax you on that. In fact, there's a whole corporation out there, Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, or MPAC, which is dedicated, mandated and legislated to giving municipalities a theoretical value on your house such that you can be taxed on it even though it flies in the face of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) AND is part of the reason America went penniless in the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

MPAC doesn't actually care about the market-value you paid for your house. It cares about what other people paid for their house. Therefore, you may be a retired fixed-income homeowner who paid $50,000 for your shack many moons ago when houses came free with a case of medically prescribed cigarettes, but because other people have been flipping their homes and jacking the value on lower interest rates, your home is presumed to be jacked up in value too.

Which leads to a few problems.

If you're on a fixed income and MPAC decides your $50,000 shack is now a $800,000 mini-mansion because you live close to downtown, you can get fucked out of your own home, much like Bristol Palin got fucked outside of her home and gave birth to a slobbering embarrassment. GAAP states that you should consider the value of your home to be what you paid for it; no guesstimating increased value. Therefore, a $50,000 home is only ever going to be taxed as a $50,000 home because that was its value when it was for sale on the open-market. Homes, much like blowjobs, are only worth what somebody will pay for it.

If somebody buys our fictitious home for $800,000 on a resale, feel free to tax 'em at the full-rate. It's part and parcel of buying an expensive home.

"But what about the city? How is it supposed to raise new revenue if all the homes are worth the old, original prices?"

Bad question. What the above scenario implies is that there is no new growth in the city, no homes are being bought/sold and everything seems to be stagnant. New services probably aren't needed and raising the mill-rate should suffice for inflation.

Which leads to the second problem: compounded tax-rape.

Cities and counties each levy mill-rates, the base-rate at which the value of your home is taxed. So, your city/county may tax you at 1.5% of your home's value. They can raise and lower that rate to adjust what monies flow into the city's coffers. By MPAC raising the value of your home arbitrarily AND the city/county raising the mill-rate, you get a nice compounded tax-rape. Each increases the other in presenting you with a whopper tax-bill.

Here's the solution: Rather than keeping on with a regressive tax structure which can fuck old people out of their homes because they had the foresight to hang onto them for so long, punish those people who buy hugely expensive homes with the increased tax-burden borne out by the hugely expensive price they were willing to swallow.

Each time a home is bought and sold (aside from the land-transfer tax which is actually based on sale-price), the taxable value of the house is locked in at that price. Therefore, each person is responsible for keeping their own taxes lower, the province can ditch MPAC and save a whack of cash and you don't have to worry about tax-surprises come February when the first tax-rolls drop.

If there's concern about fair-market value sale, like Filthy Pierre sells his home at an el-cheapo price to Greasy Maurice, the province has the onus to show it wasn't a fair-market exchange in provincial court. It shouldn't be dependent on the Dirty frenchmen to prove their innocence.

There. Shit solved. I'm going to shovel.