Lakefront Properties Taxed Enough Already

The words seemed still to be hanging on the air.  To friends with lakefront properties, “You’d better watch because the Agenda types are coming for your lakefront properties.  You just wait and see.  First, they’ll try to tax you and then they’ll send the environmentalists after the hold-outs.  You watch.  They’ll condemn your property.  Not just yours but everyone’s.  They’ll tell you that your homes are a threat to the lake environment.”

Now, if you live in northern New Jersey, if you don’t actually live on a lake, you live within walking distance of one, or within distance of some body of water – pond, brook, stream, river (Heaven help you).  In our case, it was the mosquito-infested swamp across the street (Mom lives on a hill).  Residents of northern New Jersey live cheek-by-jowl with Nature.  And they’re okay with it.  Residents of the northern regions have gone all-out against the bear hunts.  They’ve learned to live with the bears and the bears have learned to live with the humans.

The problem isn’t humans, or nature, or the interaction between the two.  The problem is the pseudo-environmentalists with their hidden agenda of forcing everyone to live in communes.

In Bloomingdale, a woman’s taxes went up so high on her Kampfe Lake property that it’s made the local newspapers.  Yesterday’s paper noted that West Milford’s 2011 property tax revaluation means lakefront property owners can an, according to yesterday’s Suburban Trends, “expect a hefty tax increase in an effort to correct what local officials were calling an ‘unfair distribution of the property tax burden’.”

“According to the state Department of Taxation, revluation programs are designed to have all real properties in a taxing district appraised at their full and fair values in an effort to spread the property tax burden as equitably as possible.”

Here’s some news for the state Department of Taxation:  the friend from West Milford with the lakefront property is no millionaire.  He’s an unemployed machinist who had to go into business for himself, working 16 hours a day just to make ends meet.  He bought the property at auction.  No sooner had he finished rebuilding the house (himself) than his house and five other lakefront properties were burned to the ground in an arsonist spree.

West Milford has the highest property tax rate in the county already.  It’s no wonder poorer residents can’t afford them.  Soon, the lakefront property owners won’t be able to afford them, either.  Certainly not our machinist friend.  The fairest tax rate is one where everyone pays the same percentage.  Government should not be in the business of overspending and then saddling the property owners with the bill.  Cut the spending.

This kind of taxation is clearly intended to cause further division between the classes.  If everyone paid the same tax rate, there wouldn’t be “classes” in the first place.  There shouldn’t be economic classes in American, anyway.

Even the Suburban Trends had to admit that the taxation is outrageous.  Homes on Greenwood Lake would face a 271 percent increase, Sunday’s editorial noted.  They even used the Tea Party’s frequently-used illustration of the boiling frog.  “Stop stewing and start stumping” the editorial headline reads.

What do they think the Tea Party has been doing these last three years?  What do they think TEA means?

Taxed Enough Already, dudes!  We’ve been to Morristown, to Trenton, and to Washington, numerous times already.  If you’ve finally woken up (I told the organizers that the revolution will begin at home, in our own backyards), come join us.

The North Jersey Regional Tea Party meets this Wednesday at the Barnyard Carriage House restaurant on Wednesday, at 7 p.m.  The Barnyard has great food, by the way.  Come for dinner, stay for the meeting.

North Jersey is very well-organized; so is the Morristown Tea Party.  They can tell you everything you need to know to activate.  Here are their Facebook pages; send the links to your friends.

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/groups/129222850427850/

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/The-Morristown-TEA-Party-a-NJ-Non-profit-Corp/139313059455619