How Florida Can Reform Property Taxes To Incentivize Young Families
States need not punish seniors, but tax policies must be structured in such a way so as not to freeze younger generations out of the market.States need not punish seniors, but tax policies must be structured in such a way so as not to freeze younger generations out of the market.The REAL solution to the housing crisis nobody's talking about
The American dream is slipping away for many young Americans, as life becomes increasingly unaffordable — especially home ownership. Soaring home prices and interest rates and a housing shortage bar younger generations of people from purchasing a house. Today, the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 years old.
Many ideas are being tossed around regarding how to bring home ownership back into the realm of possibility for young families — most notably President Trump’s polarizing 50-year mortgage proposal.
But Sara Gonzales, BlazeTV host of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered,” says we’re ignoring a simple solution: eliminate property taxes.
Right now in the state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) is aggressively pushing for the elimination of property taxes, condemning them as "rent to the government.”
Abolishing property taxes, says Sara, is a “standard conservative position.” “You should not have to buy a home and then spend 20, 30, 50 years paying off that home, and yet you still never truly own your home because you would still pay rent to the government,” she says.
And yet there are conservatives who oppose the elimination of property taxes, claiming it encourages older homeowners to hoard inventory.
“So you're basically saying … we should what? Kick all the oldies out of the homes that they've paid for so that young people can buy them up? Like, I'm sorry, are we conservatives or are we not?” asks Sara.
Further, senior tax caps allow older homeowners to pay significantly less in property taxes than younger homeowners, meaning Boomers are already incentivized to not sell. But if we were to enforce higher taxes on our senior population, as some conservatives suggest, we’re now guilty, Sara argues, of the same thing we criticize socialists for — taxing the rich.
Another pro-property-tax argument is that the tax accounts for significant funding for education. But public schools, says Sara, aren't something most true conservatives want to fund anyway because “they're indoctrinating your children."
If we really want to make sure the essentials, like police and fire services, are well funded, we should first look at eliminating all waste, fraud, and abuse. If it’s out of control at the federal level, then it’s almost certainly out of control at the local level, says Sara.
All in all, eliminating the property tax benefits everyone, says Sara. Not only will it prevent people from being forced to pay lifetime rent to the government, but when older homeowners eventually do die, younger families have a better chance of affording those vacant homes because they’re not inheriting enormous property taxes.
“Take this into consideration,” says Sara.
“Say you have parents who are wealthy because they've worked hard and they own a lot of land … that they would like to give to you when they die. Consider you will not even be able to keep your parents' property or home with the astronomical property taxes that you will owe at the end of every year on land and a home that they already paid for.”
“If you're young and you ever want to own a home, you should recognize that [property taxes are] a problem for everyone. So let's solve the problem for everyone.”
To hear more, watch the episode above.
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The 5-point plan to turn Trump’s 2025 wins into permanent victory
As the Trump administration nears the end of year one, Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman (Lomez), hosts of BlazeTV’s newest show “Rufo & Lomez,” are compelled to not only pause and reflect on 2025, but also to ask the hard questions no one else will — and demand the second-year playbook that actually delivers total victory.
“I think it started out with some very solid wins — kind of blitzkrieg-style action on many fronts — but has the Trump administration hit a stall? Are things going as well as they should be?” asks Rufo.
In this episode, the duo, celebrating the wins and acknowledging the losses, offer a “five-point agenda” aimed at ensuring more success is on the horizon.
1. Reimmigration warfare
Immigration was second only to the economy in issues that drew voters to Trump, who pledged “mass deportations” from the rally pulpit his entire campaign trail. While the administration came out of the gate with ferocious plans to flush illegal aliens out of the country, deportations need to speed up, Rufo argues.
“What we’ve seen is a lot of fireworks, especially when it comes to DHS and ICE activities, but the actual deportations are rather low,” Lomez notes.
But that makes sense. “You're never going to have enough muscle, enough kind of logistical force to deport 15 million people in handcuffs,” says Rufo.
The answer to this problem, they argue, is remigration — the voluntary relocation back to one’s native country. If the Trump administration is serious about hitting high numbers of deportations, it must incentivize people to leave of their own accord.
“If you want to get 10 million plus people to voluntarily leave the United States, you have to make their current life virtually impossible,” says Rufo. “You have to freeze them out of the financial system. You have to have punitive taxation on remittances that makes that economic incentive disappear.”
It is also critical that we begin looking at immigration through the lens of what benefits the American people, he adds. “We have to be ruthlessly selective about which populations are most likely to assimilate, most likely to contribute, and least likely to be a kind of net negative on whatever dimension — economic, social, cultural, [and] political. ... Nobody has a right to immigrate to the United States. That's a decision left to us.”
2. Build a future young Americans can afford
The nation’s younger generations are financially crushed in ways they weren’t just 10 years ago. Home affordability especially is out of reach for the majority of people under 40.
Rufo emphasizes the need for the Trump administration to “make a concrete economic agenda that will improve the possibilities for young people that are entering the work world and becoming adults.”
For starters, says Lomez, “We need to get rid of the regulatory framework that benefits older people at the expense of the young” — things like senior property-tax caps, locked-in low interest rates that keep people from ever selling, and zoning laws and building restrictions that prevent affordable homes from being built.
3. Crush terror networks
“The administration has to dismantle the left-wing terror networks, whether it's Antifa [or] other organized militant groups,” says Rufo. “They have to actually get mugshots, case numbers, inmate numbers — the tangible evidence.”
These terror networks “are essentially saying that ‘we can control the streets in places like Portland; we can veto peaceful conservative speech in places like Berkeley.’ We have to ensure that they can no longer do so and can no longer exert control through violence.”
Lomez says the Trump administration’s designation of Antifa as a terrorist network was “a huge step in the right direction,” but more action is needed. He acknowledges that some of what the administration is doing is probably “sensitive” and might take years to accomplish, but it needs to “explain to the American people what they are doing” and up the consequences for violent members of these groups.
“The other thing that we need to put pressure on,” he says, “ is these institutions that are harboring these people [in terror networks].”
“If you do a good job planting bombs at the Pentagon as the Weather Underground did, you get sinecures at major universities’ you get speaking gigs; you get massive publicity. You become a public intellectual for the left. There are ways of applying pressure to these institutions to prevent them from doing this.”
However, in order to see this through, the right people must be in power. Otherwise bureaucracy slows it down or makes it impossible. Right now there are “certain Cabinet officials [who] are doing an amazing job,” says Rufo. “They're extremely aggressive, [but] others seem to be more in it for the prestige, more in it for the spotlight, more in it the perks of the office.”
“We have to get people that are willing to fight and willing to play hard, and it has to be backed up at the highest level of the government.”
4. Death to DEI
While the Trump administration excelled at ripping up the DEI apparatus in the federal government, the initiative lives on in other places.
“Corporations, universities, school districts have kept this DEI system, a system of anti-white discrimination in particular, as part of their operating procedure,” says Rufo.
The Trump administration must “use the power of the government to say, ‘This stops now. It's a violation of the Civil Rights Act. You don't qualify for federal grants and contracts. You have to stop it.”’
“We need to go back and we need to look at who was making decisions in accordance with this anti-white ideology, but that broadly is encompassed under this sort of woke banner, so this would include like the trans stuff ... and we need to remove them completely,” adds Lomez. “We need to apply maximum coercive pressure on these institutions to get rid of these people. They cannot employ these people any longer.”
5. Bankrupt the universities
To fix broken, ideologically captured universities, we can’t just punish them with investigations or funding cuts, says Rufo. We have to make them financially liable for student loans. “You have to make the universities hold the bag so that when it blows up, they blow up with it.”
This will have multiple positive downstream effects: reduce administrative bloat; stop the admission of unqualified students; end the “everyone must go to college” scam; and shift lower quintiles to trades, apprenticeships, associates degrees, and on-the-job training.
“The Trump administration should figure out how to use this student debt problem and essentially offload it to the universities. Look, universities are not MAGA's base. Punishing the universities is not going to punish MAGA voters — precisely the opposite,” says Rufo, “and so there's got to be a little bit of political calculation that's baked into this formula that yields the outcome that we want.”
To hear more of Rufo and Lomez’s five-point plan for the Trump administration to stack up Ws, watch the full episode above.
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Debt slavery for the young, tax breaks for the old — welcome to America’s housing reality
Since 2021, home ownership has become increasingly out of reach for the average American, as both home prices and interest rates have skyrocketed with no reprieve. Earlier this month, President Trump pitched the idea of 50-year mortgages to combat the housing affordability crisis. He even posted a meme on Truth Social comparing himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who’s credited with the 30-year mortgage, and labeled himself the pioneer of the 50-year version.
The proposal, however, immediately drew bipartisan backlash, with critics across the ideological spectrum branding it "debt slavery" or "mortgage suicide."
Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman (Lomez), hosts of BlazeTV’s newest show “Rufo and Lomez,” agree that the 50-year mortgage is an economically disastrous idea, not just for the individual homebuyer but for society at large.
“I don't even want to say [the idea] is bad. It's just pointless,” says Lomez. “It doesn't solve any problem that it's ostensibly trying to solve.”
The problem the Trump administration should be zeroing in on, he says, is the massive generational imbalance in America. Our current policies have wealth flowing in one direction: “from young to old.”
“I think this is partly the problem of boomer politics. They are such an outsized political force, and they are so narrowly focused (as is everyone else) on their self-interest that they've lost sight of the larger picture of what they're trying to leave behind for the generations that come after,” says Lomez.
With boomers turning out in huge numbers to block new housing construction, defend senior property-tax caps, and protect incentives that keep them from ever selling or downsizing, the average first-time home buyer today is 40 years old (up from 33 in 2020), while the average home buyer in general is 59 years old.
“The outcome of these various policies and how we think about who can buy a home and property tax rates and how we architect certain incentives — both the sticks and carrots — have basically crowded young people out of home buying, and this is a massive structural failure on our part,” Lomez argues.
The impact is far more extensive than many realize.
“This has massive downstream effects in terms of fertility rates ... and marriage and all the stuff that makes life good. The housing piece of it is a proxy for all of that, but it's a very important piece of that, and we need to fix this problem,” Lomez explains.
“We're going to have to figure out some solution that's better than just going to debt peonage for the rest of your life.”
Rufo agrees, calling the American dream of homeownership “an amazing path for most people” that “should be widely available.”
The idea of a 50-year mortgage may seem like it brings this dream back into the realm of possibility because it “[reduces] the monthly payments on the median house by ... a couple hundred bucks a month,” but what it ultimately does is turn a home into “a speculative financial asset.”
“People aren't going to stay and pay off a 50-year loan,” and by “pushing the payment on the principal back ... for the first decade, you're really not paying down any principal at all. That's pure money to the bank,” says Rufo.
But this doesn’t just impact the individual, he says. It hurts everyone. “If [the 50-year mortgage] works, according to the theory, it will artificially inflate demand even further, which drives up housing prices.”
“The real problem is that we've flooded the country with currency. We've flooded the country by printing dollars, especially after COVID, where all of that money that is floating around the system has gone to these assets, like housing,” says Rufo, dismissing Trump’s 50-year mortgage proposal as an idea with “good intentions” but “not a good solution.”
To hear more, watch the episode above.
Want more from Rufo & Lomez?
To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Ben Shapiro And Anyone Else Telling Young People To ‘Just Move’ Are Missing The Point
If we continue to fail to address fundamental economic problems, eventually it won't matter where you move to.Government broke the housing market — only this will fix it
If you’re frustrated with being unable to buy a home today, you’re not alone. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, homeownership affordability has been near an all-time low since 2023. The deadly combination of both home prices and interest rates skyrocketing broke the housing market, but simply lowering interest rates today won’t fix it.
To understand why, it’s important to know what caused this housing affordability crisis. Over the last several years, the federal government spent trillions of dollars it didn’t have in the world’s largest-ever borrowing binge. The money came from the Federal Reserve, which created those trillions of dollars out of nothing, depressing interest rates.
The real solution is not to manipulate rates lower and spawn further inflation, but to get government out of the way so interest rates can come down naturally.
The predictable result was a rapid devaluation of the dollar, manifesting as 40-year-high inflation, followed by the fastest rise in interest rates in just as long to cool off the inflation.
Rates aren’t the problem
Not only did home prices become stratospherically high relative to incomes, but financing costs became prohibitively expensive. Consequently, during the four years of the Biden administration, the monthly mortgage payment doubled on a median-priced home.
For the housing market, this was a one-two punch that cratered affordability and consigned millions of Americans to renting for the foreseeable future.
The Fed’s artificially low interest rates helped cause the problem in the first place. Home prices rose not only because the dollar lost value (taking more dollars to buy the same home), but also because lower interest rates meant potential home buyers could borrow more and bid up the price of homes.
What’s most important to someone when considering buying a home is not the home’s price but the monthly mortgage payment. While the payment is clearly dependent on the whole price, interest rates are also a major factor. When those rates fell below 3%, people were willing to spend much more on the same home because the monthly payment didn’t change much.
As the months passed, however, and the bidding wars continued, prices just kept rising. Once interest rates returned to more normal levels, everything fell apart as monthly mortgage payments exploded. It now takes over two-thirds of the median household’s take-home pay to afford a median-priced home.
Historically, when interest rates rise, home prices fall, but that didn’t happen this time. So many people locked in home loans at interest rates below 4% — or even below 3% — that they can’t sell their homes today, because doing so would mean losing that interest rate and getting a new mortgage at 7%, 8%, or 9%.
The only way to make the math work is if homeowners sell at a huge premium, giving a massive down payment on their next home, minimizing the amount borrowed at a higher rate, and therefore preventing their monthly payment from skyrocketing. The large and fast increases in interest rates pushed home prices even higher instead of lower.
Get government out of the way
The temptation today is for the Fed to simply lower the federal funds rate (its benchmark interest rate), under the assumption that such a move will push down interest rates throughout the economy, including mortgages. Sadly, instead of fixing the broken housing market, it would likely have the opposite effect.
Last autumn, in a move that could only be described as blatant election interference, the federal funds rate was reduced when there was no empirical justification for doing so. But the move buoyed stock prices. Market participants saw through the charade and realized the artificially low rates would ultimately lead to more inflation, which prompted private market interest rates to rise.
Lenders don’t like inflation because it reduces the value of the money being repaid in the future. To compensate, creditors demand a higher rate of return. That’s why the yield on Treasury debt at the end of last year jumped 100 basis points after the federal funds rate fell 100 basis points, demonstrating the Sisyphean nature of the problem.
Additionally, interest rates and home prices have recoupled. If interest rates fall one or even two percentage points, that will again prompt potential home buyers to borrow more, thereby bidding up home prices again. Unless rates drop substantially more, existing homeowners will remain trapped by the golden handcuffs of their 2% or 3% interest rates.
The real solution is not to manipulate rates lower and spawn further inflation, but to get government out of the way so those rates can come down naturally. If the government spent much less, then there would be less demand for borrowed money. Reducing demand in turn reduces the price, and the price for borrowed money is the interest rate.
Profligate government spending broke the housing market. Only fiscal restraint at the federal level will fix the problem.
‘How could they be that stupid?’ They aren’t — that’s the problem.
In 2013, I published an article at American Thinker titled “How Detroit Almost Killed My Business.” It drew attention — enough to earn me a spot on Fox News Radio. The theme was simple: Government actions drive up costs until businesses can’t survive. I had to leave Detroit in 1984, along with hundreds of other business owners facing the same pressure.
The title of that article could just as easily have been: “How Could These Government Officials Be So Stupid?”
None of it makes sense — until you realize it isn’t stupidity. It’s sabotage.
Detroit finally declared bankruptcy in 2013. But looking back now, I realize my premise was wrong. The politicians weren’t stupid. They knew exactly what they were doing.
That same year, Diana West released her remarkable book “American Betrayal.” In a book that is part thriller, part tragedy, West exposed the depth of communist infiltration in the U.S. government — a war between those hiding the truth and those trying to expose it. Her research, though controversial, convinced me that America had long been the target of a coordinated effort to destroy it from within.
If America fell, the rest of the free world would follow.
With that lens, I reconsidered Detroit. The people running the city weren’t incompetent. They were executing a plan — to destroy the greatest industrial marketplace the world had ever seen. And they succeeded.
So when I now ask, “How could they be that stupid?” I catch myself.
How could anyone in 2020 vote for a man clearly not in his right mind? How could Americans allow COVID to justify the most extreme restrictions on freedom in modern history?
Masks, social distancing, lockdowns, mandatory shots — all of it was wrong. We know that now. And yet it was pushed with religious fervor.
How could they be that stupid?
How could the government open the borders and let in waves of illegal immigrants — including violent criminals from foreign prisons? Why did we pay to fly migrants in from distant countries, give them EBT cards with monthly refills, and house them in luxury hotels?
How could they cripple energy production, restrict how much water we use to wash dishes, and mandate what kind of car we can drive? What free government tells manufacturers what to build, regardless of market demand?
How could they decide diversity quotas matter more than competence? Why target the military for destruction?
None of it makes sense — until you realize it isn’t stupidity. It’s sabotage.
And now we have Zohran Mamdani, a self-described Democratic Socialist, poised to become the next mayor of New York City. His platform includes rent control, government housing, social policing, city-owned grocery stores, and free public transit. Every one of these policies has failed before.
RELATED: Vance on Mamdani: ‘Who the hell does he think that he is?’
Under socialism, living standards always fall. It’s never been otherwise.
How could Mamdani be that stupid?
From my vantage point as an exile from Detroit, I know exactly what’s coming. I watched a government plan hollow out a once-thriving city. Now New York, the world’s financial capital, is in the crosshairs.
Businesses are already preparing to leave. Can you blame them?
Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” Twelve years ago, I warned what would happen to America’s industrial heartland. Now the ruling class has trained its sights on its financial one.
The question isn’t whether people like Mamdani are sincere. The question is: How can we be that stupid?
Crushing fraud and DEI: Trump’s plan to restore the American dream of homeownership
The U.S. housing market has been a rollercoaster since the pandemic. First, lockdowns and economic uncertainty slowed the market to a crawl, followed by record-low mortgage rates that spurred a buying frenzy. Limited inventory worsened by construction delays and supply chain issues then spiked prices, creating a fierce seller’s market with frequent bidding wars.
In 2021, Biden’s economic policies, later called “Bidenomics,” drove inflation through the roof and prompted the Federal Reserve to spike interest rates, which doubled monthly mortgage payments for a median-priced home and made home ownership impossible for a huge percentage of American families.
Although the market has cooled slightly, affordability issues, elevated prices, and limited inventory continue to put homeownership out of reach for many Americans.
But thankfully, President Trump, as he always does, has a plan to fix what’s been broken.
Matthew Peterson, Blaze News editor in chief and co-host of “Blaze News Tonight,” recently sat down with Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to discuss President Trump’s plans to restore the American dream of homeownership.
The FHFA is in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – two government-sponsored enterprises that keep the housing market running smoothly by making sure banks have money to lend.
“My view on [FHFA] is that we are here to restore the American dream,” says Pulte. “For the last four years under President Biden, there was a significant amount of inflation, and nobody could afford a home, and so what we're really focused on is restoring the American dream of home ownership.”
However, what’s standing in the way of that goal is rampant fraud, waste, and abuse.
“There was a lot of fraud and a lot of waste and abuse that went on in 2008, and as a result, the government had to take over Fannie and Freddie, and so what we're focused on is getting rid of the fraud, getting rid of the waste, getting rid of the abuse to make sure that these entities are stronger than ever before,” says Pulte.
To further these efforts, FHFA has instituted a “tip line” where anyone can report fraud and has terminated employees for “fraudulent or misleading activity.”
Another issue that’s been standing in the way of restoring the American dream of homeownership is DEI. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have “affordable housing mandates” that encourage lenders to provide more loans to low-income borrowers, minority groups, and underserved communities above others.
“Everybody should be treated equally and our policies need to do that, and so we terminated the DEI executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” says Pulte.
While it’s a long and complicated road to rooting out corruption and making homeownership more accessible again, Pulte is confident President Trump is the person to see it done.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be great American icons once again,” he says.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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