By Jeff Smith THE BAD NEWS about getting older is that younger people have a nose for blood that would be the envy of a school of Piranha, and they're on your ass the second they think you've lost a step. The good news is that they're getting older too, and that there are even younger cannibals lusting for their blood. The worst news is that nobody pays attention to the immutability of the first two conditions, so the carnage continues unabated: We devour, even as we are being devoured. The somewhat-less-good news is that--according to highly placed scriptural sources--the poor, the meek, the this, that and the other are blessed in many and various ways, more or less in diametric counter-balance to their piss-poor earthly conditions. It has been argued in certain leftist political circles (liberation theologists pressing the flesh of Latin America come immediately to mind) that this get-your-reward-in-heaven mindset is no more than propaganda promulgated by the rich to keep the poor quiet until death shuts them up for good. Not a bad tactic for a materialist, and it appears to work wonderfully well. Spiritualists disagree, but they have a devil of a time producing tangible evidence to support their postion. Well of course they do: and that's precisely how it's supposed to work. So if the good news is that the meek shall inherit the earth, the bad news is that they'll never be able to afford the estate taxes, the property taxes, and the legal fees. Hell, if you were watching the dailies last week, and reading the postcard you got from Rick Lyons, even if you bought the earth back when dirt was cheap, you'd see the squeeze between fixed retirement income and skyrocketing property taxes might force you to live in the back of your panel truck. After skipping a year of reevaluating residential property, the County Assessor's office delivered bad news to the tune of what they officially term an average 10 to 20 percent increase in property valuations for tax purposes. It would be enough of a shock split in two and delivered in separate annual increases, but the double whammy sent tremors throughout the community. And the official average was nowhere near the 48 percent increases reported by some homeowners. Lyons, the man who replaced renegade Alan Lang as county assessor, can innocently argue state law requires his office to try to set assessed valuations according the to real estate market value. He can--and did--say your tax bill is the product of three factors, only one of which is his assessment of your property's value. The second is the ratio set by state law and the third is the tax rate, set annually by the Board of Supervisors. Theoretically, the supes should lower the tax rate to generate the same revenue. Theoretically my ass. By the time the budget comes around, nobody will remember (or if they do they won't say) that the rate should be cut. Mysteriously, uses will be found for the additional tax revenues, and the supervisors will say, innocently seeming, Hey, we didn't raise the tax rates. Ordinarily I don't have a whole lot of sympathy with people who bitch about being over-taxed, but here I do. I think when somebody is going to slip his hand into your pocket, he ought to advertise his intentions and come clean as to how much he's peeling out of your wallet. This sort of stealth taxation undermines proper government by making people victims of fraud at best, fraud and over-taxation at worst. Property taxes aren't basically a bad way to raise money for government services. Properly levied, they reflect a taxpayer's relative prosperity and ability to pay. And the market-based system of valuation would be a common-sense approach--if it were uniformly applied. The trouble is that property, as in real estate, is not the same thing for everybody. To an investor, a developer, a real estate salesman, broker, a tax assessor and, sadly, to most elected officials, property is capital...money, equity and investment. To most of you and me, it's a home, the bedroom you shared with your kid brother, the mesquite tree in the backyard, the place you go on Sundays for supper with the folks. And to those folks it's memories, security, and shelter for the remainder of their days. Unless of course the taxes rise out of sight and they have to sell out and move into a trailer in Eloy. For people on fixed and/or limited incomes--and your income doesn't have to be fixed by Social Security to be limited: you could be clerking at WalMart--appraising houses on the basis of what some rich asshole speculator from Marina del Rey wrote a check for just last week is not fair. So the move in the Arizona Legislature to freeze residential property taxes until said property changes hands makes sense--up to a point. It's nice to allow the old folks (getting back to the opening stanza) to live out their sunset years in the comfort of the old homestead, but what about the kids? Stay tuned. Next week we'll go after the feds and explore how they conspire--willingly or not--with states and counties to make land speculators richer.

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