Johonebesus wrote:
I don't know where you grew up, but in the South most people living in the country are decidedly not rich. This guy might be an exception, but there are a lot of people who are land-rich and money-poor. That's one reason many counties and states have homestead deduction or exemptions on property taxes, so that families can keep land they've had for decades or generations without going broke from taxes.
I'd also like to point out that for quite a lot of people, seventy-five dollars is a not a tiny amount of money to pay all at once. When you're living month to month, a $75 fee can mean a bill doesn't get paid, or a prescription doesn't get filled, or there is nothing extra to pay for an emergency. For poor hicks out in the county it might seem rational to take the gamble, since odds are your house isn't going to burn down.
It's $75.00 a year, not a month... That means you have to save about six bucks a month to make the payment. It's true that I suppose the area could be highly impoverished. However, at least where I grew up in a rural area there was a higher proportion of well-to-do people than there were of poor people living in trailers. The people who lived to our east were well enough, then, to our east two houses down, dirt poor trailer trash; there was us, firmly upper middle class, to the north some people who were outright rich, then two more upper middle class houses as you turned and drove up to the main road, some kind of commune off to the left at that point... You get the idea, and that was at the end of a five mile long dead end. Very sharp class divide; you were either well to do and had 10 - 25 acres and a big house or dirt poor and had 2.5 - 5 acres and a trailer on it. Still, in general, there were a lot more very upper middle class types as a ratio of the total population in the rural area I grew up in, than there were in the city itself that was eight miles away (and had a population of 4,000 when we first lived there).
The one time I resided briefly in the south in Georgia there was the same sort of mix, in my impression, of well-to-do professional families wanting to get out of the city and then the old time residents were dirt poor and little different from subsistence farmers, so I didn't see much difference. I was generously assuming these people actually farmed on more than a limited show/boutique level like the region I grew up in did (though it was hilly enough to have an excuse). The obvious answer would be to apply a local income tax on the rich families to provide basic emergency services for the entire county, but of course it's the south so god forbid that happen.
