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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

If your car payment got untenable, we won't see folks lobbying for car-payment support or caps. You'd just have to sell the car.

Houses get some sort of special treatment, I guess because people emotionally bond with them. But in a free market we'd not scotch-tape all these special rules around them.

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Selling your car has hugely less impact on your life than having to move. It's not just an "emotional bond" with a house. It's your commute. Your kids' schools. Your friends. Your daily shopping routines. The cost and labor involved with packing your stuff and moving it to another location. And so on. Moving can be very disruptive, especially if you have to move to a totally different town or neighborhood as would likely be the case if you got pushed out by rising property taxes (as the other housing in your vicinity would have the same issue).

Losing your car affects that too - you'd likely have to move. But yes, housing is a bigger hit.

Still, people move for all sorts of selfish reasons, and take on all that burden anyway. The difference between the free market making you do it is an emotional one.

Terrible comparison. Your car payment doesn't tend to increase unpredictably with your car's value over time, as property taxes almost certainly would.

Yeah but your income can, with the same effect.

I agree that it's not a good comparison. Property tax is more like a cost of ongoing operation, so a better comparison would be to the cost of gas.

If my neighbor buys a Ferrari my Subaru doesn't suddenly cost 10x in gas/maintenance as a result.

There is a good argument here, actually. Because of all these people having more and more cars, fuel prices have increased significantly. If you bought a car 10 years ago, you now spend much more money for fuel than you did back then.

Should you be able to buy fuel for the same price it was when you bought the car?

What car-owning scenario is comparable to government driving someone out of their home via unaffordable tax assessment?

Not comparable, but related in its idiocy: governments making the purchase of a Tesla illegal in their state.

You said 'home'; I said 'house'. This underlines the emotional aspect perfectly, thank you.

The government raising road/gas taxes to the point where you can't afford to run a car any more?

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