Hurray for legal loopholes!

A New Jersey family found that their tax bill more than doubled after a renovation by the nice folks from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. [source]

Speaking of bad laws, the quote at the end of the article is instructive:

"Taxes have been the ghost of my life," Llanes said. "Minus the tax, everything would be fully, fully, fully great."

I'm not much of a property tax fan - they do nothing to help people who are struggling to get buy, and it's just one more hurdle for impoverished families to overcome before they can finally enjoy the stability of their own home. In most places I'm aware of, the tax is levied purely on the value of your home, with no exemption corresponding to the number of people living in the home, as there is with income tax.

Interestingly, this would make the property tax both progressive and regressive - high-income folks are likely to own one or more large houses, but for certain income groups the tax is vastly disproportionate to their income. The solution is somewhere over my pay grade, but I do know that when purchasing houses is easier, people do more of it, and this is probably a good thing.

Also in the article is a brief description of the IRS loophole that it used - technically, the EM:HE crew leases the property from the home owner, which makes the renovation a tax-free leaseholder improvement (whereas otherwise it would be a taxable gift, I think). This may not have been the IRS's intent, but I'm all in favor of loopholes that actually help people get out of hard situations.