I just stumbled upon one of the most bizarre, and frankly, most telling artifacts of our time: a 20-track, AI-generated album with a single, unwavering purpose—to abolish property taxes in Ohio. It has song titles like "Uplift the Dream," and it's part of a nationwide movement that includes protest breakdancing in New Jersey and property-tax raffles in Washington.
My first instinct was to laugh. It sounds like a parody, a skit from a show about our increasingly strange political landscape. But when I dug deeper, I didn't laugh. I honestly felt a chill. This isn't just a quirky political protest. This is a system screaming that its core logic is broken. It’s the sound of a social contract, written in a different century for a different world, beginning to tear at the seams.
We’re not just talking about taxes here. We're talking about the fundamental, often unspoken agreement that holds a society together: the young pay for the old's security, and the old pay for the young's future. It's a beautiful, cyclical transfer of wealth and opportunity. But what happens when that cycle breaks? What happens when one generation, feeling squeezed, decides to unilaterally opt out?
The Cracks in Our Social Operating System
Think of our civic structure as a kind of societal operating system, an intricate piece of code written decades ago. Property taxes are a core function in that OS: they take wealth from established, property-owning citizens (who are often older) and use it to fund the foundational services—schools, libraries, fire departments—that create a stable community for the next generation. In return, younger workers pay into programs like Social Security, funding the retirement of their elders. It’s a reciprocal loop.
For a long time, that code ran beautifully. But now, it’s hitting a series of critical errors.
The first is a massive, unexpected data spike: skyrocketing home values. Since 2020 alone, property values have shot up by nearly 27% after inflation. For a Baby Boomer on a fixed retirement income, seeing their tax bill jump by thousands of dollars for the same house they’ve lived in for decades feels like a betrayal. As Ohio retiree Brian Massie, one of the movement's leaders, put it, "Do I have to go bankrupt? Is that what everybody wants?" He feels like he’s paid his dues—over a hundred thousand dollars toward local education without ever sending a child to the schools.
On the other side, you have Millennials and Gen Z, who are facing their own system crash. They're priced out of the housing market, with the median age of a first-time homebuyer now at a record 38 years old. They look at Boomers sitting on mountains of home equity and see them trying to pull up the ladder by defunding the very schools and community services that might give their own kids a chance. This is the central conflict in the debate over whether Boomers Push to Eliminate Property Taxes Would Hurt Millennials, Gen Z.
This isn't just a policy debate anymore. It’s two generations trying to run two completely different, incompatible versions of the social contract on the same hardware. And the whole system is threatening to freeze.
A Dangerous Fork in the Road
The proposed solution from this revolt—"axe the taxes"—is less of a software patch and more like taking a hammer to the motherboard. Experts are unified on this point: eliminating property taxes would be catastrophic. Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation notes they make up about 70% of all local tax revenue. You can’t just remove that. It would force a choice between gutting public services into oblivion or inventing massive new income or sales taxes that would cause their own economic shockwaves.
You can hear the frustration in the voice of Cameron Mulvey, a 27-year-old entrepreneur. "Just because you're not using the benefits that your tax pays for... that's how taxes work," he says. "It's just a little bit of a frankly delusional argument."
He’s right, of course. That is how taxes are supposed to work. But what he’s describing is the logic of the old operating system. The argument from Massie and others represents a radical fork in the code—a new, radically individualistic version where your obligations extend only to the services you personally consume. Why, he asks, should the value of his house determine what he pays for police and roads?
The speed at which this 'every person for themselves' mindset is taking hold is staggering—it's moving from fringe online forums to state-level initiatives in a matter of months and it threatens to unravel the very fabric of community trust that we all implicitly rely on for a functioning society. This feels like a moment of profound historical transition, not unlike the invention of the printing press. Before Gutenberg, the transmission of knowledge—and by extension, social cohesion—was controlled, linear, and managed by a central authority. The press decentralized everything, creating chaos, new ideas, and ultimately, a new world.
Are we at a similar inflection point for civic duty? The old, centralized model of reciprocal obligation is being challenged by a decentralized, atomized worldview. The impulse to protect your own assets is human and understandable. But the ethical question we have to face is enormous: what happens when that impulse, multiplied by millions, dismantles the public square for everyone?
There are, of course, smarter fixes than just blowing the whole thing up. Experts talk about things like levy limits or property tax circuit breakers—in simpler terms, it's a smart safety valve that trips when a tax bill becomes an unsustainable percentage of someone's income, protecting the vulnerable without defunding the entire system. But these nuanced solutions aren't as emotionally resonant as a simple, powerful call to "starve the beast."
It's Time to Write New Code
This whole situation, from the AI protest songs to the generational resentment, isn't a disaster. It's a diagnosis. It's our society telling us, in the clearest possible terms, that the old code is no longer sufficient for the world we live in. The system is broken.
So, let's stop trying to patch it. Let's start thinking about what comes next.
This is the kind of challenge that gets me excited, because it forces us to ask bigger, better questions. What if this crisis is the catalyst we need to design a new social contract for the 21st century? What if we could build a more dynamic, more equitable, and more transparent system from the ground up? Imagine a system where civic contributions are more fairly distributed, where technology allows for real-time adjustments to prevent the kind of shocks homeowners are feeling now, and where we restore the sense that we are all, truly, in this together.
This isn't about saving the property tax. It's about seizing this moment of fracture to imagine—and then build—a better way to fund our future. The old system is crashing. Let's get to work writing the new one.