While I generally agree that, yes, you're in essence paying back your own education.

But also you're ensuring that your world has a functioning economy so all that money you've saved to look after yourself in your old age is worth something and there are actually things to buy with it.

If your country goes to pot around you because you didn't raise a couple of functional generations to replace you (even if you didn't have kids) you're effectively screwed, an old person in a Mad Max world

And another answer: Do you really want to live in a society where only the wealthy have any sort of basic education?

Then why does the bill change depending on the assessed value of my property?

Because property tax is an awful, dreadful way to fund public education.

A progressive percentage of earned income above given thresholds (either poverty or happiness) would make much, much more sense.

> Because property tax is an awful, dreadful way to fund public education.

I don't think the property tax is the issue. It's doing school funding at a sufficiently granular level that's the real issue—poor cities / districts won't have the same sort of tax base, be it collected via income, property, excise, sales, or somehow else, as do rich districts.

What you want is some sort of redistributive system. Really large districts (like entire states or countries) accomplish this as rich areas within the district subsidize less wealthy ones. Grants from higher levels of government, paid for by taxpayers in other parts of the jurisdiction, also accomplish this.

That said, money isn't everything...San Francisco has a tremendously wealthy tax base and an unusually small student population due to the city's demographics, but the schools aren't anything to write home about.

Property tax is progressive because rich people purchase more property, and real property tax is critically important because real estate is a permanently finite resource.

Progressive taxes are not linear, they are at least quadratic. The way many property taxes are set up now in the states, they are flat taxes by zoning - ie, residential pays a fixed rate.

I would absolutely argue for progressive property taxes, and that you either need steep progressive property taxes or homesteading rights to avoid the current bubble of land hoarding by the rich, but we don't have those now, and they should fund other things (and at a much less granular scale) than public education.

> A progressive percentage of earned income

Highly dense young-urban-professional work-centric neighborhoods low on kids (SF, LA, SJ) would receive more money, suburban, rural and single-industry neighborhoods (towns in San Bernardino, Fresno counties) dominated by families with children would receive less money.

Because you're good for it, it's convenient to assess and collect, and the property itself isn't going anywhere. I'm not big on property taxes on general principle but it's a somewhat economical approach to implementing the hyperlocal school board approach that Americans seem to prefer despite the proliferation of bureaucracy it imposes.

>Because you're good for it, it's convenient to assess and collect, and the property itself isn't going anywhere.

OK but what does that have to do with paying back the cost of my own education?

The American Dream is basically get born, go to school, go to work and work hard, get a car, get your own home, and settle down with someone you like and drop a couple of kids. taxing property balances out these costs and benefits in a very approximate indirect way without much accounting.

For me it's not very important that there should be accurate accounting of such things. I just don't lose much sleep over tax money going to education because it keeps a virtuous cycle going. I didn't even grow up in the USA, but what my home country lost in direct tax revenue may be made up over the long run by increased international trade.

I really don't see any point in trying to exhaustively account for public goods at the individual level, which only results in more bureaucracy and promotes a penny-pinching mentality that is inimical to the undertaking of increasing public goods and economic development.

Think of it like this: your public education was provided not for a fee, but for an equity stake in You, Incorporated.b the more you earn, the more the state gets back, like an investor.

Why does my education become retroactively more expensive if I move to a different town?

That only happens if you move to a more expensive town, which could be because of the benefit you got from your education. You could always go somewhere cheaper and poorer and pay less.

Because the US doesn't have a uniform tax rate, due to a federated power structure.

If you don't like it, you don't have to migrate.