Every year, property taxes, vehicle registration fees, business taxes, professional licensing fees, and myriad other government fees keep going up. It's all taxes as far as an individual is concerned.
Except most of the pension bombs are in the state and local governments, which rely primarily on regressive taxation (sales taxes, property taxes, fees, etc.).
At the time, only the wealthy owned land. Today in the US, 2/3 of people own their homes. Meanwhile, rich people have less of their assets tied up in real property. Someone worth $100,000 probably has most of that in their house. Someone worth $10,000,000 likely will have only a fraction of that in their house, and the rest in financial assets not subject to property taxes.