Your home or commercial property may go up or down in value. The money needed by units of government, however, does not decrease just because your property goes down in value, which is why your taxes can go up even if the value of your property goes down. Because they keep right on spending.
Your consequent Spending Pressure increases the tax claims against your property. Spending, in turn, is funded not only by the amount taxed from you right now, but also by the amount that the spenders have borrowed from someone else, adding to the amount that must be spent later to repay the debt. Payment will be made from taxes on you.
We must remember all of that borrowing, since the debts owed to government creditors become assets held by those lenders. In this sense, the promise made to a lender is an assurance of spending unseen. Current taxes are “only…immediate; since taxing “manifests itself simultaneously with its cause---it is seen.” Whereas debts “unfold in succession—they are not seen”[1] until they arrive in the form of future taxes.
Consider all of the Spending Pressure you feel as a simplified proof of your existence: “I am taxed, therefore I am.” Spending Pressure shows how strenuously you need to exist to pay your way through life in a jurisdiction more heavily pressurized against you.
Spending is the key to it all.
[1] Fredric Bastiat, What is Seen and What is Not Seen (1850) from Introduction.
