A friend of mine received the following in her e-mail:

“Home Sales Tax-effective Jan. 1, 2013

It doesn’t matter which side of the political fence you sit on, this is crazy, and it will affect ALL of us.

Say this isn’t so!!!!!

When does your home become part of your health care? After 2012! You vote counts big time in 2012,make sure you and all your friends know about this! HOME SALES TAX I thought you might find this interesting – maybe even SICKENING! The National Association of Realtors is all over this and working to get it repealed, – before it takes effect. But, I am very pleased we aren’t the only ones who know about this ploy to steal billions from unsuspecting homeowners. How many realtors do you think will vote Democratic in 2012? Did you know that if you sell your house after 2012, you will pay a 3.8% sales tax on it? That’s $3,800 on a $100,000 home, etc. When did this happen? It’s in the health care bill, – and it goes into effect in 2013. Could it be so that it doesn’t come to light until after the 2012 elections? So, this is ‘change you can believe in’? Under the new health care bill all real estate transactions will be subject to a 3.8% sales tax. If you sell a $400,000 home, there will be a $15,200 tax. This bill is set to screw the retiring generation, – who often downsize their homes. Does this make your November, 2012 vote more important? Oh, you weren’t aware that this was in the ObamaCare bill? Guess what, you’re not alone! There are more than a few member of Congress that weren’t aware of it either. You can checkthis out for yourself at http://www.gop.gov/blog/10/04/08obamacare-flatlines-obamacare-taxes-home.

I hope you forward this to every single person in your address book. VOTERS NEED TO KNOW!”

First of all, the link is a dead end.  I tried it. 

The National Association of Realtors is not all over this. One of the people who forwarded this to Peg asked her realtor, and they had never heard of.

So, what are the facts? If you sell your house and you are single and you make a $250,000 or highter PROFIT on the house, you will pay 3.8% tax. If you are married, the exemption rises to $500,000.

Let’s get some of those numbers into the real world. Let’s say you bought a house for $150,000. You have a $120,000 mortgage and are paying more in interest on the loan than principal. Now, you will pay around $85,000 in interest in the first ten years that you own the house. You’re going to want to get that money back, right? So, you put the house on the market for $210,000. If you are really lucky, and the bottom hasn’t fallen out of the housing market, you could get your asking price. Your actual profit? $5,000, though the check they hand you will be for something closer to $20,000 because your mortgage balance has to be paid off. You as a single person would have to sell the house for $455,000 to hit the threshold for paying the tax, and that’s only if you made no improvements to the property, which also are counted against the “profit.” As a married couple, you would have to get $705,000 for the house.

Frankly, there were more than a few people who thought they could double the price of their houses in five years. They were in part responsible for the housing market correction most of the country has gone through.

Before the housing crash, the median price of a house was $250,000. Right now, it’s a very hard statistic to figure out. Unless you are buying and selling property in the multimillion dollar range and doing so in cash and can find suckers willing to give you a more than a half-million profit, this tax will not effect you.

This is the kind of propaganda that Democrats are facing. This “story” is being forwarded across the internet and few people are going to bother to find out the facts.

The only thing that can be done is make the effort to respond when you receive one of these things. Go to factcheck.org, find out what the truth is and e-mail it back to whoever sent you the lie. You can be damned sure that whoever sent it to you hasn’t bothered to check it out.

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