Effective for the tax year 2008 (and now 2009 with the bailout bill), taxpayers who normally do not itemize deductions because their mortgage interest and other deductions do not exceed the standard deduction will get a little tax relief from payment of their property taxes.
Specifically a single taxpayer gets an additional standard deduction amount of $500 ($1000 for married filers) as long as their property tax payment exceeds the deduction amount.
Seems to me that people who rent rather than own should also be entitled to a similar deduction. After all, part of their rent payment is certainly paying the owner of the property for the underlying property tax cost.
But I don’t make the tax laws, I just try to make sense out of them. And sometimes that is impossible.
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