This doesn’t sound like Ricardian Equivalence to me

From the New York Times:

A mint-condition two-bedroom, described by the broker as having “a New York meets Los Angeles meets South Beach flavor,” it is also in a race against time. It has been on the market since March, and Mr. Abrams, who has relocated to Los Angeles to be closer to his son and for work, has already slashed the price three times, to $1.575 million. He is hoping to sell the apartment in part because his monthly real estate taxes are poised to surge by more than 400 percent over the next several years.

That jump is mainly due to the city’s 421a tax exemption program, which encouraged development of underused or unused land by drastically reducing property taxes for a set amount of time. Buyers got what seemed to be an unbelievable deal on taxes — but with the caveat that it was only temporary and that someday, their rates would rise to what everyone else was paying.

…

“It is utterly ridiculous,” said Mr. Abrams, a co-president of Alternative Marketing Solutions, which helps publicize films. “I have a home in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and California is famous for high taxes, yet we don’t pay anything close to what I will be paying.”

To make a broader economic point: while there are valid arguments against fiscal stimulus in general, and the Recovery Act in particular, one also ought to be deeply skeptical of some of the assumptions used by the stimulus’ critics. If these assumptions were true, then the Times would have had a boring story indeed, about perfectly rational people who put aside what they saved in property taxes to smooth out their consumption once the (inevitable and explicit) rise in taxes occurred.