Gamboling With Other People’s Money

The first and foremost thing to remember about seeking to raise taxes is that taxes are a form of theft.  It means that you promulgate the involuntary, forcible extraction of additional money from people.  If you somehow don’t “get” that, try not paying your property taxes for a while.

An argument can be made for that simply being the way things are done; the way we as a society have chosen to finance certain activities at various levels.  I have even said as much myself, in recognizing the dual nature of what I know should be versus what is.

Even given that, one should strive to deal with what is in a way as close to what should be as possible, trying to bring the two closer together.  Taxes should be lower rather than higher, to whatever degree possible.  What they are spent on and how they are spent should be as efficient and logical as possible, rather than wasteful, superfluous, or better handled privately.

It’s very difficult to support additional property taxes when they are already plenty high, when teachers are well paid, when schools are well funded.  There was a time when teachers legitimately needed more money, but that has passed.  The problem now seems to be wasteful school administrators sucking the public teat dry and leaving little sign of the bales of cash being dropped in the direction of educating other people’s kids.

The whole theft thing is enough to make one think twice about supporting a property tax limit override, but if that’s not enough, you have to ask yourself is it really needed, and what will happen after a year or two.  What about when the money gets diverted from what they want you to believe it’s needed for currently?  How long will it take before the public is being asked to lactate even harder?

$25 A month is too much for us to dismiss lightly.  In theory, it might be possible for someone who rents to consider a property tax increase especially painless, but it has to come from somewhere.  How many of those will it take before your landlord is raising your rent at least enough to cover them?  I have to look at it like it’s our money, even though we don’t pay it directly.  It’s not trivial to us.  Hooray if it’s trivial for you.

The ideal thing, where property taxes fund everything, is to increase the base of property of significant value.  That is, more business or other taxable development that contributes substantially more to town funding than it uses.  A casino, for instance, would be a huge addition to the tax base, indirectly as well.

Even if you support an override in the near term, if you like seeing the town well funded, in the longer term a casino and associated businesses would be just the ticket.

1. The financing of Oklahoma governmental units is somewhat complicated, but we do somehow stay within our budgets.  Moreover, unless a parcel is sold or substantially improved, the county assessor cannot increase the taxable value more than 5 percent a year, and the actual tax rate, since I moved into the city in 2003, has gone up a total of 1.12 percent.  Really.

   Posted by CGHill  on  05/05  at  08:41 PM  from  Deepest Oklahoma
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