Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Team Straus telegraphs LATEST Property Tax Misdirection....


"As a dog returns to his own vomit,
So a fool repeats his folly."
Proverbs 26:11

They never change, but they are predictable:
Straus also said the House can assist the state's economic situation by looking at the cause of growing property tax rates, particularly whether the process of setting the rates is open and transparent.
This is such a typical Straus move.

Nobody is mad about property tax rates. People are mad about the property tax appraisal system.  It's called "appraisal creep": as property values go up, people's property tax assessments are so high that their tax bills increase even though the tax "rate" goes down.

To solve appraisal creep requires appraisal caps.  Last session, HB 365 would have capped appraisal.  Naturally, HB 365 was killed without a hearing by Dennis Bonnen, Straus' anti-property tax reform hatchet man.

Also last session, Straus and Bonnen introduced a dopey scheme to cut a sales tax that nobody is complaining about.  The point was to chew up time and attempt to derail property tax relief.  While some property tax relief did emerge, Straus and Bonnen were able to use that effort to water it down.

Bottom Line: Talking about property tax 'rates' is a distraction.  The real issue is the property tax appraisal system.  Anyone who confuses the issue is deliberately killing time to enrich greedy local governments and their taxpayer funded lobbyist industrial complex.

1 comment:

  1. Could not disagree more. The appraised value is irrelevant. Rates are set months after the appraisal values are released. Taxing entities need only adopt the effective tax rate and taxes wouldn't go up. Look no further than states like CA or CO where property tax bills are low, even though the assessed values can be high. What matters is the rate - how much money they take from the appraisal value.

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