PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Although there are always plenty of people who criticise property taxes, I was reassured to see a recent article with the title “Property Taxes Are Good, Actually”. The author, Nathan J. Robinson, wrote in a magazine called Current Affairs: “Taxes fund services. Even progressives sometimes don’t make the affirmative case for taxation as forcefully as we ought to.

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis has attacked the very concept of property taxes. In a speech last year, he portrayed them as unfair. “You buy a home, you pay off the mortgage, and yet, you still have to write a check to the government every year - just for the privilege of living on your own private property. Is the property yours, or are you just renting it from the government?”

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• Property taxes currently generate 70 percent of all local tax revenue, some or all of which would have to be replaced with other taxes under property tax repeal.
• Replacing the property tax with newly granted local taxing authority is exceedingly difficult, because local sales and income tax bases vary widely across jurisdictions; there may, for instance, be no feasible sales tax rate by which an agricultural county or bedroom community could replace its property tax revenue.
• Backfilling forgone local property tax revenue through new state taxes is difficult because it dramatically shifts overall tax burdens, undermines local accountability, and cannot easily adjust for changing population mixes.
• All revenue alternatives are less conducive to economic growth than the existing property tax regime, but some transfer regimes are sharply degrowth.