Some cutting remarks about property taxes
Persistent sweltering under a relentless sun and yard signs sprouting faster than weeds — almost as fast as they did after a hailstorm — mean it’s time for a few cutting remarks about taxes.
This time around, we get a triple whammy — local budget season, a primary election, and the oddity of a handful of partisans deciding who will fill a commissioner vacancy just days before real voters try to do the same.
In these and other contests, cries about cutting property taxes will become as loudly heard as “GOOAAALL!” during the World Cup.
Kansas law allowing precinct committeemen and committeewomen to decide who fills vacancies needs to change.
In choosing who will replace Dave Crofoot, 94 residents of Fairplay Township will get two votes — the same number as will be accorded to more than half the 1,922 residents of the City of Marion. If you think the Electoral College violates “one person, one vote,” precinct committee elections are as democratic as how members of the Politburo were elected in Soviet Russia.
Precinct committee members are so anonymous that Marion County, unlike most in the state, opted to illegally not even list them as candidates in its official publication of who’s running in the upcoming primary.
But these secretly powerful few, who have ushered into office more than half the county’s elected officials, will put their fingers on the scales and pick a temporary commissioner just days before voters start to choose a more permanent one.
And as with all politicians, talk is likely to focus on the No. 1 issue, the solution to which no one seems to offer: lowering property taxes.
When they’re not trying to deceive you into voting to make the state supreme court a Punch and Judy show, with strings held by big-money interests, most politicians and coffee shop pundits are busy telling you how evil property taxes are.
They don’t tell you that most governments get only a small portion of revenue from them, that the main reason they’re unpopular is that we see how much we owe all at once, and that the real problem is not so much taxes as it is wasteful spending.
The worst effect of excessive fascination with property taxes is that local governments, especially cities that provide utilities, avoid property tax increases by imposing more regressive taxes, like sales taxes and, worst of all, inflated utility rates.
Property taxes hit the wealthy harder than they do the rest of us, and in American tradition, that’s considered fair. Sales taxes impact less affluent people harder. That’s why they’re called regressive. Utility rates hit the least affluent hardest of all. They often can’t afford to buy the most energy-efficient appliances and tend to live in cheaper homes without effective insulation.
What politicians and pundits need to be talking about in this budget and election season is not tax rates and well-intentioned yet flawed concepts like the revenue-neutral rate. Instead, they need to focus on the true underlying problem.
Budgeting shouldn’t be about trying to get government more or less money to spend. It should be about making sure we as a community actually benefit from what money goverment does spend. That means cutting needless spending and putting money into fixing real problems, like the sad, legally perilous state of Remington Rd. between Marion and Pilsen or, for that matter, half the streets and sidewalks in Marion.
If the trouble is that crews don’t know how to properly fix these problems, maybe it’s time to find employees who do. Or if the problem is that elected officials don’t want to risk the wrath of taxpayers by paying enough to fix things right, we need to look at eliminating other, unnecessary spending so that we do have enough.
Yet, after making a predictable plea to cut taxes and reduce spending, rather than offer any concrete ways to eliminate waste, most politicians and pundits prefer sleight of hand worthy of Penn and Teller. They talk about hot-button issues — abortion, gun rights, election integrity, data centers, wind farms, immigration, seldom-used wedding venues despoiling parks, illegal protection of hospitals from competition, even old issues like mask mandates — while taxpayers’ pockets are picked to fund bureaucratic inefficiencies.
The City of Marion is to be congratulated for finally getting city council members involved in budget decisions rather than just rubber-stamping department’s Santa Claus wish lists tacked onto existing spending.
Phase II could be zero-based budgeting, in which every expenditure has to be rejustified every year. A more modest first step might be to ask departments to propose three budgets — one that cuts 10%, one that keeps spending the same, and one that increases it by 10%. Identifying what could be cut and what could be added would help elected officials have a better idea what their choices would do. Who knows? They might even accept both the cut and the addition, leaving us with the same spending, albeit more effective.
Ultimately, what we need are leaders willing to make hard choices rather than superficially trying to placate various constituencies — voters during election season and government workers afterward.
— ERIC MEYER