Thursday, January 07, 2016

Hogsett Beats The Drum Beat That Property Tax Caps Are Bad


Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett sat down and met with all of the public school superintendents in Marion County yesterday. It's an overture for which he should be applauded. I don't think that happened once under former Mayor Greg Ballard, who lied to the editor of this blog about the partnership he planned to form with public schools when he became mayor. He was quickly schooled on the campaign finance bonanza presented by the peddlers of charter schools and abandoned that campaign promise like almost every other promise he made in that 2007 mayoral campaign.

What I wanted to draw attention to in this post-press conference Mayor Hogsett conducted surrounded by the public school superintendents was his return to that common meme of our dishonest politicians to blame property tax caps for the perceived funding woes of schools and local units of government beginning at the 3:50 mark. We must call them out every time they repeat this lie. Property tax caps involved a major trade off under which state government relied on a higher state sales tax to pick up entirely the education expense component of local schools, as well as the county welfare costs previously paid for by local property tax levies.

Those fundamental changes included in those property tax reform measures freed up a good deal of the potential property tax levy to be absorbed by other units of government, and they have fully taken advantage of it to the point of ensuring that most homeowners are taxed at the maximum possible amount permitted under state law. School districts have repeatedly been hitting up taxpayers by referendum to exceed those property tax caps, sometimes with success, sometimes without success. School districts have placed those ballot initiatives on the ballot in very low turnout primary elections rather than general elections at which more voters participate, creating a loophole of sorts to slip property tax increases passed the voters, which the state legislature ought to close.

So whenever you hear a politician like Hogsett castigate property tax caps, get in their face and call them out for the liars they are, armed with the knowledge of what's really transpiring. Any supposed shortage of revenues has more to do with the ever-expanding use of TIF districts to replenish the slush funds used to reward their campaign contributors, along with the overly generous use of tax abatements, which only serves to shift the tax burden to the rest of us left to foot the bill.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lying Joe surrounded by the next group of organized liars is almost too much to take at one sitting. I do wonder if Putin meets with all the heads of the Soviet Collective Farms to discuss productivity.

Anonymous said...

Let's be frank: Indianapolis is a dump. Indiana is boring. Indianapolis has crappy roads, a lack of high-speed roads and is missing so many things found in other cities.

The only reason anyone would want to live here is because it's cheap. If you make Indianapolis expensive to keep campaign donors, corporations, government workers and cops well fed and well paid, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio and other cities down south are much better choices to live in.

Anonymous said...

And yet you call it home

Anonymous said...

Nearly $120M in property tax dollars siphoned off for pet development projects via TIF! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Anonymous said...

Way to simplistic an argument. Caps hurt some areas (low growth, stagnant incomes) but didn't much effect others (high growth, affluent). Those that were hurt had to increase other revenues, and since increased value properties weren't going to change much, they needed to attract higher income residents, which created the TIF's. Mitch's biggest concern was that school building spending had gotten out of control, and caps squeezed that - if you wanted a shinier school, you had to vote to pay for it.

Paul said...

It's Indiana. Let's hope Hogsett doesn't become another Rahm or De Blasio.

Anonymous said...

They are a recipe for disaster.

Pete Boggs said...

Caps are fraud; as they exist in name only. Caps are the lower anatomy of what is really a kite; the state flown assessment system or counterfeit "market value." There is no budget either; only a statist spending plan. One-two-three is a cynical, codified system of abuse economic bigotry & inequitable treatment; depending on the sins of "owner type," residential, investment or commercial.

Property tax is an unConstitutional abrogation of individual property rights; a notion that "owners" must rent from the state. We have too much government; more lipid layering of which is not better. If she's to continue singing; the inhumanely proportioned 1200 lb lady has got to shed lbs. Nonconsensual laboring of citizens in service to her unnatural girth is likewise inhumane.