Everett, Wash.
Published: Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Where's the evidence that property taxes are too high?

By John Burbank

 Last week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released the latest results for academic skills for 15-year-olds. The report measured students' aptitude in science, math and reading. The top country was Finland. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, was second in science and fifth in math. The United States was ranked 25th out of 30 developed countries.

How about the performance of the most academically talented kids? Even that attempt to slice and dice the numbers doesn't work. The top 10 percent of Finnish 15-year-olds scored more than 10 percent better than the top 10 percent of kids in the U.S. in math. Canadian kids were 7 percent better.

Another key to citizenship and economic vitality is the number of kids who go on to college from high school. Unfortunately, in this measurement Washington is at the very bottom, 50th out of the 50 states in the percentage of students who attend college right after high school. So our kids are falling behind in global standards, and education ends for the majority at 12th grade.

This is not just about the need for our children to have the skills and the brains to compete globally. Public education is the foundation for democracy. As we slowly starve off resources for public education we are also undermining any sense of shared citizenship that is central to democracy.

We do have some great public schools and great public school teachers. We have politicians who, at least in their rhetoric, place public education at the center of our state's responsibility. Our state's Constitution declares the paramount duty of the state to provide basic education for all children. We have students who work hard and do well. But what supports are we willing to provide to these students?

Consider the governor's and the Legislature's recent rapid response to the state Supreme Court decision declaring Initiative 747 unconstitutional. Instead of taking the time to consider a measured reform of the property tax, they agreed to put into statute a 1 percent limit on growth on overall taxation of current property. That means that without special elections the state, as well as local school districts, will be unable to keep up with inflation, and only watch while their revenues for public education are slowly squeezed.

It is not only our elected officials jumping on the anti-tax bandwagon. Many liberals are pandering for "tax relief." Consider this statement in a Seattle newspaper last Wednesday: "Lower- and middle-income homeowners across the state have been hit with property tax bills they cannot easily afford to pay. For some -- especially those on fixed incomes -- rising property taxes have made it difficult to stay in their homes."

It reminds me of the recent debate about the estate tax, which was claimed to put family farmers out of business. When the Farm Bureau was asked to locate one of these family farmers, they couldn't find one in all of Iowa who had to sell out because of the estate tax. So where is our evidence for the unaffordability of the property tax? I bet that 80 percent of us don't even know what we pay in property taxes, either because it is wrapped into our mortgage payments, with principal and interest taking a much bigger share of income, or because it is hidden as a pass-through to renters. So if we don't know how much it is, how can we determine that it is unaffordable? Many of those who do know how much they pay in property taxes do so because they have paid off their mortgages and have to make semi-annual tax payments. That's a lot, but then, it is still many times less what homeowners with mortgages are paying.

There may be instances of property taxes that may be difficult to pay, but let's see the evidence before we go overboard in joining the current "property-taxes-are-bad" movement. More than 55 percent of property taxes pay for K-12 education. These taxes also pay for police officers, firefighters, road maintenance, public health services, public universities and health coverage, among other public goods and services.

Tax cuts do come home to roost. And that won't make for a very easy path for our children to catch up with students in Finland, and Canada, and Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, France, Norway, and all the other countries ahead of us.


John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org ), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him in care of the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.
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