I'm going to attempt to hit points raised on here and on my AO thread with one post, so here goes.
My general property tax philosophy...
2 baseline assumptions:
-There are State and Local governmental responsibilities that require funding;
-Texas has, for better or worse, decided over many decades that primary funding sources shall be property and sales taxes, and other standard sources of significant tax revenue are off the table (income taxes as the primary example).
Ok, with those assumptions, there is zero argument that the current property tax system is in need of overhauling. My view is that to overhaul a system, you need the base of said system to be as broad and comprehensive as possible. What we've done in the past few cycles of these is make multiple carveouts, narrowing and complicating the base. These carveouts make overhauling the system (challenging at best) more difficult and shift the very necessary tax burden to an ever shrinking population.
The ironic thing to me is, admittedly based on anecdotal observation, many people in favor of a flat national income tax are also in favor of adding as many carveouts to the Texas property tax as possible. But that's just my observation.
On business taxes and other related...
For some reason, we have been handling stuff that needs to be legislative matters, dually debated and refined by our democratically elected representatives, as constitutional amendments. Business taxes are an excellent example. These complicated and narrow issues need hearings and experts and lobbists from business groups and tax policy groups and young underpaid and overcaffeinated law school grads writing and revising. And then a vote, on the record. These are not issues for Nana and Pappy who might (might) have looked at the language in the Palestine Sunday Times once.
As noted, our class of representatives is, shall we say, eroding in quality. No argument. But that's on us to fix.
Happy weekend all. BTHOmizzou.
