Imagine my shock when I opened up today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this morning and found this headline – Median property tax bill in state up $7. Instead of the pap and self-congratulations both parties heaped on each other for this latest increase contained within (I’ll get to that in a minute), let me bring in a quote from Jim “Craps” Doyle (WEAC/Potawatomi-For Sale) when he created his expiring tax anti-freeze, as carried by that very newspaper – “‘The result of the freeze that I will sign will be that the average property tax on the average home will not go up at all next year, and will actually go down $5’ in December 2006.” So, where’s the $5, Jim? Better make that $12, because they’ve gone up an average of $7.
Republican Assemblyman Dean Kaufert, the incoming Assembly co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee, didn’t exactly cover himself in glory by calling that “laudable”. What’s laudable about another record property tax intake of $8,700,000,000?
As for the excuses for the high property tax intake, let’s take a look at them:
- Homeowners pay about 70% of all property taxes, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. – What a canard. Even if 100% of the property tax levy were shifted to businesses, the people of Wisconsin will end up paying nearly 100% of the property tax levy in the end.
- Wisconsin’s public schools must largely rely on property taxes. Of the $8.7 billion total property tax levy, $3.7 billion – or about 42% – will go for public schools, Schmiedicke said. – Wait a minute; I thought Craps was having somewhere north of 60% of the costs of schools paid for by the state. I don’t know if it’s 2/3rds anymore, but assuming that it is, we’re spending $11.1 billion on schools, for what?
One more thing about the $3.7 billion. That’s $200 million $550 million less than the $3.9 billion $4.25 billion Dem Senator Jon Erpenbach wants to jack up sales taxes by to replace the school property tax. Jon, you mean to tell me that the state needs more than 5% just to manage this, and we have to give the counties somewhere north of $500 million more in the process?
- Wisconsin has more local governments, which levy and spend property taxes, “than all but the largest states, such as California and Texas,” said Todd Berry, president of the non-profit Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. – Guess it’s time for some consolidation
- The Legislature has refused to let local governments levy local-option sales or income taxes, said Andrew Reschovsky, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor. – And for that, I’m thankful. It’s bad enough that counties, a couple stadium boards and the idiots that run the Midwest Airlines (soon to be AirTran Airways) Center get to levy sales taxes.
