From the Tax Foundation:
There’s No Good Way to Pay for Property Tax Repeal
| Property taxes fund roughly 70 percent of local tax revenue nationwide. Repealing the property tax would require replacing the lion’s share of city, county, and school funding with something else—immediately and permanently. Replacing the property tax with newly granted local taxing authority is exceedingly difficult, because local sales and income tax bases vary widely across jurisdictions; there may, for instance, be no feasible sales tax rate by which an agricultural county or bedroom community could replace its property tax revenue. Replacement pitfalls: Replacing local property taxes with state-level sales or income taxes reshuffles tax burdens across counties, weakens local accountability, and nudges communities away from pro-growth decisions when fixed transfers don’t keep up with population or development. Repeal is an aspiration, not a plan. Most realistic alternatives are less pro-growth, more distortionary, and harder to administer than the current system. Taxpayers should have the opportunity to evaluate plans for replacing property tax revenue, not just receive promises of repeal without trade-offs. Sound tax relief options like property tax levy limits are far more workable than wholesale repeal. Read more. |
A Twenty-seven minute discussion from the Tax Foundation on the subject of property tax reduction, limitation, abolition:
