Imagine that you're on a cruise ship. Everyone is enjoying fun in the sun and evening parties, and life is good, until you learn that water is slowly coming in down below. As the ship gets lower and lower in the water, the passengers and crew decide to get rid of weight to make the ship float higher. First you throw luxury items overboard: the casino tables, the crystal chandeliers. Then you get more serious and start throwing out important items: passengers' luggage, the beds, the liquor. Each time you dump something, the ship rides a little higher, but then it continues to sink. After all, it isn't really excess weight that's sinking the ship, it's the leak. You can continue throwing things overboard - the food, the ship's navigation system, and finally each other - but none of that will keep the ship afloat unless someone goes looking for the leak and stops it. Lightening the ship might be a reasonable emergency measure but only to buy time while someone works on the real problem.
This is a metaphor for the County budget situation,
, and actually all local budgets, including schools. Property taxes are the rising waters that threaten to drown us all. We are arguing about which items to throw overboard. Will it be libraries, youth recreation, senior services, human rights protection, literacy programs? If we dump enough we can stem the rising tide of property taxes, for the moment. Then next year we can talk about which of the remaining items to throw out: roads, buildings, food, medical care, police protection, fire protection? Whatever we decide, we will be faced with the same situation again the next year, because no one is dealing with the leak.
Property taxes did not reach oppressive levels because we are spending too much on libraries, children, seniors, roads and police. They have risen because of a steady inflow of expenses that were once covered by state and federal governments, but are being moved to the local level. We've talked a great deal about unfunded mandates, but that's only one of a myriad of mechanisms by which that shift has taken place. There was once a national commitment to public health and clean water that funded sewage treatment projects. Now local governments are often on their own. Once we had federal money for housing, but that has been dramatically cut back and homelessness is regarded as a local problem. Federal and state education funds once covered much school construction, but now local districts must issue capital bonds and cover them through property tax. Once it was acknowledged that state and federal governments had access to more equitable forms of taxation that were more closely related to a person's ability to pay, and so we had state and federal revenue sharing to allow more progressive funding for local needs. That is largely gone now. Every year more of these "leaks" are filling up local budgets.
We can continue to throw overboard all the things that make our communities special and that give pride, dignity and hope to our lives. We can stop keeping up our infrastructure and stop planning and building for a better future. But we will still sink under a rising tide of property tax unless we address the leakage of expenses and responsibilities flowing in from higher levels of government.
This shifting of expenses to local governments has been driven by a steady stream of tax cuts at the state and federal levels. These tax cuts have been largely an illusion for most citizens because they are targeted almost entirely at the wealthiest among us and have caused increases in the taxes paid by most people. We had a dramatic example of this recently when Congress was debating the elimination of the estate tax, which would benefit only the wealthiest 0.3%, while at the same time, the county was debating imposition of a new property transfer tax, which would affect all property owners. Only the extremely rich are actually paying less taxes than they did before the tax cutting began.
Stopping the leak will require that the electorate stop cheering automatically for any proposed tax cut, and stop electing those who propose and vote for them. Until we start asking whose taxes will you cut, and whose taxes will that raise, our communities will continue to sink no matter how many crucial services we throw overboard.