Don't cap property taxes in North Carolina

 The Republicans have found another tax they would like to cut. Alarmed by rising property tax revenue in urban counties, GOP leaders have announced their intention to cap these taxes against the will of local governments. They have tended to justify a potential constitutional amendment on the grounds that vulnerable homeowners may be taxed out of their homes. This is a valid concern. But the primary result of capping property taxes would be to slowly starve local governments of the revenue they need to maintain public services. 

Property taxes are indeed going up in North Carolina. This is a somewhat troubling development, in the event that rising levies threaten to impose an intolerable burden on the poor. But the increase in property tax revenue is hardly the result of cynical machinations. In the last five years, real estate prices have rocketed to unprecedented levels. Because property taxes are linked to home values, tax revenues have risen in tandem. We are not facing the sort of situation that deep-blue states have been burdened with in the past, where property tax rates were simply excessive and precluded middle-class people from living comfortably. It is certainly worth addressing the vulnerability of poorer homeowners, but that can be done without a frontal assault of local tax revenues. 

Republicans belie their true intentions with the rhetoric and terminology they use. The key buzzword, heard consistently, is “inflation and population growth.” This is the magical threshold North Carolina Republicans have set, for ideological reasons, as the level above which government spending must never rise. In other states, it’s been called “TABOR,” taxpayer bill of rights. And North Carolina Republicans have made strenuous efforts to keep state spending growth beneath the TABOR level nearly every year since they won control of the government in 2010. 

The results, here and in other states that embraced TABOR, have been disastrous. Public schools are underfunded and their performance has declined since Republicans assumed one-party control of government in 2013. Mental health care is languishing in the desert. Colorado’s TABOR constitutional amendment resulted in the severe decline of the University of Colorado at Boulder and terrible problems in k-12 education. This is to say nothing of the experience of California, which imposed a constitutional amendment on property taxes (not TABOR) in 1978 and spent much of the next three decades broke. 

What Republicans are trying to do—with some inexplicable Democratic support—is to impose the General Assembly’s right-wing fiscal policy principles on progressive urban counties. Wake County’s local tax revenues were already insufficient to build public schools as good as Fairfax County, Virginia’s and other top performers’. But in recent years, they have raised quite a bit of property tax revenue without raising rates. The GOP (dominated by provincial white men, it goes without saying) wants to force Wake and other urban counties to make budgetary decisions under the constraints of TABOR. They’ve already forced Wake County Public Schools to lower their graduation requirements. Stupid, starved, and poor is the NC Republican idea of greatness