64.0°,
Mostly Cloudy N.Y. shouldn’t follow California’s lead
Politicians are normal people. They like to be with winners, and want badly to blend in with the crowd. That may be the reason why New York state’s elected officials wind up supporting things like tax caps: They sound sexy and are appealing to today’s voters.
Sometime in the next 60 days there will be enormous pressure put on your state senators and Assembly members to vote for a tax cap. While the devil is in the details, there’s no doubt in my mind that a tax cap in New York state could be the mistake of the century.
Voters from Buffalo to Montauk are demanding that real property taxes be held down and that government must be restrained. They aren’t wrong. The state desperately needs to find a way to keep our senior citizens from fleeing south. Plus, we need to dissuade large and small companies from doing the same thing.
But before we rush headlong into a state freeze on local taxes, a lot of questions need to be answered. Just as there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all shoe, not every community can survive with a law that arbitrarily tells them how much they can spend and what their priorities must be. I’m not referring to the rich enclaves of the suburbs that love to spend money like drunken sailors.
My concern is for middle-class communities that have no Walmarts, Costcos or power plants to inflate their treasuries with enormous tax collections. There are dozens of villages and small cities that can’t survive under a tax cap unless it allows them to provide a reasonable amount of basic services.
Part of the reason that local taxes are so high all over the state is that many elected officials, in their zest to get re-elected, spent money that they didn’t have or borrowed to pay for things that they should never have bought. Many of them felt that they had to spend big dollars just to placate the crowd.
But every time the words “tax cap” are mentioned, I can’t help thinking about the state of California and Proposition 13. Back in the 1970s, an anti-tax zealot named Howard Jarvis waged a vigorous campaign out there to curb taxes on all residential homes. Riding a wave of senior-citizen discontent, Proposition 13 became law.
