Constitutional Amendment Election

Not everyone realizes that there are to separate elections in May. There’s the run-off for congress and other partisan offices on May 14 and the less well known Constitutional Amendment election on May 7. There are two propositions on the May 7 ballot, both are related to property taxes.

Proposition 1 says “The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school purposes on the resident homestead of a person who is elderly or disabled to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate of maintenance and operations taxes imposed for those purposes on a homestead.”

Yes, it is widely agreed that the ballot language sound like gibberish, even lawyers have to ask experts what it means. Those experts will you refer back to the actual legislation that generated the proposition and the Texas constitution and explain that if passed it would reduce property taxes for elderly and disabled Texans by decreasing the amount they pay to public schools, which is generally the largest part of a homeowner’s tax bill. The state is responsible for making up the reduced revenue for school districts. This amendment will increase the state’s share of public school funding by more than $744 million from 2024 to 2026.

The reason that the Texas legislature passed this amendment by a wide bi-partisan margin is that in 2019, they passed a law which provided a property tax reduction to many homeowners but failed to include disabled or elderly homeowners because under the Texas Constitution, their tax rate is frozen. Proposition 1 would amend the Constitution to allow disabled and elderly homeowners to receive the benefits from the 2019 property tax reduction that other homeowners received and freeze their tax rate at a lower rate.

The language of Proposition 2 is much more straight-forward and says “The constitutional amendment increasing the amount of the residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxes for public school purposes from $25,000 to $40,000.”

If passed by Texas voters, Proposition 2 would raise Texas’ homestead exemption from $25,000 to $40,000 for school district property taxes, saving an average homeowner around $180 on their annual property tax bill. The amendment requires the state of Texas to make up $600 million annual decrease in school district revenue.

Opponents of these propositions make the argument that they don’t fix the real problem which is that our public schools are largely funded by property taxes. While that’s true these propositions do make the issue slightly less onerous and swing the pendulum back toward the state with regard to the percentage of funding provided by the state versus local property taxes. For the last decade or so, in most districts, the local portion has steadily increased so in that sense these propositions are a welcome reversal.

Monday April 25^th is the first day to early vote and Saturday May 7th is election day, I urge you to make time to vote “For” both these important propositions.

 Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 20, 2022

Reverse Robin Hood at the federal and state level

Imagine for a moment that you are the manager a successful family business owned by your retired parents and you also own a separate business. You have a reputation for borrowing very little and calling out others who do. Now further imagine that in order to pay for the lifestyle you believe you deserve you started paying yourself more than your personal company was earning and it will soon go into debt. You then decide to reduce the monthly payment your parents have been getting from the business you manage for them so you can transfer difference to your personal business in order to prop it up. I think you’ll agree that would make you a lousy daughter or son and a lying hypocrite.

Now replace the family business with Social Security, the personal business with the rest of the Federal Government and you with Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. That’s exactly what Ryan is calling for as the congress resumes after Easter break. He’s scheduled a vote on a bill that would reduce Social Security benefits claiming that federal revenues aren’t keeping pace with spending and therefore the national debt is going to increase. What he’s trying hard not to mention is that the reason the budget is out of balance has nothing to do with Social Security because as in the example above it has its own revenue stream and expenditures completely separate from the rest of the federal budget. Not only that the entire reason that the budget is out of balance and the country will borrow a trillion dollars this year is the massive tax cut Republicans just gave to the wealthiest among us and which most of the rest of us got little or nothing. That makes Paul Ryan a lousy representative of the people, and a lying hypocrite.

It’s like reverse Robin Hood, stealing from the poor, Social Security recipients, and giving to the rich. If this were Sherwood Forest I’d be rooting for Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Sadly Texas has its own very similar situation, Lt Governor Dan Patrick is running around lying to the public by claiming that school districts are at fault for property taxes going up. He says he has a plan to reduce property taxes by putting limits on how high school districts can set their tax rates. Patrick fails to mention that the reason school districts keep raising their rates is that he keeps lowering the state’s portion of funding for public education.

Just like Paul Ryan, Dan Patrick is both responsible for the mess and blaming it on the victims so he can cut taxes on his wealthy patrons. He too is a lousy representative of the people, and a lying hypocrite.

In November we have an opportunity to replace Dan Patrick with someone who will tell the truth and has a plan for restoring state funding for public education without increasing the burden on the average Joe. Mike Collier is running for Lt. Governor and he wants to change the way real estate purchases are reported to local taxing authorities so that wealthy individuals and big businesses can’t hide the price they pay for multi-million dollar homes and business sites. Just making our property taxes fair by taxing those properties the same way your home is taxed will go a long way toward restoring the balance between state and local funding for public education.

Check out Mike Collier, you’ll find he’s a straight shooter and if you elect him you won’t feel like rooting for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Wealthy Use Law to Maintain Their Wealth

Anti-drug laws, voter suppression and gerrymandering, and tax policy are all used by the wealthiest among us to maintain a fractured society. It’s in their interest to keep us at each other’s throats so we don’t turn our attention to their hoarding of assets and work together to develop a more equal and just society.

Using wedges to keep people with common interests separated has been a trait of the wealthy here since colonial times when plantation owners noticed that indentured servants were fraternizing with and sometimes escaping with slaves or running off to live with the Indians. In order to stop losing their enslaved workers the planters developed programs for the indentured servants wherein they would receive what was essentially a large bonus at the end of their servitude, assuming they lived through it. In addition they were made the supervisors of the black slaves and given the privilege of beating and otherwise abusing them.

Anti-drug laws such as the prohibition against marijuana were created expressly to enable the arrest and prosecution of black members of society since at the time of inception it was preferred over liquor and beer due to being cheaper because they could grow their own. The use of anti-drug laws has continued to be used for control as explained by former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman who was quoted in Harper’s magazine saying "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people, you understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Until the Voting Rights Act poll taxes and literacy tests were used to prevent “undesirables” so that the wealthy could continue to prosper at the expense of the lower classes. Now laws like Texas’ Voter ID bill seek to suppress the vote by only allowing forms of ID that tend to be held by wealthier white voters and not by poorer voters of color. Gerrymandering is used to prevent voters of color from electing officials who might be more sympathetic to their plight. Here again Texas is a prime example with a federal judge having found that the 2011 redistricting maps were intentionally discriminatory against voters of color.

Just look at Texas tax policy and the funding of public education. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick claims that property taxes are too high and he wants to set a maximum that cities and school districts can charge. Ironically he’s been instrumental in reducing the share of public school funding provided by the state thus requiring school districts to raise property taxes in order to provide an adequate education. The way this hurts people of color is that their school districts generally have overall lower property values so even if they could afford to raise the tax rates they’d still have less money to spend on educating children in their districts. Most of us would be very angry if our tax deduction for mortgage interest went away so it won’t but the people who get the greatest advantage out of it are the very wealthiest who buy multi-million dollar homes.

Nearly 400 years later and the wealthy still lead us by the nose.

Published in the Seguin Gazette July 14, 2017