Lawmakers have handed Texas homeowners serious property tax relief over the past few years. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the Legislature’s property tax guru, announced at a recent interim committee hearing that 40% of Texas homeowners no longer pay any school district taxes. Almost 61% of disabled homeowners and those age 65 or older pay no school taxes. Republicans’ strategy of repeatedly raising various homestead exemptions, and using surplus funds to substitute for local tax dollars, worked.
Now lawmakers need to pause and consider how far to continue down this path. Both the governor and lieutenant governor have said they’d like to eliminate residential property taxes, at least those related to schools, though they diverge on how to accomplish that goal. They should drop the idea altogether because it’s irresponsible and fundamentally unfair. It only benefits select Texans, jeopardizes school districts’ most reliable source of funding and contributes to the state’s “stuck” housing market.
No doubt, most homeowners who still pay school property tax would love to pay less. The strategy of flat-dollar exemptions, which Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has pushed, helps homeowners with lower-value properties the most, making it more equitable than a percentage discount.
For good schools? Eventually it will be rich parents, with a little help from the “fuck you subsidy” as the voucher program expands. There are already idiots in state government (Epstein ranch owner Huffines, IIRC) pushing to double the voucher budget.
Poor minorities will get the absolute best public schools that the remaining budget can buy, which will, in a perfectly legal way, happen to be garbage. Poor white kids in bumblefuck too, but Abbott and the donors already gaslit their parents and grandparents into primarying the parochial-but-occasionally-pragmatic representatives they used to have. They’ve all been replaced with “Only Jeebus and the GOP can save us” stooges who will not do anything so inconvenient as evaluate what’s best for their districts.
Yeah, it pisses me off that fascists manage to figure out ways to hide stuff in plain sight - like on this topic: school vouchers. On the surface, they sound like a great solution to the problem of shitty schools, but if you look into how it actually plays out… it destoys the system completely, except for the rich.
Of course that’s what they want: Uneducated poeple are easier to manipulate, and that’s all the fucking oligarchs want: A slave state of people to serve their every need.