Tony Katz:
Mike Braun’s property tax plan… He came out with it last week, went on with Kendall and Casey and talked about it.
What do you want me to say? It does the job. It doesn’t do the job. It’s enough. It’s not enough. It’s gonna satisfy some people. It’s not gonna satisfy others. The plan as he describes it: Changes homestead deductions. Property taxes have gone up because housing values have gone up. So, what he says is the homestead deduction to allow every homeowner with an assessed value of over 125,000 deduct 60% of their homes assessed value from their tax bill. This is the overhaul that he wants. Homeowners with assessed value below 125,000 would be allowed to take the standard deduction of 48,000 in addition to a 60% supplemental deduction. According to Braun, this would result in an immediate 21% reduction in the average homeowner tax bill and result in an immediate 39% reduction in the average tax bill for homes worth $80,000. Then he wants to cap the property tax bills at 2% for seniors and low-income Hoosiers and families with children under the age of 18 and 3% for all other taxpayers. If you go back to my interview with Senator Mike Braun when he was running for into the primary right to get the nomination on the Republican side, this question got asked got asked of all the candidates.
There were no plans, really. But in the anytime it came close it was conversations of caps. Capping this and capping that. And remember that property taxes are local. And it’s how your local government does XY and Z. Our problem? Are property taxes. I don’t know why we don’t address the issue as it is. I’m not even saying I’m opposed to the plan. A reduction is always good. But the issue, the most fundamental basic issue, is that a property tax is obscene. A property tax states that you do not own what you own. But rather, the state owns it, and you’re given some opportunity to play make believe. If they tell me I have to pay a tax on the property I’ve already purchased year in and year out for the pleasure of owning the property, and if I don’t, they could take it from me, I don’t own it. This is the issue.
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And then they take property taxes, and they tie that to education funding. Well, I can end that if I put an end to this nonsense that we call public education, which in the vast majority of cases doesn’t work. And I say this as a guy who lives in Carmel. My kids do public education and it’s great. Well, it’s great. Why do you want to stop it? Because just because it worked out well for my kids doesn’t means it works out well. There’s a level of boondoggle here, there’s a level of abuse here, there’s a nonsense with the unions here.
Source: Citizens of the Planet / Getty
Sometimes one must sacrifice for the greater good. I know that’s a very much an anathema thought to certain people out there. The property tax is the issue, and I’m not saying that even if I were governor, I’d be able to have it eliminated, change the methodology, but we should be clear that as a concept. Property tax is abusive and obscene. So, if you ask me. Whether or not I am OK with this, overall, about 60%. If you’re homes worth over 125 thousand, 48,000. If it’s worth less than 125,000, then you get the additional supplemental deduction of 60%. It’s a start. Is it a good plan? I’m not. Others break it down. Am I gonna pretend that nobody else understands this stuff? Of course, I might pretend that it’s not complicated. Of course not. It is complicated, and there are people who get it. You’d have to be, you’d have to be a really rare air to think like there’s only a handful of people who understand this stuff. I understand it a bit in in more of a theoretical way. Why do we allow these property taxes to take place? And why do we say, well, we’ve got these systems that somehow must be funded when not necessarily? We need to rethink. I don’t know why that’s that. That’s so hard. But it is. And I’m not saying that even if I were governor, I could, I could change this. This is a nice start, Mike Braun. A nice start.
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