North Dakota to vote on abolishing property tax

"What can possibly go wrong as a result of fucked-up property tax laws?"

Signed,

California

 

U.S Highway 85 desperately needs to be turned into a four-lane expressway from the South Dakota state line to the Canadian border, new schools need to be built to deal with the surge of population out West, and it would be smart to invest in infrastructure to capture all of the natural gas that is being flared off from oil wells, which could make the state completely energy indepedent.

But those needs are not important enough to the old men sipping coffee at the Dickinson McDonald's waiting for their farm subsidy checks to come in.

 

Exactly. You take out local control with raising revenue and then you get a situation where local authorities ramp up spending because elected officials are no longer accountable in how that revenue gets collected.

 

Given an oil boom is part of the impetus for this, I get the feeling someday we'll read post-crash stories like, "In the headiest days of the oil boom, North Dakotans voted to abolish property taxes..."

 

But there is a billion dollar surplus in the state government annually?

Yep, sounds about right - which is why the "cutting taxes will make us lose police men" argument is idiotic in almost every case.

There is money available to fund the services - or in this case fix the roads - but the government wants to keep it and spend it on way too many other "goodies" and the "we need more tax" crowd allows it to happen.

Governments are broke not because of lack of income but because of awful spending habits.

 

How long does it have to last before it's not a boom and is just an industry?

 

I'm not sure this oil boom is going anywhere. With developing economies like India and China, demand is going to remain strong.

And this story would argue that the reserves in N.D. are the real deal.

http://online.wSportsJournalists.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576602524023932438.html

 

Its much smarter to have message board posters from Michigan decide the tax situation in North Dakota than the North Dakotans who actually write out the property tax checks.

 

Zag, the point of this dispute is that North Dakota's governments are not broke. It's just that one of them, the state, is running an enormous surplus from energy revenue, and the local governments want a share, or rather, a group of voters wants to force it to share through this ballot initiative. No political entity in human history has ever managed an energy revenue windfall very well. Why should we expect North Dakota, where pheasant hunting rules were the hot political issue until about four years ago, to do so?

 

So they want to redistribute the state's wealth? Sounds socialist to me.

 

Property taxes are highly regressive, because the value of property is not correlated with overall wealth, and probably the most unpopular of all taxes. Many states, including Massachusetts, give direct payments to cities and towns to supplement property tax income. There's nothing inherently radical in North Dakota wanting to do the same, but abolishing the property tax and hoping for the best probably isn't an optimal strategy.

 

Can't expect those redneck pheasant hunters to do anything right. If only the civilized big city folk could do it for them.