You may recall last year when I was rallying behind the cause of the School Property Tax Elimination Act (SPTEA), referred to in proposed legislation as HB1275. While our elected officials in Harrisburg come and go, this idea is still on the table. And it's something you should take a serious look at.The program isn't without risk since it relies on income and sales-based taxes instead of the more predictable property tax. But with foreclosures on the rise and an increasing number of residents receiving lower property assessments, not even property tax income is as predictable as it once was.
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It's a radical idea to some and that can be a little scary. But that shouldn't stop you from learning more about it. Personally I am intrigued by the idea, and was very proud to speak on its behalf at a taxpayers rally in Harrisburg last year.To learn more about the SPTEA, visit the Pennsylvania Taxpayers Cyber Coalition (PTCC) website at http://www.ptcc.us. And if you like the idea, contact our State Representative Frank Farry by sending him an email or calling his office at 215-752-6750, and tell him to support HB1275, the School Property Tax Elimination Act.
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3 comments:
Chris King couldn't support it because he democratic party wouldn't permit it. Frank Farry has no such excuse.
Get er done, Farry!!!!!
This is the single most important issue affecting public schools today - far more important than contracts, which generate so much heat and emotion. Schools must be paid for in one way or another. It's the specter of retirees on fixed incomes and out-of-work taxpayers who are struggling just to feed their families losing their homes that make school budgets exercises in cost cutting no matter the consequences. Under the current system of property taxes school boards each year are forced, when costs inevitably rise, to find new ways of saving money on top of the ones they enacted the year before. Until school taxes are based on real income (and corresponding ability to pay the tax) instead of the potential worth of property that provides the owner no cash until it's sold, we will live the current nightmare over and over, year after year.
We no longer live in an agrarian and trade-based economy in which property and wealth were synonymous because property produced income. Almost 200 years after the Industrial Revolution, it's long past time to get ourselves out of an eighteenth century form of taxation.
I believe the current system must be overhauled, but how? A fair, system would effect each of us so that no individual is feeling all the pain. Income/wage, real estate, and sales taxes would be the best way to go so that all people would have to contribute towards funding the schools. We cannot trust the politicians to do the right thing as they are always influenced by lobbyists, plus they don't want to be the bad guy.
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