Property taxes will be eliminated when pigs fly
In her excellent May 15 letter, detailing the history of impotent efforts to eliminate the noose around the necks of homeoowners inflicted by the property tax, Joann Diesel asks, ‘Will property taxes ever be eliminated?” The short answer is a simple, “No.”
Property taxes will be eliminated when pigs fly, on the day that the General Assembly votes to cut its size and vast expense and when it becomes a largely honorable institution which seeks to do the public’s business rather than that of powerful, moneyed special interests like the National Rifle Association, the gun manufacturers’ lobby, which acts in contravention to public safety.
There is no serious effort to reduce property taxes on the part of the majority of our state government “leaders,” and some might be surprised to know that it is largely Republicans, purported members of the tax restraint party, that have gummed up the works.
To my knowledge, my longtime Republican State Representative John Maher has never sponsored or proposed a measure to swap a more fair and straightforward levy for the property tax, expressing to me some years ago his unwillingness to consider increasing the state sales tax on the basis that it would harm our competitiveness with other states. During his years in office, State Senator John Pippy did nothing to lead the way to relieve the burden on property owners.
When State Representative Democrat David Levdansky proposed a means of significantly reducing the property tax, then-Speaker, now jail inmate and felon John Perzel used his power to kill the legislation. Perzel would only lend his support to relieving his district’s many seniors of the tax on their homes, as if they are the only individuals upon whom this is a burden.
When another relief measure was proposed more recently, it did not survive a House committee vote, killed by a majority of Republican nays. Now State Senator Matt Smith, a Democrat, at that time a House member of the Committee that was voting on the property tax relief legislation, cast his vote in the public interest, to send the bill to the House floor for a vote.
For years, then House member Republican Sam Rohrer made his signature issue a viable plan to eliminate the property tax. Had his colleagues been willing to listen, the measure could have become law.
Governor Ed Rendell, while campaigning for office in 2002, promised that he would reduce or eliminate property taxes, “and if the Legislature does not act, I will.” The Legislature did not act and neither did Rendell, and the property tax relief that was promised by virtue of approving casino gambling in Pennsylvania has been shown to be a fraud, offering peanuts to most homeowners.
We have been stonewalled for decades in which meaningless study and debate have purportedly occurred in the General Assembly. There are few profiles in courage, decency and fairness there, and so long as we re-elect the same cast of characters, offering them lucrative positions for life, that shall not change.
Apparently even Allegheny County State House and Senate members are content with a system of taxation which is expensive to administer and whose court-ordered reassessments heighten inequity and increase the tax burden for many, tying tens of thousands of homeowners into knots.
This is not government of, by, and for the people. It is the definition of insanity.
Oren Spiegler
Upper St. Clair