I'd be willing to bet Leo, that you couldn't even find out how much property tax has been abated in the school districts your local represents! Your New York state attorney general Spitzer, who I hear is a pretty decent guy, even with the authority of his office probably couldn't find out!
If corporations in their various forms paid their fair share of property taxes, there would be very few school funding problems anywhere in the USA.
Tom Lehman
Leo Casey wrote:
> The problem with using property taxes as the primary
> source of education revenues lies not with their
> alleged regressivity, but with the extreme variations
> in the value of property from one jurisdiction to the
> next. Therein lies the reason for the extreme
> variations in the amount of funds and resources
> available to spend on K-12 schooling, with the
> suburban school districts having much more than urban
> school districts. In NY, which ranks near the very
> bottom in the US in terms of equity of spending and
> resources, a wealthy suburban district may spend
> as much as 2 to 3 x as a poor urban district.
>
> In theory, the solution to this problem would be to
> have education entirely financed by the state
> legislature, and on the basis of a progressive income
> tax. But public education advocates have been cautious
> here for a number of reasons:
> (1) property taxes are much less susceptible to the
> vagaries of the political process, and thus, are a
> more stable, even if inadequate, source of funding
> than state taxes; education requires long-term
> investments, and huge swings in funding are never
> good -- what is lost on a downturn, especially the
> experienced human capital, is never simply regained
> on an upswing.
> (2) there is no guarantee that state funds will be
> distributed in an appropriate, fair manner; in NY
> State, the funding formulas are pure "window
> dressing," recognized as such by all parties; the
> politicians make a decision about who gets how much,
> and then the green eyeshade people go work it out
> in terms of the formulae. Results: NYC and other urban
> areas get screwed, receiving even a smaller proportion
> of state funds than their percentage of the state
> student population. [And NYC is, of course, the area
> with the greatest concentration of high academic need
> students -- special education, English language
> learners, etc.]
> (3) the history in states where the shift to central
> state funding have been made, such as Michigan and
> California, are not exactly models of what one would
> want to see duplicated.
>
> It will be interesting to see the results of the
> Campaign for Fiscal Equity law suit in NY, should
> they get to the remedy phase. The CFE studied the
> results of law suits in other states quite closely,
> and
> have attempted to develop a remedy strategy which
> avoids their shortcomings.
>
> Max wrote:
> > The conventional leftie wisdom is that prop
> > taxes are
> > regressive because landlords pass these taxes
> > along to
> > renters. I am skeptical. I think property
> > ownership
> > reflects income, so property taxes track income.
> > They are closer to proportional, neither regressive
> > nor progressive.
>
> Leo Casey
> United Federation of Teachers
> 260 Park Avenue South
> New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
> Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> It never has, and it never will.
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
> agitation are men who want crops without plowing
> the ground. They want rain without thunder and
> lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar
> of its waters.
> -- Frederick Douglass --
>
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