Thursday, June 29, 2023
Mulvaney: Beneath the property taxes that fund education
Timothy M Mulvaney (Texas A&M; Academic google), Beneath property taxes that fund education123 Column L. Rev. 1325 (2023):
Many states rely heavily on local property taxes to finance public education. The political and academic discourse on the extent to which these taxes should play this role largely focuses on second-order issues, such as the vices and virtues of local control, the availability of mechanisms to redistribute property tax revenues between school districts and the general situation. income stability. This Essay argues that such discourse would benefit from more attention being directed to the fairness of government threshold choices over property laws and policies that impact property values against which property taxes are levied.
The Essay classifies these options into three categories: structural options related to infrastructure and land use; financial options related to subsidies and exemptions; and protection options related to the prevention of natural and human-induced adversities. This taxonomy reveals that if the government made different choices about the content of property rights, those choices would produce different property values and therefore different distributions of property tax revenues that finance public education. The Essay distills a number of norms—circumstance-sensitivity, anti-discrimination, and interconnectedness—that can serve as a useful starting point for a fairness-inspired assessment of these pervasive ownership choices that are inevitably linked to opportunity and delivery. educational.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/06/mulvaney-beneath-the-property-taxes-financing-education.html