President’s Message

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Paul Sanderson

I would like to start this newsletter by wishing you all a very Happy New Year and by referring to a more positive article on property tax than the one that featured in my previous newsletter for December 2025.

This one is also from the Bluegrass Institute and is the second installment in a two-part series on property taxes. The first was Vance Ginn's article titled “The Case Against Property Taxes” to which I referred in my December 2025 newsletter. This month we look at a response by Jared Walczak, Vice President of State Projects at the Tax Foundation.

This article is titled “The Free Market Case for Property Taxes” and starts with the statement “Economic research consistently finds that property taxes are less economically harmful than other major taxes.” The author continues: “Americans have been paying property taxes since the colonial era - and complaining about them for just as long. It’s about as American as you can get. (The paying and the complaining.)

  • Property taxes currently generate 70 percent of all local tax revenue, some or all of which would have to be replaced with other taxes under property tax repeal.
  • Replacing the property tax with newly granted local taxing authority is exceedingly difficult, because local sales and income tax bases vary widely across jurisdictions; there may, for instance, be no feasible sales tax rate by which an agricultural county or bedroom community could replace its property tax revenue.
  • Backfilling forgone local property tax revenue through new state taxes is difficult because it dramatically shifts overall tax burdens, undermines local accountability, and cannot easily adjust for changing population mixes.
  • All revenue alternatives are less conducive to economic growth than the existing property tax regime, but some transfer regimes are sharply degrowth.
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