Manny Diaz, chair of the Florida Senate Education Committee, plans to introduce legislation to exempt people over 65 from paying school taxes. This would destroy public education, since its funding depends on every citizen paying taxes for its support, because they are citizens who have a stake in the future of our society.
We do not exempt childless people from paying for public schools. We do not exempt those whose children have finished school. We do not exempt anyone from paying what belongs to the public for the benefit of the public.
Should you get a tax rebate if you didn’t call the Fire Department?
Orlando Sentinel columnist Lauren Ritchie writes:
“Never mind that Florida already shamefully ranks 44th in per-pupil spending across the nation.
“That’s irrelevant,” said Senate Education Committee Chairman Manny Diaz, a South Florida Republican who now says that he plans to amend the bill so that the proposed homestead exemption covers only new taxes rather than existing ones…
”An aide for Diaz, whose district covers part of Dade County, on Thursday blamed the department that writes legislation for the sweeping scope of Senate Joint Resolution 344 that would let longtime senior homeowners off the hook for most school taxes…
“Asked who paid for the education of that older population, the senator also brushed that question aside as “irrelevant.”
“Except that it’s not.
Diaz’s philosophy behind this tax cut is a deeply flawed plan that is a slippery slope to chaos: He says seniors who don’t have children in school shouldn’t have to pay for future students or improvements.
“Seriously? This society decided long ago that some important government functions — providing education, building roads, repelling invasion by foreign powers — are key to making the U.S. a strong and healthy country. Everyone contributes to keep it that way.
“If seniors are exempted from paying for schools, why aren’t they charged double for ambulance service? After all, they’re the ones using it most. And what about paying for the nation’s interstate road system? Who here wants to be charged for roads in Nebraska? And police? Those with weapons may argue that they don’t need law enforcement — they handle threats themselves. If you’ve never called 911, should you have to pay?
“This user-fee notion is not just bad philosophy — it’s harmful to public institutions that keep society from crumbling. There is one way and one only to improve Florida schools, which are attended by 90 percent of children: Fund them.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
(NOT ON TOPIC) Tomorrow, Feb 6 is International day of zero tolerance for FGM. Girls all over the world, including here in the USA, are having their external genitalia horribly amputated, often under filthy and septic conditions. They tie the girl down, and hack off her genitalia with a tin can lid, that they found on the ground.
It must be stopped.
see
“We do not exempt anyone from paying what belongs to the public for the benefit of the public.” That should be end of discussion, but in Florida I am no longer surprised by anyone or anything coming out of that state. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” As a retiree, I am proud to be able to financially support our public schools with my taxes.
I benefitted from going to a public school system and so, as a retiree, it is my duty and obligation to financially support the public schools through taxes. Having an educated public is a common good from which we all benefit. Starving the school system of funds through all kinds of carve-outs and exemptions will lead to disaster and collapse.
What bothers me is that so much of what is happening in this country PROMOTES pure selfishness. Retired people benefit from an educated citizenry. There is just so much wrong with this picture.
Ah, “selfishness.”
The more selfishness,
The less public wisdom.
The less public wisdom,
The less democracy.
The less democracy,
The less public good and
The more selfishness.
The more selfishness and
The less public good,
The more violence and crime.
The more selfishness,
The more school choice and
The less civil society.
The less civil society,
The more poverty effects.
The more poverty effects,
The less student learning.
The less student learning,
The less public wisdom (after a delay).
The less public wisdom,
The more selfishness.
Go to the top.
This is a horrible, regressive idea. It is everyone’s responsibility to pay for the common good. With the drug crisis in our country, we can no longer assume that seniors do not have children in schools. I know many instances in which grandparents or even great grandparents are raising grandchildren. Florida already offers a homestead deduction, and wealthy individuals already get tax breaks for useless “scholarships.” Florida needs to collect taxes for schools and other services such as fighting the spreading “red tide” that threatens the tourist industry.
This idea is horrible in ways you may not have even contemplated. Unless the law is written not to leave loopholes and has strict enforcement people will cheat the system. My county in Georgia already has this garbage in place. A few years ago they had to ammend the law to expressly state that it only includes 65+ homeowners who had no children under the age of 19 resident. Why? Becuase families with school age children were rampantly putting their homes in grandma’s and grandpa’s name and then claiming that they didn’t owe school taxes.
Given my familiarity with Florida this seems like an open invitation for people to cheat as happened where I live. Unless school boards are willing to do as ours did and start carefully investigating and documenting fraud people are going to get away with it. Obviously this a terrible law and school boards shouldn’t be put in this position in the first place, but this is the kind of crap you have to expect with Republican dominated legislative bodies.
Property values are directly related to the schools in the area. That is a sure fire way to destroy a community’s value as well as destroy public schools. It’s obvious that Diaz lacks the educational background to be in the position he is.
This is the danger we all face as Social Studies and civics get wiped clean from our classrooms. It’s a Catch 22 situation.
Then again, he probably has no idea what that is.
This is a key issue people need to understand. Quality public education is a tremendous community asset that equals higher property values. People gain nothing from sending public dollars into schools that will compete against their public schools. More charters are disinvestment in your own community and property values.
This Florida legislator must be a libertarian Koch minion.
In other words, a complete bigoted, prostituting idiot.
This is one of the problems that happens when property taxes are connected to school taxes.
In truth, I have known people who sell their homes and move as soon as their kids are out of high school because the property taxes that fund the excellent school systems are so extraordinarily high.
Presumably a new person who either has kids or has so much money that a huge tax bill isn’t an issue then moves in.
I do have some sympathy for a senior citizen living in a home he bought 60 years ago when a middle class worker could easily afford it and who dutifully paid off his mortgage being forced out his home because he had hoped to die in it. I don’t know if this law was intended to help people like that originally and got warped into helping lots of very rich people instead.
But the philosophy behind the legislator’s statement is awful and not what America is all about.
^^I should clarify that I am referring to some middle class seniors who find themselves living in homes that are now extraordinarily valuable and whose annual property tax could rise to 2 or 3 times their annual income.
It is not just seniors worried about taxes, at least in NYC. Moving into the catchment district of any well thought of public elementary school is far more valuable to families with school age children, so they flock to those catchment areas, driving up rents and prices. Once their children leave the school, they can get better deals in catchment areas of less popular schools, so they move out.
I haven’t noticed any move away from districts with good schools. But then I don’t live in Kansas.
It happens in Westchester and parts of New Jersey. If you bought a home decades ago for under $350,000 and kids graduated high school and you are near retirement, spending $35,000 or more each year on property taxes can be quite a burden. There are some rich people who don’t even notice an additional $20,000 or $30,000 in taxes. And there are people who never earned much more than $100,000 and as they retire they simply don’t have the money to pay the taxes.
Just to clarify: what nycpsp is describing is the norm for NJans who bought a 3 or 4br house w/n easy commute to NYC 25 yrs ago. Their annual RE taxes are not 3 or 4 times their retirement income– more like 1/3-1/2 combined SS & pension– but that’s not sustainable unless you have a mighty nest egg, too. Many downsize & stay in the area. The property here holds its value, so it’s also not unusual for people to keep the house in the family for 2 or 3 generations.
When I lived in NYC [’70’-early ’90’s] the picture was different– school zone was not quite as important, as there were multiple options w/n the ps system, as well as reasonably priced catholic schs.
Want to help seniors? Increase Social Security and Medicare! Pay people a decent wage while they are working, so they can pay their mortgages off and save money. Fund better pensions.
The liberitarian thinkers are in the habit of saying that the problem with democracy is that the majority always votes itself benefits taken from the minority of people who really work. I look at the situation a different way. I think people who have a substantial amount are more interested in keeping what they have than helping their community.
Perhaps it would help if the people voting knew the children in the schools. Political leaders who have gotten things done often try to put a face on an issue. I think rural schools were able to receive funding through property taxes because the rural people knew each other. They voted to give money to the schools because they knew many of the students by name and were related to others. The problem then was that property taxes could not bring much money in. Farmers can have money, but there are not too many of them. Enter the modern day, when property taxes are still asked to fund schools.
In the modern paradigm, the property owner is asked to pay much of the burden when the need for alternative funding is rising. Businesses want better trained workers, but some of them, especially the big ones, argue that it is society’s job to train their workers. Big retail is enticed with tax breaks, communities hoping to reap the sales tax benefits. Small wonder that property owners are eager to share the burden of taxation with those of significant income. The solution to the modern problem is an old solution: the progressive income tax. Regressive sales taxes need to be replaced with taxes that leave alone the basic income of the poor, and ask more of those who have been rewarded by the economy.
See my response to you below.
Wow. Heh, heh, heh. What’s next? How about: seniors who drive less than 6k mis/yr need not pony up taxes for infrastructure? Those who haven’t had a house fire in 25 yrs don’t pay taxes for fire dept? Here’s one– your taxes toward police protection will be pro-rated based on crime stats in your nbhd.
Better yet, since the most health costs on average are for the last year of life, let’s pull the plugs, quit giving palliative and hospice care, and deny high cost drugs and treatments. Our snark fits well together!
😀
Bethree5,
Actually people who do not buy gasoline do not pay taxes to support the highway system. This will need to change as more people have electric cars.
Ah, you’re right about that, TE. You could add tolls to that, but the point is the same. Tho it seems odd to me that those who don’t drive get to sit there & enjoy [free] the benefits of having others travel to visit them, not to mention all the goods & services at their fingertips thanks to infrastructure.
Perhaps I should have said, “seniors who never travel need not pay into infrastructure costs”– thinking about trains and planes. Surely plane/ train ticket price can’t cover all maint & capital costs?
Don’t these seniors realize that someone paid for THEIR educations, and for their children’s educations? And that they, therefore, have a responsiblity to fund the next generations?
I know many seniors do, but the ones clamoring for bill like this don’t seem to.
Yes they do and they don’t care. As William S Burroughs wrote for one of his characters, “F*** you, I got mine. Every man for himself.”
My late father-in-law used to complain about this regularly. Tho his argument was, you should only have to pay for the facility while [if] you’re using it, I think most of his resentment had to do w/paying to send his son to Catholic schools K-12, while his taxes supported the local pubschs. I’m sure he thought of that as providing his only child w/the best ed/oppty he could afford. Yet baked into his idea of “best” was “white,” as he raised his kid during block-busting days. (His NYC generation raised kids in tight ethnic nbhds, so he did as ‘everyone’ seemed to be doing.) We could never get him to see that the quality of nearly every good & service he depended on lifelong was based on the quality of the local public schools.
Waters:
Money, get back
I’m all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack
Money, it’s a hit
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit
Gramps: I’ve paid into SS for 47 years, and now I’m on it. I just got a 2.8 percent
“raise”. How much of it do you want? You say you’ll be in deep shit if I’m exempted
from paying for schools? That’s a shame. I never thought I was in deep shit “cause
you were exempted from paying into SS. I just figured there was no way around
reaping what you sow, like sleeping in the bed you made.
Well, I guess I’m never too old to learn a new way of being stupid.
How much do you want? One thing though, don’t get too carried away with
education. The KAZILLION paid custodians would be out of a job, if what to
think, was replaced with HOW to think…
Roy Turrentine, I think you made a big jump there from “rural schools were able to receive funding through property taxes because the rural people knew each other” to modern-day problems w/school-funding via property taxes.
I grew up on the rural fringe of a small city whose business was about 1/2 colleges [an Ivy Uni & a private college]. The other 1/2 was ag (buttressed by the large ag school at the uni) and light industry. The cycle of public ed funding in 2nd 1/2 of 20thC was similar to many US communities. Just post-war we still had small rural schools, and town made do w/school bldgs dating back to ’20’s/ ’30’s. No question, knowing each other incentivized funding local schools via prop taxes. This was just as true ‘downtown’, w/its tight-knit nbhds, as in the outlying rural villages.
Early-’60’s baby boom (supported by thriving economy): big new hisch [old bldgs converted to jrhischs], plus addns or replacements for old town elemschs, plus a few new bldgs consolidating studs from the tiny old rural elems. No real change in culture, despite more babies– we all still “knew each other.”
But… ’70’s reqd replacing the old ’20’s/ ’30’s sch bldgs w/new midschs, & adding onto hisch. Simultaneously, local farms were taking hits from burgeoning centralized mega-ag industry, and small mfrs began disappearing [moving South, or merging w/ larger, out-of-town facilities]. THIS is the point where public stopped approving new school bond issues. (First thing to go in ’71 was hisch vo-tech, now to be found only regionally).
Property values stagnated, flattened out. They did not nosedive; colleges have thrived, still draw people/ $/ desire for qual schsys to the area. But supporting ag/ industry has remained minimal, so there’s nothing pushing values upward. Unemployment/ lo-wage jobs plagues the rural fringe, which has increased the town-gown wealth gap, & brought increased [unaddressed, i.e., unfunded] mental-health/ addiction issues in its wake.
The population is still 30k (as it was in ’60’s); everybody still knows everybody. That’s not the issue– it’s the economy.
Many states offer seniors a “homestead exemption”, as a way to give elderly people a break on their property taxes. My Grandfather (in Kentucky) qualified for the exemption. After paying property taxes all their lives, some elderly people deserve a break.
The problem is our nation’s berserk idea to fund public schools through property taxes. This ensures that wealthy areas with a solid tax base, can have excellent schools. And it guarantees that poor children, in areas with a depressed tax base, get terrible schools. This was addressed some years ago, in the book “Savage Inequalities” by J. Kozol. see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities
The solution must be in developing new ways to finance public education, through revenue sources, other than property taxes.
Schools in economically-depressed areas need more funding than schools in prosperous areas. Low-income families need additional nutritional programs, and additional after-school programs. All of this costs money, and the property tax stream is not there.
I read an article in Time magazine, that said that after Kozol wrote that book, he wept.
SIGH?
Charles, I just checked to see how much I save in California because I am a 73 year old senior.
“This year seniors will save between $111 (single) and $222 (married) when filing their 2016 California income tax returns. You may also qualify for the Senior Head of Household Credit equal to 2 percent of your California taxable income, up to $1,345, if you: Are 65 or older as of January 1, 2017, and …
https://www.boe.ca.gov/runner/seniors/
Ah, my property tax for 2018, after that GREAT exemption, was still more than SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS and the value for my small house is way below the average for the area where I live.
The median Price tag for a Bay Area home is $935,000.
I bought my home for $362,000 because it was a mess, a fixer upper and was such a wreck, I had to work on it for several months to get it livable before I moved in and three years later, I’m still working on renovating the house and its small lot.
Imagine what a senior my age is paying in property tax in the Bay Area for a house with a median price tag after their exemption. Maybe $18k annually.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Freezing property taxes is one thing but eliminating them completely is ridiculous.
Oh the irony. We all have been paying for Medicare for seniors since we started working. That means that while I paid for full-time child care, school taxes and other expenses, I was on the hook for people using Medicare. During the time my kids were in college, I paid property taxes and MEDICARE. We pay our whole lives for Medicare, for the over 65 crowd. It’s a very worthwhile program. The problem with exempting seniors completely from property or school taxes, is that we are still paying thousands a year for their Medicare and if they are retired, they are no longer paying into it. For the record, I think that property taxes can be onerous, too. I’m not suggesting that some changes could not be made, but there are so many wealthy people who would jump at the chance NOT to pay, this would place an unfair burden on everyone else.
In New York, the first $20,000 of income from retirement accounts or private pension is exempt from state taxes. And retired public employees pay zero in state taxes on their pension income.
Not in California.