Chris Tomlinson, a columnist for The Houston Chronicle, writes here about the audacious, mendacious plan of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick to destroy public schools. Patrick was a talk-show host like Rush Limbaugh before he entered politics. In Texas, the Lt. Governor has more power than the Governor, so his actions must be closely scrutinized.
Dan Patrick hates public schools. He wants to abolish them and replace them with vouchers.
Tomlinson explains Dan Patrick’s malevolent plan:
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s fantasy of abolishing property taxes would set the state up for financial failure and end public education as we know it by placing a greater burden on low- and medium-income Texans.
The most powerful man in Texas politics wants you to believe he’s looking out for homeowners, but there’s always an unacknowledged goal for significant initiatives like this one. You need only look at who deposited $3 million in Patrick’s campaign account and who gave the record $6 million donation to Gov. Greg Abbott to boost private religious schools.
As lieutenant governor, Patrick appoints the leaders of Senate committees, sets their agendas and decides whether a piece of legislation gets a vote. Patrick also rewards senators who appease him and punishes those who don’t with his fat campaign war chest.
Last week, the lite guv ordered the Senate Finance Committee to “determine the effect on other state programs if general revenue were used to fully replace school property taxes, particularly during economic downturns.”
Rising property taxes are directly correlated to the growing cost of housing in Texas. When home or apartment values go up, so do taxes, and the two combined create a crisis across the country.
Median property taxes in Texas rose 26% between 2019 and 2023, according to data from real estate research firm CoreLogic, and first reported by Axios, an online news agency. In four years, the median payment rose to $4,916 from $3,900 as property values nationwide grew 40%.
Texas has crazy property taxes due to a convoluted system that protects the wealthy and pushes the burden of paying for government services onto low- and middle-income families.
To understand how and why, Texans must remember that we pay for schools through property taxes levied by school districts. The state is forbidden from collecting a property tax, so the Legislature depends primarily on sales taxes and severance taxes levied on oil and gas production.
The Texas Constitution also forbids an income tax, perpetuating the myth Texas is a low-tax state. The wealthy, who spend less of their income on retail purchases and real estate, get off easier than in other states. But the half of Texans who struggle to make ends meet pay a higher proportion of their income in sales and property taxes.
Most states rely on the proverbial three-legged stool of income, property and sales taxes to fairly charge families and businesses based on their ability to pay. Texas relies on only two legs, and Patrick is talking about kicking away one of them.
Patrick’s command comes less than a year after the Legislature took $18 billion from sales taxes and oil and gas severance taxes to pay down school taxes. Most of that money came from high crude oil and natural gas prices and a roaring economy that generated huge sales tax returns. The move marked the first tax reduction paid by most property owners in decades.
Ending property taxes is part of the Republican Party of Texas platform, but it would require collecting $73.5 billion from the remaining leg of the stool, the sales tax.
The state sales rate is 6.25%, while local authorities can collect up to 2% more. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association in 2018 calculated the sales taxes would need to reach 25% to replace property taxes.
Right-wing fantasists will point at Texas’ colossal budget surplus last year as proof that lawmakers will only need to raise sales taxes a tiny bit. However, anyone who’s lived in Texas for a decade or more knows the fossil fuel business goes through boom-and-bust cycles.
During a bust in 2011, Texas lawmakers slashed school funding by $4 billion. When the money runs out, the Republicans who control every lever of power in Texas do not hesitate to sacrifice public education to avoid raising taxes. Even with last year’s windfall, they refused to give teachers a raise.
This is where school vouchers and property taxes collide. The billionaires backing Abbott and Patrick believe public schools are Marxist, woke indoctrination factories. They want to give parents vouchers to choose Christian nationalist indoctrination factories exempted from state or federal oversight.
The vouchers, though, are insufficient to cover private school tuition, so families must pay the difference. The GOP hopes to create a system in which the state pays a defined amount and normalizes parents’ paying the rest.
Don’t be fooled by promises of lower taxes; this is about killing public schools by underfunding them and shifting more of the burden onto young families and off the wealthy.
This malicious proposal could be politically palatable. There are some five million public school students in Texas. There are more than six million privately owned homes. The population of Texas is majority-minority, like the public school students. The Republican-dominated legislature is overwhelmingly white. Do the math. The people with the power, the people who pay the most property taxes, are white. Do they want to pay property taxes for other people’s children?
Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonhchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So how are schools going to be funded if they abolish property taxes?
The point of Dan Patrick’s scheme is to defund public schools. Then everyone will need vouchers. The rich will supplement theirs and have access to the best schools.
“The billionaires backing Abbott and Patrick believe public schools are Marxist, woke indoctrination factories.“
They may say they believe that. Anybody can say they believe something if they want to get other people to believe it. In this case, I believe that the people saying public schools are subversive are just saying it, knowing that they are loud liars. They are ploughing salt into the soil of public education and calling it fertilizer.
Right wing fantasist is an apt term for the extremists in the GOP. They fail to understand the consequences of their decisions, but they are willing to plunge the people of the state into uncertainty and chaos in order to please their donors. The extreme right works for oil, gas and other big industries in the state, not working families, that bear the burden of most of the increases. People cannot afford to pay a 25% sales tax so oil and gas can reap the benefit. Another unrealistic plan is to dump the cost of vouchers on the middle class and poor. The surplus from a booming economy would dwindle in time, and people would be overwhelmed by the cost of living in the state. Consequences matter! When are voters going to wake up to the fact that the GOP does not represent their interests.
That is the question – when is enough, enough???!!
“When are voters going to wake up to the fact that the GOP does not represent their interests.”
That they have not is testimony to how breathtakingly stupid many people are.
Because the Republicans have mastered the art of motion overcoming reason. With the cynical addition of appealing to Christianity, they add another layer.
I live in Michigan and have met a fair amount of proud UAW members who love Trump. It’s impossible to get them to understand that he will stack the NLRB with anti-union, pro-corporate lawyers and roll back their labor rights to pre-WWI standards. They emotionally react to his false claims on rising crime and scapegoating any and all immigrants.
Is this nudnik going to abolish publicly funded roads. We don’t need any of those fancy schmancy public roads. Private roads are the way to go don’t you know. I’m sure the big corporations will jump in to build our new private roads network. Velveeta Parkway, Tesla Boulevard, KFC Lane, Verizon Road, etc., ad nauseam. These new roads will be called voucher roads. Ooof! These right wingers are nutso.
They actually have some privately funded roads in Texas in some of the cities. They run parallel to the jammed public highways. For drivers unfamiliar with the concept, it’s very confusing.
If that happens, Texas will become a throwback to the dark ages.
MAGARINO Republicans are already pushing to get rid of the child labor laws. With no public schools, it would be the 19th century again when the poverty rate was about 40% and only 7% of children graduated from high school because the children from the poor were in factories, coal mines and worse.
These guys are the dog who catches the car.
They don’t think about (or care about) the future. They want to keep lobbyists happy (that’s bigger than we imagine), keep the radicals and angry people who show up at board meetings happy, and keep the culture wars alive because they get local headlines.
I expect that the book banner or the “don’t make my white kid feel guilty about slavery” people who show up at a board meeting gets more media attention (regular and social) than taking away property taxes.