Aug
18
Written by:
William Lutz
8/18/2009 4:49 PM
One of our readers just wrote and asked what questions would I have asked U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison if she had taken questions at yesterday's announcement of her candidacy for governor?
I would have asked two questions:
1. Senator Hutchison, where do you stand on tuition deregulation?
For anyone who knows me, that I would ask such a question is predictable. But it’s also fair game. In her announcement speech, one of Hutchison’s attacks on Perry is that tuition has skyrocketed during his term of office. So it’s only fair that she clarify her position on the policy that allowed it to skyrocket.
2. Senator Hutchison, you correctly mentioned that property taxes are some of the highest in the nation. Do you support requiring cities and counties to obtain voter approval before raising property taxes faster than inflation?
To put it another way, Senator Hutchison, whose side are you on: the taxpayers of Texas or the people who raised their taxes – who are represented at the Capitol by the Texas Municipal League and the Texas Association of Counties?
I’ve run the numbers myself. Of all the methods that have been tried to control rising property taxes in recent years (tinkering with homestead exemptions, fine-tuning the comptroller’s property value study, altering truth-in-taxation notices, etc.), only one of them actually works. The only way to keep taxes low is to require tax-increasers to get voter approval before increasing taxes more than inflation. Nothing else works.
Hutchison has made an issue out of high property taxes. She has also blasted the revised franchise tax (sometimes called the margin tax or business tax). But the main reason the margin tax has become unpopular is because businesses that have to pay the levy did not receive the property tax relief intended by the Legislature. Cities and counties abused the flexibility provided by the Legislature to erode tax relief.
I hope that in the next few weeks, we get answers to the two questions I pose above.