Abolish Property Taxes? Really?

A bill originally authored by former state Rep. Phil Krinkie (R-Lino Lakes) to eliminate all property taxes resurfaced at the House Taxes Committee. There is no Senate companion, and the committee laid over the bill. Rep. Chris DeLaForest (R-Andover) sponsored HF3632 to “have a little bit of a discussion.”

Here are some excerpts:
• DeLaForest: “We’re conservatives, we’re liberals, we’re Republicans or Democrats. But I’ve had so many good discussions with colleagues across the spectrum about this issue who all recognize the problem with property taxes… Should we be taxing property at all, especially in 2008, when it seems that property wealth has less and less of a nexus to ability to pay?”
• Rep. Mike Jaros (DFL-Duluth): “It’s the most archaic and unfair tax. It was created to tax wealth. Just because someone has a nice home or a nice business building doesn’t mean they have an income.”
• Rep. Tom Rukavina (DFL-Virginia): “To go to income tax would be great, but can Minnesota charge an income tax on all those people from Chicago who’ve got those beautiful cabins on Lake Vermillion?”
• Rep. Paul Marquart (DFL-Dilworth): “The one thing about the property tax is you have a linkage with services that you don’t get with state and income taxes.”
• Rep. Sandy Wollschlager (DFL-Cannon Falls): “I think that property taxes were invented by men … because my husband has used that excuse any number of times: the government sets your value. And he would just love to remodel the basement but that would be about the time someone would come in and reassess the value of the house.”
• Gary Carlson, League of Minnesota Cities: “We might have to increase the appropriation for LGA by about $1.6 billion.”
• Grace Schwab, Minnesota School Boards Association: “Property tax adds some kind of stability to education funding that we can count on year-to-year.”
• Keith Carlson, Executive Director of the Minnesota Inter-County Association: “We have great concern about anything that suggests an alternative where we would have to rely on the state because, frankly, the state’s proven itself to be an unreliable funder.”