Sorry, I’ve been neglecting you all for a few days. I teach a three hour class on state and local politics on Wednesday afternoons. It’s a new prep, so I’m usually up the night before until 2am making powerpoint slides and grading papers. I’ll get the kinks out of this class, and be back to proper blogging soon. Last night, I was too groggy to write a post, so I answered e-mail and played dumb video games.
One of my neighbors, Shawn, is flipping out over the property taxes in New Jersey. In the past four years, her taxes have nearly doubled from $4,500 to $8,200. 8 grand is actually lower than the neighboring towns. Nearly 75% of that money goes to the schools. Some of it goes to Newark and Elizabeth for their schools. We also have tiny little school district up here, each of which has a superintendent that gets paid $200,000.
Shawn is complaining that property taxes in her native Louisiana and in Florida are much, much cheaper – maybe $1000 per year. The old people in town are complaining in town council meetings that they are being forced out. The town leaders are complaining about having to give money to Newark. Lots of griping going on around here.
I’ve been shooting back e-mails begging my buddy to stay, since there’s always a fun party in her kitchen. Also, the public schools in that area aren’t wonderful. Both of their salaries would be cut in half. The values of homes in this area are always rising.
Megan McArdle had a post up last week about whether or not people willingly pay taxes. (link when I’m not so tired). I’m willing to pay the higher taxes in New Jersey. I’m getting things for that money — better schools, a home that holds its value, access to better paying jobs, proximity to New York City, access to grandparents. Taxes aren’t always about money for other people; it’s also about services for you.
UPDATE: Megan responds. Comment section is here.
Apt. 11d 
“Shawn is complaining that property taxes in her native Louisiana and in Florida are much, much cheaper – maybe $1000 per year. The old people in town are complaining in town council meetings that they are being forced out. The town leaders are complaining about having to give money to Newark. Lots of griping going on around here.
I’ve been shooting back e-mails begging my buddy to stay, since there’s always a fun party in her kitchen. Also, the public schools in that area aren’t wonderful. Both of their salaries would be cut in half. The values of homes in this area are always rising.”
There’s also a lot of griping in Florida over the growth in property taxes, which as I understand it, are designed to really smack snowbirds and favor long-time property owners. Then there’s the issue of hurricane insurance, which is really steep, since you are insuring against a near certainty. Also, as I hear it, the Florida economy (which had been highly housing-dependent) is really suffering, and a lot of people are leaving. It has the potential to be a sort of warm Michigan.
“The values of homes in this area are always rising.” I wouldn’t bet on that. Also, even if NJ housing were to stay high, that would mean that their kids would have a hard time affording a house there.
In Texas, houses are relatively cheap, but property tax runs between 2 and 3 percent. When you buy a house at a certain level, you are in effect choosing your tax level. Livable/decent neighborhoods in our area start at around $100,000, so anything above that is elective.
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I wish my taxes were higher. I feel under-served, and think that we have the affluence to pay for much more in my neck of the woods. I guess that’s not my decision to make for my neighbors. Howeer, I would much much rather have a public pool in my neighborhood, one that had sufficient access and useability, and yet was available to everyone than join the local country club (which pretty much stands for everything I detest). But, low taxes == no pool, which means I actually consider the unthinkable.
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Can’t your friend run for superintendant of a school district? If she’s pulling down 200K, she ought to be able to cover the property taxes…
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bj,
Don’t city pools charge admission fees anyway? At least in certain places, getting a membership (JCC or whatever) is fairly inexpensive per-visit, as long as you use the heck out of your membership. We paid $400 a year (mainly to swim) for a JCC membership at our neighborhood branch eight years ago. And there was always toilet paper in the stalls, and no murky puddles in the changeroom.
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Boy, I really hated this post of mine. Then the power went down for a day, and we had no cable access, so I couldn’t pull it off typepad.
Isn’t it a sign of privilege to not care about taxes? This post of mine sounded really snobby and it’s annoying me.
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Levittown on Long Island has free pools for all town residents. Actually, you don’t have to live in Levittown technically. They’re in the Levitt-built surrounding communities as well (Hicksville, East Meadow, Westbury). All you have to do is show proof of residency, and you get a pool tag.
You guys get really nailed on property taxes in NJ. We’re paying around $2500, and I don’t know how or why. We live in Taxachusetts, after all. I don’t question. I just send the tax bills to the mortgage company.
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Of course, the question is how much high taxes=quality services, as opposed to high taxes=lots of school superintendents making $200K/year. And don’t get me started on the lack of results from the massively increased funding poured into Newark.
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Don’t forget that high taxes and no services is a very real possibility. They shut about half of the pools here at the same time they raised my taxes by about $300 a month. They also stopped doing any road repair for the year and cut the police force by 100. And all of this happened during years when the economy was doing well.
Anyway, sorry for dragging Pittsburgh into everything. It’s just that my views on taxes, the Democratic party, suburbanism, and the proper size of the government are all very wrapped-up in my experiences of the last five years. Basically, I am in a zero-sum game with the various local governments. A dollar of taxes isn’t that much less of a waste than a dollar burned. Of course, I still do receive (and need) some local services. But, every new tax raised is basically poured into the bottomless bucket that is the public sector pension plan.
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“…better schools, a home that holds its value, access to better paying jobs, proximity to New York City, access to grandparents.”
You’re paying for government to artificially inflate the housing market and for access to grandparents?
I guess PT Barnum was right.
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MH,
I think there’s a lot of value in presenting well-sourced, detailed personal experience, rather than trying to argue purely based on abstract argument. Local information is important. You really see this at places like thehousingbubbleblog.com, where the blog seemingly manages to get around to talking about every crevice of the country, one zip code at a time. It’s very helpful at arriving at a big picture.
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There seems to be something broken in the posting software.
Several of the above messages include things like “I wish that my taxes were higher” yet none of them mention how much extra their author actually pays. The posting software must have cut off that part, right?
After all, there’s nothing stopping anyone from paying more taxes. Surely folks advocating higher taxes are paying what they think that they should pay, not just what they’re forced to pay.
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It would have to be broken down, item by item. You’d check off where you want your money to go:
1. cool exploding stuff
2. dairy cows on welfare
3. Bibles/Korans/chickens for ritual sacrifices/etc. for public school classrooms
4. above-market-value affordable housing
Etc.
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I have to echo Andy on this one, Laura. If you feel you’re undertaxed, tack on a bit extra when you send the check to the IRS or the State of New Jersey. They gratefully (or not so gratefully) accept donations, y’know.
To paraphrase you: Taxes aren’t always about services for you; it’s also about money for other people. I’ve got services enough– so why should I be in the business of giving money (of which I don’t have very much) to other people? Let *them* pay for whatever extras they want, like swimming pools and such.
Yes, I know. I’m being cranky, and my attitude is crabbed. But then *you* don’t live in the People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland.
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Oh, and congratulations on the Instalanche.
🙂
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As stated earlier the government isn’t preventing you from paying more in tax, so walk the talk.
That said; Charity is a selfless giver to family, friends and neighbors. If you care why do you need the government to do the giving; that’s about as silly as LSD-fried millionaires in Connecticut throwing campaign cash towards Schmumer and Clinton who then try to take America’s tax dollars to build a Woodstock Museum.
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Better schools? Than whom? The U.S. already spends more per pupil than any other nation on Earth, and yet our students’ performance is abysmal.
Access to better paying jobs? How do taxes facilitate this access?
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Well, the problem is that I (one of the people who wants to pay more taxes) want to pay more taxes in order to get more services (I mention pools, specifically).
Unfortunately, though I am very privileged, I can’t actually pay for a pool for the neighborhood all by myself. Neither can any of my neighbors (I think, though there might be a few). So, sending in the amount extra in taxes would do nothing to improve the situation.
And, Amy — yes, I could find a private membership in a pool (that’s what a country club is after all, and money isn’t what prevents me from having access). But, I don’t want a private membership. (And, I also don’t want to utilize the services of a religious organization, if I can avoid it).
I recognize, of course, though, that democracy is how we decide these things, and don’t think that I should be able to raise my neighbors tax rate so that we can all have pools, if they’d rather spend their money on something else. But I do resent it when the people who live on the other side of the state tell me tha we can’t do that, rather than letting my neighbors and me decide what level of taxes we want to pay for what level of services.
And, yes, I guess not worrying about taxes is a sign of privilege, ’cause it means you have enough money that you can pay for the things you want (like an ipod), and the things that you and your neighbors agree you want (through taxes). If you’re trading them off, it’s much harder to make the decision. But, it’s also a recognition that taxes are used to pay for services we actually use (like roads, and schools, and clean air) rather than delusionally imagining that they are wasted into the ether.
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And, yeah, I used to live in the people’s republic of Maryland, and I thought we had more and better services (even though I was childless at the time, and didn’t use some of them).
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Of course, you could all pool your money together and buy the pool without government intervention. Why must taxes enter this?
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I don’t think that I’m delusional in believing that taxes to Pittsburgh are wasted into the ether. Say people passed a tax and built a new pool. Then, you have to staff the pool with lifeguards, janitors, a manager, etc. All of those people are going to be getting above market wages as city employees and all of them will be expected to grateful for it or be getting the job as a reward for past service to the machine. The machine has proven incapable of fiscal reform, largely because it depends on patronage. The leading symptom of the machine’s inability to live within its means is the pension system. Not only is there a huge current shortfall, but the contributions for everyone one of those new pool employees (their own and the city’s) are still too low to even come close to paying for the retirement of the new employees, let alone close the gap left over from the past.
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I live in Essex County, New Jersey. I moved there in 1999. That year, my property taxes were $10k. Now, they are almost $19k. My property taxes are split 57% for school taxes (and these only go to my local district, not Newark), 25% for my municipality (to clear snow from the roads, etc., local police and fire), and 21% or so for Essex County (county parks, the jails and courts). I’m not sure where the state income tax and state sales tax (now 7% thanks to the bearded genius running our state into bankruptcy) go, but state taxes pay for the Abbot-district schools – Newark, Elizabeth, Camden, to pay medicaid, to pay for state parks and to provide some assistance to municipalities and school districts.
I have less issue paying my property taxes as those funds educate my kids (although there are WAY too many special ed instructors – is every kid in special ed??). I have more of an issue paying the state taxes.
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OK, I just read Megan’s post about people not wanting to pay higher taxes unless it’s to fund something big. Well, in Taxachusetts, one of the big political issues in any town is the Proposition 2 1/2 override. OK, so in my town the override wasn’t passed, but the reason we wanted the override was to *maintain* services. They closed one of our elementary schools when the override was defeated. But several communities in MA do pass the override.
Here‘s a Boston Globe site on news about various override initiatives.
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In my home town in rural western Washington, the city built a small indoor pool a few years back. Rah-rah! Unfortunately, it eventually became clear that there was no way that the town could afford the horrific heating bill or the cost of staffing it. The facility now has a nice website saying that the pool is closed until further notice. That was millions of dollars down the drain, for nothing.
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I was just looking over the closed pool’s plan for reopening. They say that it costs $364K to operate it for a year (about $100K of which is the cost of propane), and that the pool would make about $88K a year from admissions, classes, etc. So that means that the pool would require a $276K yearly subsidy from the city.
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bj,
Much as you dislike using private or religious pools, don’t you think that in view of the tremendous amount of resources used by a pool that it is greener and more environmentally sensitive not to build a public pool just to have a public pool. If the existing pools were well-located and if we are worried about access to them, why not offer “scholarships” to anyone below a certain income level who is interested? Trust me, not much proselytizing goes on at the JCC swimming pool (although ours did have nights reserved for men’s or women’s swimming).
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Sounds like property taxes are directly tied to that old real estate mantra: something with three Ls. I don’t remember.
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People don’t mind paying taxes if they see a real, and accountable, use of their money. In much of New Jersey it has always been about the schools. The fact that people move out of towns like Ridgewood as soon as their children graduate high school is no coincidence.
And I remember the argument about chasing out the poor and the elderly from property tax battles in the mid 70’s.
QM
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> Well, the problem is that I (one of the people who wants to pay more taxes) want to pay more taxes in order to get more services (I mention pools, specifically).
Nothing it stopping you from pooling your money with other folks (which is actually quite common wrt pools) who want the same but you’re not doing so.
In other words, you’re willing to pay more only if other people are FORCED to pay more. That’s very different.
What’s wrong with you paying for the things that you want and other people doing the same?
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I just read this site’s tag line: “Leave saving the world to the men? I don’t think so.”
Hint – saving the world is doing something, possibly with other like minded folks, regardless of whether other people go along. It’s taking the hit if you’re wrong. It’s paying more for things that you want. It’s not arguing for more taxes.
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I’m so over NJ! born and raised here I would up and leave in a second if it weren’t for my husband’s job being located in Newark. Family of 5 still renting, can’t afford to buy, not just because of the 3br houses in Linden being $300k & up but also the darn $8000 in property taxes. Linden is overcrowded & schools aren’t perfect. Not all of NJ is horrible. I grew up in a suburb near the shore where the schools were exceptional, I can sit on my porch all day and watch only 3 cars go by oh and did i mention its by the shore! houses are cheaper, taxes half of linden’s but that was when the economy was good don’t know about now. again too far from my husband’s darn job anyway.
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