The Business Council of New York State Inc. has created a Web site aimed at supporting a property tax cap. Now.
The cap is the brainchild of the Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi-led state Commission on Property Tax Relief and has been supported by Gov. David Paterson.
Paterson presented a bill to the state Legislature to cap property taxes at 4 percent, but the Legislature failed to vote on the bill. The state Senate seemed to be warming to the bill when the legislative session ended this week, but Assembly Majority Leader Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, has vehemently opposed the bill.
In addition, some Long Island legislators have said they would prefer to find a way to lower property taxes than set up an artificial cap that practically mandates a 4 percent increase each year. And the teachers don’t like it either.
From the Albany Business Review:
Powerful unions, including the 600,000-member New York State United Teachers in Latham, have fiercely opposed that idea and campaigned against the cap in the waning days of the legislative session, which ended June 25. Paterson has repeatedly said he is willing to call special legislative sessions later this year to try to lower future budget deficits or pass key legislation like a property tax cap.
“I want to get to a point where we start to look at substance, more than anything else,” Paterson said at a June 23 press conference. He said he and state leaders would continue negotiations over the summer.
Fairness in taxing for our Government schools is not the answer to an increasingly inefficient and ineffective public school system.
Shifting the growing burden of rising costs to educate our children from a property tax to state income tax is politically motivated and foolish.
We need to wake up to the fact that what we use the term “public” schools, we are really speaking of Government schools.
Once we realize that our children are receiving their education from the most incompetent, corrupt, inefficient and ineffective institution the world has ever produced, that is Government, only then can we consider how best to reform K-12 education in the US.
Certainly a transition away from a Government monopoly and toward market competition would improve our K-12 school system and lower costs.
Universal school vouchers and school choice are the keys.
A property tax cap is simply a diversion.