An ex-upstater who sees the good in NY taxes
So, on RT we’ve been talking about taxes, how they are an investment in our community, infrastructure, and for the future. Why does the D&C continue to feed the myth that there is no value in what we get for our taxes?
The point here is we don’t know what services we miss until we leave the area. Can our taxes be spent “better” or more efficiently? Maybe but to simply cut them is to cut the future. Who wants to do that?
Check out this bit of griping from the front page of Sunday’s D&C (permalink):
Rochester-area property taxes among highest in the nation
…
Homeowners in the Rochester area pay some of the highest property taxes in the nation.
Property taxes in New York are the fourth-highest in the country, according to recent studies. And a Democrat and Chronicle analysis shows that the median property tax rate in Monroe County is 12 percent higher than the statewide median.
How is this helping things? This is written with one view in mind: taxes are bad. Taxes are high. (Insert 1950’s sci-fi robot voice) Must…stop…taxes…
It’s easy to complain when you haven’t seen the alternative. I got this email from a fellow parent of a CP child, who has a different perspective:
I’ve lived all over the US, and the place with the best schools was upstate NY (Syracuse), where the snow is 9 feet deep in the winter, and homes cost around 100K … taxes were a bit high, and spent well……we had by far the best early intervention program of any state I’ve lived in since.
Early Intervention is a program designed to help disabled kids become productive members of society. (Note to conservatives: you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t have boots.)
She goes on:
I wish I was still in Syracuse, for the schools, at least. Just can’t handle the weather! I do know, however, that funding from the early intervention programs has decreased quite a bit since we left, unfortunately, so I’m not sure how great they are now. But, you know, it’s not just schools that made the high taxes ok with me. We also had excellent city services. Snow plowing of the streets was a work of art. We lived in Michigan for a few years - lots of snow, but not like upstate - and never once was our subdivision plowed. Only a few of the main streets around it. Same here in MO. We had two major ice storms in January, and never any road service. Crazy. I could go on.
Her final point:
I am a huge proponent of taxes when they provide me the services that my family really needs.
What????!?!?! Is she crazy??? Did she just say that?
Yes, she said that, because when you cut taxes, you cut services. Services that we all, because we’re human, take for granted.
So, these places with the low taxes. How are the schools there? In the top 25 in the country, like some of Monroe County’s? How’s the infrastructure holding up in general?
Come on, let’s talk about how we can spend our taxes more efficiently instead of blindly saying “cut, cut, cut”!
Related posts:
“I...
This debate always starts with a questionable assumption: that our
taxes are the highest in the nation. It is true that the
percentage of property tax paid is among the highest in the
nation. But housing is cheap in Monroe County, so a family is more
likely to be able to own a home here, and to send their kids to
high-quality public schools.
The study I’d like to see is a comparison of major metro areas using
three indicators: average per-family income, average per-square-foot
cost of a home, and percentage of school-age children in charter or
private schools.
I used to live in Rochester, but now live in Delaware. It’s not just the property taxes that make Rochester a less than favorable place to live (hence a negative population growth), it’s all the other taxes upon taxes upon taxes. Gas is at least 40 cents cheaper here, ZERO sales tax, reasonable state taxes (much easier to file by the way), and we still have some great schools. Did I mention that an area such as Henrietta has taxes that don’t go over $700 dollars a year. And don’t say this is a conservative thing, because Delaware is VERY liberal. You don’t need ridiculous taxes to have great services. Delaware is living proof.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to also develop an analysis of how much money is spent by this county on what it buys, rents or uses. I suspect we would find that we are paying too much (out of our taxes) because we are paying those that have contributed to the Republican coffers. I support the concept of paying taxes to get services. But I don’t support paying taxes to give water authority board members health insurance and cushy retirements, or party contributors extra bucks as they rent or sell items to the county.