It’s a curious thing. And puzzling. Property taxes are back in the news.
A proposal to freeze property taxes for Indiana homeowners age 65 and older surfaced in the Indiana Senate this week. I am curiously puzzled.
A couple decades ago, I playfully considered the idea of filing a lawsuit of some sort to protest the inherent unfairness — or so it seemed at the time — of senior discounts. It kind of came to a head when I went to play golf with one of my wife’s uncles. He was of such an advanced age that he got the senior rate, about $20 cheaper than what I paid. He was retired and had loads of discretionary income. My wife and I were putting at least one youngster through college at the time. One might argue I shouldn’t have even been shelling out cash to play golf.
“Why do people get a 10 percent discount at the supermarket on a certain day of the week just because they’ve reached a certain age?” I argued to anyone who would listen. “Isn’t that a form of age discrimination?”
Of course, I did no such thing, realizing that some day I would be enjoying a lower rate at the golf course and a 10 percent discount at the supermarket. Wouldn’t want to screw that up. Besides, a lot of old people would be mad at me.
But I have to be wondering how a young couple buying diapers and the 40-somethings putting their kids through college would feel about us old folks getting our property taxes frozen while theirs would go up and up. I have to wonder about the property tax process being further complicated by factoring in the old folks. Local government will still need to raise a certain amount via their property tax levy, which is a safe bet not to be lower than the prior year. If old folks pay less, others will have to pay more.
While I’d love to be able to budget a set amount for our property taxes year after year, I will go on record as opposed. My generation is in the process of leaving our children and grandchildren with a monumental national debt. This would add insult to injury.
Meanwhile, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation has launched a nationwide television ad campaign that has been aired on local stations. It is a well-done, fast-paced message that touts a number of reasons people and businesses should put Indiana on their radar. Indiana has, for example, the best “Business Tax Climate in the Midwest.” We rank in the top 10 nationally in that regard. One of the claims, however, caught my eye and makes me wonder: “Lowest Property Taxes in the Nation” one headline screams.
Hmm. As part of my recent research on property taxes, I had come across some charts that placed Indiana on the better side of the national average, but far from being the lowest. My source showed property taxes make up 12.3 percent of total Indiana tax revenue. Hoosiers pay $1,139 per capita in property taxes, ranking us 35th in the nation. As a reference, New Hampshire is the highest at $3,246 per capita (which constitutes 35.5 percent of the state’s revenue) while Alabama is at the other end of the scale, paying just $620 per capita in property taxes, which make up just 6.9 percent of total revenue. Each state manages to collect enough taxes to keep things running through a variety of means.
So where did the IEDC get their numbers? The source noted in the commercial is “Tax Foundation 2022.” Mr. Google easily finds www.taxfoundation.org, which looks to be quite an extensive compilation of tax data for every state. You would think that our questions would be answered under the heading “Where Do People Pay the Most in Property Taxes?” Here are two statistics I found:
• Property tax paid as a percentage of owner-occupied housing value: Hoosiers average 0.84 percent, which is very consistent with the research we did for our 2022 series on property taxes. But that ranks us in 30th place in that category (but better than any other Midwestern state). It is interesting to note that Hawaii is the lowest at 0.31 percent, but the home values there are through the roof.
• State and local property taxes collected per capita: The number here, $1,139, is exactly the same as the other source. On this chart, however, it puts Indiana in a slightly different 36th place. Curious.
I spent a fair amount of time poking around this website, looking for Indiana to be the lowest in some sort of property tax category. I’m sure it’s there somewhere; the professionals at the IEDC surely wouldn’t fudge some figures.
And to answer the question about who pays the most, New Jersey is the clear winner, ranking No. 1 in both categories.
All of this further displays the complexities of not just property taxes, but the puzzling curiousness of how things get figured.
miller@news-banner.com
