The Governor on Property Tax Caps

The Governor, via Tully:

The governor made a strong case for a ballot initiative aimed at determining whether to put recently passed property tax caps in the state constitution. “The only real question,” he said, “is do you trust the people of Indiana to weigh the evidence and make this decision, or don’t you?”

I don’t because:

a) The evidence –real world effects of the caps on local revenue and, therefore, services — is not all in; and won’t be all in for some time;
and
b) Once the evidence is all in, I do not think the average voter will take more than a superficial look at it. I suspect if you quizzed the average voter, most could not tell you in detail how local government functioned or how it was funded.

And that’s all right. That’s why we have a representative government. Because our citizens, while having a duty to keep informed to some degree, have more important things to do than get into the weeds of local government finance. That’s why legislating property tax caps is a better idea than engraving it into the Constitution based on popular, and possibly superficial, anti-tax sentiment. That’s also why the General Assembly has been given a significant gate-keeping function with respect to which public questions get put on the ballot.

So, I say to our legislators, don’t shirk your duties with a glib “let the voters decide” response. If you vote for a Constitutional property tax cap, do it because you feel you have deliberated with all of the necessary facts, and based on that deliberation can explain what effects this will have on local government, its finances, and the services it will provide and have decided that these caps are the best thing for Indiana, not just now, but for the next century.