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Robert L. Franck's avatar

State spending and local spending are two distinct issues, except that the State sets limits on local agencies that depend on property taxes for the majority of their funding. The limit of 3% local budget increases is fine in an environment of no growth. Over the past 15 years that probably has kept pace with inflation. It has not kept pace with growth for many of Idaho's counties.

Here is the rub as I see it. Idaho has seen tremendous increases in revenues through the Income and Sales taxes and enjoyed this while lowering the income tax rate and rebating some sales taxes to the counties as "Property Tax Relief". The property tax relief is used to reduce property tax bills by a marginal amount. It cannot be used to fund increases in local agency budgets. To keep this brief, Idaho takes in more money than it can spend at the State level, while County Agencies are forced to place levies on the ballot that are essentially begging for the resources needed to keep pace with growth. These levies often fail as taxpayers are rightly concerned about the lack of a cap on property tax rates.

My conclusion is that a major revamping of the Idaho tax code is needed in addition to detail oriented scrutiny of all budgets, State and Local.

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Don Crawford's avatar

What we need are incentives for bureaucrats to find cuts in their own budgets. Business owners have a built in incentive to keep costs down because the money saved goes into their pockets. Why not give a fraction of the savings (the first year) to the bureaucrat who proposes the cut?

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