Dear Editor,
The latest Education Finance Update from the Joint Fiscal Office projects a school property tax hike of nearly 12% that is, for many, unwelcome, but unsurprising given that costs are going up for everything. So it’s been proposed that we move money from the general fund into the education fund, which we did last year and have done in some previous years as well. I say: good plan.
The use of property taxes to pay for education made good sense when most of people’s income came from their house and lands. But that’s not true anymore. There are plenty of people who are “house poor” — they own a valuable house (just about any house is valuable these days) but don’t have much income. These people pay a big chunk of their income in school taxes. People better off, who may own a house worth five times as much but have an income 20 times greater, pay a small fraction of their income to support the schools.
We need to move away from the archaic practice of using property taxes to pay for schools and shift the burden to income taxes. We could do this in one bold stroke — see a bill proposed by Sen. Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden Central. But a more gradual approach is probably better, and that’s what moving money from the general fund will accomplish. So let’s do that, and allow ourselves to increase it each year, so we can move to a more fair and equitable way to fund the schools that are so important to our future.
Steven Gaarder
Burlington
