More on a dominant issue in this legislative session.
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Willing to give up some sales tax exemptions to pay for a cut in your local property taxes?
That proposition, from state Rep. Drew Springer, R-Muenster, is the first serious stab at a statewide property tax cut in the current Texas legislative session.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate are already working on legislation designed to slow the growth of property taxes. But those bills, pushed by the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House, wouldn’t lower existing taxes; instead, they would require voter approval for tax revenue increases of more than 2.5 percent.
Springer wants cuts. But it would cost a small fortune, more than $6 billion a year, and he’s a Republican, and he certainly doesn’t want to try to persuade a conservative Legislature to raise taxes. He wouldn’t actually cut them, either: He’s proposing a swap, cutting local school property taxes by getting rid of some popular exemptions to state taxes.
Springer wants to raise $6.4 billion a year, mostly by getting rid of sales tax exemptions and rules that are in current law. The list has some darlings on it — popular exemptions that might be hard sells in the Legislature and in lawmakers’ districts. Springer would tax sales of motor fuel, on top of existing gasoline taxes; over-the-counter and nonprescription drugs; “non-nutritional” foods, like potato chips, coffee and tea; newspapers and magazines; cuts and stylings at beauty and barber shops; and auto maintenance and repair. The proposal would also end things like prompt payment discounts for retailers remitting sales taxes and the loophole for hybrid and electric vehicle registrations.
Each of those things has a constituency: sometimes a mob of people who’d be affected, sometimes a small group of powerful people who would lose a business advantage.
Previous runs at sales tax exemptions have fallen to pieces under resistance from taxpayers — or, to be more precise, nontaxpayers — who benefit.
But with his other hand, Springer is offering prizes for property taxpayers. Springer says he would give a 50-percent homestead exemption on school property taxes, exempt retail inventories from property taxes and use the balance to “compress” school property taxes by 10 cents — or to 90 cents per $100 property valuation, whichever is higher.
