On the Senate floor today, Sen. John Howe (R-Red Wing) tried to explain how canceling the renter’s credit is a good idea. The Senate was debating the Republican’s $1 billion cutback’s bill. This is basically a tax increase on all renters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“That’s a $170 tax increase on every renter in Minnesota,” Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL Mpls) said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Well, no.\u00a0 It’s a cutback on a rebate that renters get.<\/p>\n
In Minnesota (if you don’t live here), renters are entitled – via a niggling, sliding, income-based formula – to a refund of a piece of the property taxes paid by their landlord on the property they’re renting.\u00a0 On the one hand, if you’re poor – and up until about 18 years or so ago, I certainly was – it is an annual tradition in Minnesota; waiting for the rebate check.\u00a0 When I was a single guy making $12K a year and paying out $300 amonth in rent in 1989, it was a nice little $400 bump.<\/p>\n
Of course, that money comes from somewhere<\/em> – the state’s gross property tax receipts, in this case.<\/p>\nAnd with that pool dropping, as property values decline and foreclosures continue mounting, it’s high time the state re-jiggered the formula.<\/p>\n
Pusey doesn’t see it that way, naturally.\u00a0 He quotes Howe’s speech to the Senate:<\/p>\n
It’s [the renter’s credit] actually encouraging people to stay in that renter mode, and not achieve what we want people to move forward. If we want to be “progressive”, we need to help people to achieve their dreams and their goals. And we shouldn’t hold them back. I view a renter’s credit as something that holds people back. It doesn’t encourage the type of behavior that we want. It doesn’t encourage the type of dreams and hopes that people can achieve to having their home ownership. And it runs counterproductive to other things that we do.<\/em><\/p>\nFirst of all, he keeps using the word “progressive.” To quote Inigo Montoya from the movie “Princess Bride”: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Entirely possible, but that doesn’t mean Pusey gets it right…)<\/p>\n
Secondly, isn’t it the Republican mantra on taxes that people should keep more of their own money or something? So why is it a good idea to take away this tax break for renters? Oh … I get it … they’re not millionaires …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Pusey doesn’t get it.<\/p>\n
People should <\/em>keep their own money – poor, rich, and everyone in between, myself included.<\/p>\nBut don’t\u00a0 mistake the renters rebate for “people keeping their own money’; it’s a rental housing subsidy that gives tax revenues back to certain “targeted” constituencies – renters making less than $30K or so a year.\u00a0 While landlords (and regular homeowners, who have nobody to pass the costs down to, even more so) get clobbered with property taxes (especially if you’re stuck living in a DFL-plagued city like Saint Paul), renters get a piece of that money directed back to them<\/em>.<\/p>\nWouldn’t it be better to just lower taxes, and let the rental market pass the savings down to the renter?<\/p>\n
Indeed, the market for rental prices is affected by a dizzying number of variables, most of them tied, directly or indirectly, to big government.\u00a0 “Affordable Housing” – houses and apartments that might not make it into Architectural Digest, but are inexpensive – is zoned out of existence by utopian City Councils from New York City to Saint Paul, to be replaced by tax-funded Public Housing and\/or “affordable housing”, built and subsidized by taxpayers but not remotely “affordable” except maybe in the out-of-pocket cost to the government client <\/span>“renter”.\u00a0\u00a0 The taxes to make more “affordable housing” combine to make housing, ironically, less affordable and, in bad times, contributing to a vicious cycle that forces out home owners (by foreclosure or tax fatigue), lowering property values, and thus tax revenues, thus requiring more tax increases…<\/p>\nAt its worst, the “Renters Rebate” insulates the poor from the profligacy of city government; if they didn’t get part of the price of their over-taxed rental property rebated to them, perhaps they would take a closer look at the stupidity of their city and county governments, the same way the profligacy of the 2009-2010 DFL legislature and the 2009-2010 Congress made so many Americans do the same before the last election.<\/p>\n
Look – the formula’s being re-jiggered.\u00a0 People will still get rebate checks.\u00a0 They’ll get smaller.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it’s time those renters took a moment to ask where the money comes from, and why.<\/p>\n
I wonder if Eric Pusey would care to help do that?<\/p>\n
(And isn’t it hilarious that the Democrats call the Bush Tax cuts – which cut taxes across the board, from billionaires to minimum wage owners, a “subsidy” and “spending”, while the portion or the renter’s rent that goes into property taxes is not?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Reagan once said, “It’s not that liberals lie.\u00a0 It’s just that they say so many things that are not so”. Now, if you’ve read this blog for a while, you know two things: I, among very few partisan bloggers in the Twin Cities, make a concerted effort to try not only to remain civil, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,123,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics","category-taxes","category-the-great-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17879"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17881,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17879\/revisions\/17881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}