Once, there was a group of people who decided that they no longer wished to be taxed for the sake of being taxed. If they ran their own towns and their own shops and their own limited government, it seemed superfluous to be taxed by a group who didn’t have their best interests in mind. So the history books say there were skirmishes, and those skirmishes led to fighting and those fights to battles and those battles to war. The war waged on. It probably waged for so long that they forgot why they waged. They waged because they wanted freedom, even though the price of that freedom was more than some really wanted to pay.
Today, we are a civilized bunch. I mean, we’re not, but on the surface we most certainly are. We do all sorts of things to prove that, every day. We wouldn’t dream of starting a war over taxation. And so our civilization exists inside this structure where we vote for things we like and we hope that through those votes we may be able to push and pull our town and county and state and country in the direction that we wish it would go. We do this because we are civilized and proper, and we cast our votes into so many boxes and then hope that they are counted by neutral hands.
We pay taxes because we must, and even the most Libertarian among us would agree that some form of taxation is necessary to keep these roads paved and some bullets in our military guns. If the government decided that it would be best to tax us and then relieve us of the burden of voting, there would be outrage. There would be skirmishes and then fights and soon enough there would be war. Democracy is to voting life is to breathing, and without one there cannot be another.
Imagine then, the interesting way that property taxes are paid. If you own a home in Arlington Heights, and you wish to vote on that election that has to do with Arlington Heights, the voter’s booth is open to you. If you own a home in Arlington Heights, and one in Williams Bay, you still get to vote. In Arlington Heights. Your tax contribution to Williams Bay be damned, you do not get to vote in the Williams Bay election because you are not allowed to vote in Williams Bay. The sentence was purposefully constructed without reason. You cannot vote in the election because you are not a resident. What makes you a resident? Paying taxes? Nope. What makes you a resident is living there more than half of the time, and paying income taxes as a resident of this state. You must pay taxes, you must not tax the system, and when it comes to deciding what happens in that town you must simply bite your lip.
I believe that phenomenon is known as taxation without representation, and if you think that’s acceptable then I would have to speculate which side you would have been fighting on in 1774. Even so, we must abide the rules and if you’re an Illinois resident who pays significant taxes on a Wisconsin vacation home, then you have much at stake in the coming November elections and nothing you can do about it. At issue is a Gubernatorial election that pits a candidate who doesn’t like taxes against a candidate who loves them. There are other issues, sure, but those are subterfuge.
Williams Bay has an interesting vote on the same ballot, and that, too, pits taxpayers against taxpayers, just that one of the taxpayers gets to vote and the other does not. There is a school referendum on the ballot, and Williams Bay has convinced itself that is must have a new elementary school. I do not disagree with this idea. I think Williams Bay does need a new elementary school. I think the old school is quaint and charming, and it is the school of my youth, but it’s old and in need of considerable renovation to the point where it may be better to tear it down and start over. So let’s do that, let’s build a new school.
The big brick Williams Bay High School building was built on the promise of Harvard’s Motorola plant swelling our location population. That plant closed a few years after it was built, and the rush of students never came. Alas, the school was built anyway, and while I cannot remember the exact cost I believe it was somewhere around $8MM. The school was built for many students, of which few are present. The new school that the village wishes to build for its elementary students is to cost $19.9MM. That’s $19,900,000. For an elementary school in rural Wisconsin.
The current debt on the older new building is scheduled to be paid off this year, resulting in a possible property tax decrease of $32 per $100k of assessed value. If the new school is approved, the tax increase will be $119 per $100k of assessed value, or a $151 increase per $100k of assessed value. The $119 figure is fuzzy math, as the real increase is the $151. This is to build a $19.9MM grade school for approximately 350 students. We need a new school, because renovating the old school is probably too expensive relative to the end result. What we probably don’t need is a new school that’s going to cost $19.9MM. Maybe we should build a new school that costs around $10MM? But the children!
But the new school is likely going to be approved and then built, because why wouldn’t it be? The residents of town get to vote on the taxation of the group that owns the bulk of the assessed value in the district- the non-resident property owners. These non-residents get to pay the bulk of the taxes, including the significant increase for the new school, yet they do not receive the benefit of education for their children. They simply come here on the weekends, support the local economies with their entertainment dollars, and then return home, to pay the same taxes on their primary homes, where they actually get a say in the matter. It’s somehow unpopular for me to proclaim the taxation without representation of our vacation home owners to be unfair, but isn’t it the most patriotic theme of all?
What a brilliant comment. Perhaps you could explain what’s false about the post. This is David Curry, not Craig. Try to take a few deep breaths and write something that doesn’t sound like a 13 year old wrote it.
"Douche-nozzle’. That’s classy. A $19.9MM elementary school certainly would have been a waste on you.
It sounds to me that a retired teacher who owns a house on the lake did something right, perhaps by saving money and investing wisely.
Let’s remember Milton Friedman’s Four Ways to Spend Money;
"There are four ways to spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why you really watch out for what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well then, I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it costs, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government."
The school is clearly an example of the fourth. $19.9MM for an elementary school is absurd.