A comment from Stan

The lead editorial in this morning’s Brownsville Herald, concerning an alleged rebound in the Valley’s real estate market, acknowledges that the current banking system (if you can call it that given that the the development of subprime lending means that the so-called bankers had given up due diligence) boldly asserts that one of the drags on the market has been that “many residents saw their property taxes rise drastically,” thus dragging out one of the paper’s favorite whipping boys once again–taxes.

Not that taxes are a good thing precisely, but they are necessary. We want streets and drainage and fire  and police protection and there’s not another viable entity beyond government to provide those services, unless, of course, we want to go with the Robocop scenario where we’ve outsourced all government functions so that we’ve got to pay some greedy and lazy shareholder, too. We saw how that worked out. In the current arrangement, we are the shareholders.

The Herald’s note got me thinking. I’d gotten my property tax bill yesterday or the day before and, yes, I had one of those whistling-through-the-teeth, will-ya-look-at-that moments on the way to filing it away.

But this morning, as I read the newspaper, I noted the Herald writers didn’t mention anything about the silent tax of the market place—inflation—and the question came up, “What would the ‘natural,’ market-based rise in property taxes be if one took into account inflation?”

It so happens that my first property tax bill is a number that sticks in my head—$1,200 to all taxing entities for our current abode. What would that number be if we calculated the inflation in the interum? Fortunately, there are a plethora of inflation calculators on the Web, so I googled them and ran the numbers through four or five. The results were the same more or less: $1,200 in 1987 would be worth $2,250 this year. Yet my tax bill was only $1,800 and some change.

So I’m actually ahead on this one permanent cost by four-hundred dollars or so. A bargain.

But that also means that, collectively, the taxing entities were behind by that same amount. No wonder those folks are scrambling.