Governor Fires Artillery!
Pillen Determined to Slice Property Taxes
Nebraska Governor Pillen is absolutely determined to cut property taxes. I have been a bit dismissive of his efforts until now. He is seriously doubling down to cut property taxes. By now, if you are on the Governor’s email list, you know Pillen has done a survey on taxation. While the survey is small, the graphics of the numbers are amazing.
More stunningly, Nebraskans favor the State funding of schools instead of property taxes.
And…
And voters are paying attention to the property tax issue.
Local control? Not an issue on the tax side. The State should takeover the responsibility of funding schools.
And the issue cuts across party lines….
And it is a winning issue….
The full survey and details can be found in PDF format at https://files.constantcontact.com/c7d2e968901/0b998977-5bfd-4d68-a7a9-02a23b253719.pdf
Now, I still think property taxes need to be abolished, but Pillen has a lot of strong cards in playing the politics on taxation. He has managed to corner the public school industry and other government entities into a situation where they need to rethink how they are funded. This has resulted in interesting commentary from those who would normally object to change (https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/08/07/what-is-the-cost-of-government-and-what-should-it-be/). Pillen has helped shift the debate on taxation quite well.
I was talking to a farmer in South-Central Nebraska. It seems that a company owned by Bill Gates had just bought dry land farmland at $5500 an acre (for cash). The land normally sells for about $3200 an acre. Assuming that an almost doubling the value of the land in a single transaction would have a commensurate affect on property taxes, would this be destabilizing to small and medium farmers?
I hope that he's able to make real headway on this issue before November. We're headed for hyper-inflation due to the national debt.