Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, left, Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dade Phelan at a press conference at the state Capitol in 2021. Patrick has ordered the Texas Senate to come up with a plan to eliminate property taxes, setting up the end of public schools.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick listens to questions from reporters about recent energy bills at the Texas State Capitol in Austin last year. Patrick has ordered the Texas Senate to come up with a plan to eliminate property taxes, setting up the end of public schools.
Gov. Greg Abbott speaks about a school voucher plan during a rally in March 2023 at Cypress Christian School in Houston. Abbott and his allies say the voucher effort is about school choice. Critics say they are private school vouchers that allow people to take money out of the public school system to benefit private schools.
Love Elementary School in Houston.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s fantasy of abolishing property taxes would set the state up for financial failure and end public education as we know it by placing a greater burden on low- and medium-income Texans.
The most powerful man in Texas politics wants you to believe he’s looking out for homeowners, but there’s always an unacknowledged goal for significant initiatives like this one. You need only look at who deposited $3 million in Patrick’s campaign account and who gave the record $6 million donation to Gov. Greg Abbott to boost private religious schools.
As lieutenant governor, Patrick appoints the leaders of Senate committees, sets their agendas and decides whether a piece of legislation gets a vote. Patrick also rewards senators who appease him and punishes those who don’t with his fat campaign war chest.
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Last week, the lite guv ordered the Senate Finance Committee to “determine the effect on other state programs if general revenue were used to fully replace school property taxes, particularly during economic downturns.”
Rising property taxes are directly correlated to the growing cost of housing in Texas. When home or apartment values go up, so do taxes, and the two combined create a crisis across the country.
Median property taxes in Texas rose 26% between 2019 and 2023, according to data from real estate research firm CoreLogic, and first reported by Axios, an online news agency. In four years, the median payment rose to $4,916 from $3,900 as property values nationwide grew 40%.
Texas has crazy property taxes due to a convoluted system that protects the wealthy and pushes the burden of paying for government services onto low- and middle-income families.
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To understand how and why, Texans must remember that we pay for schools through property taxes levied by school districts. The state is forbidden from collecting a property tax, so the Legislature depends primarily on sales taxes and severance taxes levied on oil and gas production.
The Texas Constitution also forbids an income tax, perpetuating the myth Texas is a low-tax state. The wealthy, who spend less of their income on retail purchases and real estate, get off easier than in other states. But the half of Texans who struggle to make ends meet pay a higher proportion of their income in sales and property taxes.
Most states rely on the proverbial three-legged stool of income, property and sales taxes to fairly charge families and businesses based on their ability to pay. Texas relies on only two legs, and Patrick is talking about kicking away one of them.
Patrick’s command comes less than a year after the Legislature took $18 billion from sales taxes and oil and gas severance taxes to pay down school taxes. Most of that money came from high crude oil and natural gas prices and a roaring economy that generated huge sales tax returns. The move marked the first tax reduction paid by most property owners in decades.
Ending property taxes is part of the Republican Party of Texas platform, but it would require collecting $73.5 billion from the remaining leg of the stool, the sales tax.
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The state sales rate is 6.25%, while local authorities can collect up to 2% more. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association in 2018 calculated the sales taxes would need to reach 25% to replace property taxes.
Right-wing fantasists will point at Texas’s colossal budget surplus last year as proof that lawmakers will only need to raise sales taxes a tiny bit. However, anyone who’s lived in Texas for a decade or more knows the fossil fuel business goes through boom-and-bust cycles.
During a bust in 2011, Texas lawmakers slashed school funding by $4 billion. When the money runs out, the Republicans who control every lever of power in Texas do not hesitate to sacrifice public education to avoid raising taxes. Even with last year’s windfall, they refused to give teachers a raise.
This is where school vouchers and property taxes collide. The billionaires backing Abbott and Patrick believe public schools are Marxist, woke indoctrination factories. They want to give parents vouchers to choose Christian nationalist indoctrination factories exempted from state or federal oversight.
The vouchers, though, are insufficient to cover private school tuition, so families must pay the difference. The GOP hopes to create a system in which the state pays a defined amount and normalizes parents' paying the rest.
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Don’t be fooled by promises of lower taxes; this is about killing public schools by underfunding them and shifting more of the burden onto young families and off the wealthy.
Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonhchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.
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