You have a real gift – the ability to read our minds. The article’s real purpose was not about tax freezes. It was about what we wrote about, and since it was published in Memphis magazine, we’ll base our grade on that rather than your perceived clairvoyant powers.

Finally, a few facts. The wheel tax was NOT presented as temporary. Never, ever. Just pull the resolution, the bond issues, and the transcripts. You can even pull the brochure that was sent to taxpayers. It’s not there. Never was. It’s a myth like so many ones here.

Regressive is a widely accepted economic and public financing term. Sorry you aren’t familiar with it, and as a result, you mangle its meaning and the unfairness captured in our regressive tax system.

We’ve explained before why Nashville has a lower tax rate. We have the higher birth rates that go with the Delta culture and we pay about $200 million a year countywide as a result (and the higher birth rate is throughout the county) and in addition, Nashville has a better mix of property taxes and fees. Memphis has not created a balance between taxes and fees. It’s not as simple as comparing property tax rates because you have to compare all sources of revenues and per capita costs for government.

And finally, regressive tax systems most benefit the wealthy who get them passed, not liberal bureaucrats.

Thanks for commenting.

If this was a paper presented me for a grade based on the assignment of writing an argumentative paper opposing or supporting the current systems of property tax freezes as a method to encourage businesses to remain and provide jobs, I would give the paper a D+ at best. More likely I would just give it an F.

I digress … Let’s get back on topic. The short version is that I actually agree with you that the property tax freezes have gotten out of control and are probably doing more harm than good.

But that is about all agree with. I dispute David Birch’s assertion that “the cities growing fastest right now have the highest taxes, most expensive workers, most expensive land …” Without looking it up, I seem to remember that Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing cities and it certainly isn’t known for high taxes and overly expensive workers. I once lived in Texas which is the fastest growing state and it isn’t known for high taxes or expensive workers … BTW, both of those states don’t have an income tax either.

What tends to drive up land prices is demand. That is the result, not the cause, of a fast growing city. If high taxes were the cause of a city’s growth, then New York would be booming … but it isn’t.

And to talk about “expensive workers” is misleading as well. What sets the workers’ wages are skills/education and experience. It has nothing to do with location except sometimes one must pay a premium to get the needed workers to go to bad location (workers on the Alaskan oil rigs come to mind). Again, if high wages were the cause of, rather the result of, a fast-growing city, then NYC would be booming … but it isn’t.

So yes, let’s reform the property tax freezes but let’s do it because it makes sense. It all those words, you really never explained why it makes sense except for the one little quote from Forbes. Otherwise it was all political rhetoric.

Now to the garbage parts of the article that need to be addressed.

The only thing about the wheel tax being the “lesser of evils”, was that it was touted as being temporary until the schools were all air-conditioned. Now you can say all you want that this wasn’t the case but the collective memory of several tens (maybe hundreds?) of thousand taxpayers say differently. I argued vehemently with my parents that it wasn’t going to be used just for the schools and that it wouldn’t be temporary even if the wheel tax proponents said it would be … And proponents of the tax did say that! There is no getting around that. To deny that shows either ignorance or willful deceit.

And you know as well as I do that information didn’t flow as freely and as quickly back then as it does now. We didn’t have the internet and twitter postings about the meetings of the county commissioners. Sure, some public notice was probably published in the back pages of the newspaper. There was probably even a paragraph or two written about the changes in the paper. Don’t try to stand on, “The tax was passed in a public meeting, …”. That dog just doesn’t hunt.

First of all, it was passed by the voters and then renewed by the county commission. It was a classic bait and switch. Opponents of the wheel tax, like me, tried to point this out but we where hushed by the proponents who kept assuring the public that it was temporary. Well we all know that politicians don’t like temporary taxes. They used to actually go thru the motion of renewing the tax until they finally made it permanent.

Some bright lawyer should sue the county and the individual commissioners who voted to make it permanent for fraud based on fact that it was touted as temporary. It should have been put back up to the voters at that point rather than just letting the commissioners vote on it.

It was deceitful from the git-go. And it is just as deceitful and deluded to try to convince those of us who fought it and even those who voted for it that it was never touted as temporary.

Anybody who says that it was never put forth by the proponents as temporary, just loses credibility. Thousands upon thousands of voters who remember otherwise can’t all be wrong. We weren’t all hypnotized by aliens.

SCM – “The poorer a Memphian is, the greater percentage of his income is paid in taxes, or translated into bureaucratese, it’s called regressivity, meaning that taxes are not based on a person’s ability to pay.”

—Let me help you with that … it should be “translated into liberal bureaucratese”. It just another example of taking a simple word and twisting it mean something completely different. The word “regress” come from ORIGIN late Middle English (as a noun): from Latin regressus, from regredi ‘go back, return,’ from re- ‘back’+ gradi ‘walk’.

It simply means “to go back” or “return”. Now how did it come to be tortured into meaning taking a proportionally greater amount for taxes from those with lower incomes?

As long as I’m on this soapbox, liberals long ago hijacked the word “progressive” as if the liberal philosophy represents “progress”. To me, liberals should be called “regressives” since advocating greater gov’t control and intervention is returning the ordinary taxpayer to being nothing more than serfs to feed the elite.

Next, just the fact that Memphians pay about 1/3 more in taxes, according to you (and I don’t dispute it), than do Nashvillians (Is that what they call themselves?), should give you and everyone else pause. We pay a 30% premium over Nashville yet we do not have a corresponding 30% increase of livability. In fact, one could argue that we have less. But yet, you want more taxes? And you wonder why people are leaving Memphis? You wonder why the state gov’t rejects Wharton’s pleas for permission to create new and different taxes?

I really do love this city but I despise the last 15-20 years of city gov’t … that includes the city council and the school board. This city has lacked leadership for way too long … both in the mayor’s office and from the city council. I think the school board is hopeless and a way needs to be found to eliminate the Memphis school board.

Lately I’ve been encourage. The most recent city council membership shows signs of courage. I hope it continues. The newly approved term limits should help us from “regressing”!

More taxes aren’t the answer. Show us some leadership. Show us that the city can make good decisions. Show us that the money is being used wisely.

We’d be more reasonable about tax freezes if our economic development officials were trying to break their addiction to giving away taxes. We’d go along with them for awhile if they would give as much attention to creating the kind of quality city that reduces the reliance on paying people to love us. Interestingly, some of the most economically cities in the U.S. have the highest tax rates, so it’s not about the rate only, it’s about the value and quality produced by the rate.

We’re concerned that here a disproportionate portion of property taxes are shifted to residential taxpayers because of incentives given to pretty much anyone who can fill out the paperwork while the real drivers of the economy go it on their own.

We agree with you completely about the cost-benefit analysis. But it needs to be done by an independent person so the results have credibility. Too many times, these are done by firms who know future contracts depend on delivering the right results.

Downtown tax freezes are to us different than the IDB ones, because the freezes downtown essentially froze declining property values before they dropped even lower, but we question the length of these freezes.

However, I have been one of those people lobbying to keep some of these programs alive… primarily because it is difficult to find any way to make any form of substantive urban-revitalization project profitable (or even remotely viable) without an extreme palette of financial incentives. Despite any rational thought – land costs in the city are comparably high, construction costs for anything other than the flimsiest product are prohibitive and rents are relatively low for comparable urban product.

I think incentives should fit a community criteria. Is the project located where there is infrastructure, where there are employees or users, etc… basically, is the incentive for what you want or what we want?

I think incentives should be based on a fairly stringent and very public cost-benefit analysis. What is the public giving away? What will the public get in return? What does the development need? What will it provide in return? I do not know if it is still in use, but the CCRFC used to have a simple, one-page sheet that showed how much tax revenue would be diverted by a PILOT and for how long and then fairly accurately showed the increased tax revenue to the City and County when the project was fully on the tax rolls at the end of the incentive. Perhaps this is done for everything at all IDBs and we just don’t see it or talk about it. But these tools are necessary to make logical decisions about good incentives and to make the case for public/private partnerships.

POINT: I agree that many incentives encourage detrimental development at the worst and are an unnecessary gift at best. However, we are often tempted to throw the baby out with the bath water when we talk about incentives. If we do that without dramatically changing where developments are permitted, without reducing overall taxes for everyone and without a huge mindset shift regionally regarding City projects… then we may doom revitalization efforts.