HCAD Protests (Houston, Post, Mart: high school, income, taxes)

[PedroMartinez]

Originally Posted by crone

How do you purpose schools be funded?

The lege is just now finishing up another session of doing nothing.

Looks like all they cared about about was funding religious schools with property taxes and where people peed.

You gotta beef, do not re elect anybody.

So, do we fund everything via property taxes?

Last I checked, property taxes weren't the only form of generating revenue.

I'd be in favor of sales tax.

[WRM20]

Originally Posted by PedroMartinez

So, do we fund everything via property taxes?

Last I checked, property taxes weren't the only form of generating revenue.

I'd be in favor of sales tax.

Texas has sales taxes and property taxes, plus a few other taxes(oil and gas severance, etc). The state sales tax is 6.25%, and the maximum allowable is 8.25%. In the Houston area, the City of Houston has a 1% sales tax and Metro has 1%. No more sales taxes are allowed. HISD, and the other school districts, are funded by the State budget and by property taxes. There's no allowance for sales taxes for school funding.

In Houston, property taxes for the current year are about $1.1 billion, and sales taxes are $615 million. The public safety budget is more than the amount of property tax collected.

For HISD, property taxes make up 70% of revenue, the rest coming from the State, and some other small sources. If the State keeps reducing the amount of funding provided to schools(which happens because the morons in Austin want to make their rich business friends even richer by cutting school funding to zero) then the shortfall has to come from somewhere, and right now that's property taxes.

[crone]

One of the reasons property taxes are used for school funding is they are stable sources of income. Sales taxes are iffy.

Most states have an income tax.

NY once had a high sales tax and anybody close to a lower tax state did their shopping across the state line.

With Amazon so popular for everything. now, you put in higher sales tax and I can just set up an account using another state and do my shopping online. Do you tax where the products was purchased or where it was delivered?

My kids hardly ever shop. They even get pet food online, delivered.

[WRM20]

Originally Posted by crone

With Amazon so popular for everything. now, you put in higher sales tax and I can just set up an account using another state and do my shopping online. Do you tax where the products was purchased or where it was delivered?

.

Taxes are due where the goods are used, which is generally the delivery address.

[PedroMartinez]

Originally Posted by WRM20

Taxes are due where the goods are used, which is generally the delivery address.

Yep, I pay sales tax when I buy from Amazon.

[PedroMartinez]

Originally Posted by crone

One of the reasons property taxes are used for school funding is they are stable sources of income. Sales taxes are iffy.

Most states have an income tax.

NY once had a high sales tax and anybody close to a lower tax state did their shopping across the state line.

With Amazon so popular for everything. now, you put in higher sales tax and I can just set up an account using another state and do my shopping online. Do you tax where the products was purchased or where it was delivered?

My kids hardly ever shop. They even get pet food online, delivered.

The housing market has ups and downs as well.

Schools need to make cuts in the bad times just as everyone else. So if sales taxes decline due to a bad economy, schools need to cut expenses just like me.

[H'ton]

Meanwhile, only the UT and Texas A&M systems have access to the oil royalties in the constitutionally funded Permanent University Fund.

Why the average Houstonian isn't outraged over the fact that UT is hemorrhaging money and use the tax PUF fund to buy 300+ acres without approval.

Meanwhile, the middle class homeowner in Texas is getting taxed to death.

[shytiger]

Out of all my research on this topic, I've only found one loop hole if you are not eligible for the senior exemption. That is the disability exemption on top of your homestead exemption. You'll need a statement from your physician which will have to be directly mailed to the appraisal district from him/her. You also have to qualify your income, which means you'll have to make less than 1,180 a month then its a little over 1,200 if you are legally blind per the tax code. If you are eligible for the disability exemption, you qualify for a waiver depending on the acuity of your disability, which pretty much allows you to defer all of your property taxes until you pass. I can see independent small business owners using this for a loop hole by setting up an s-corp and paying themselves peanuts for a salary. It wouldn't take much to get a physician to draft a letter to HCAD about a disabling back or knee injury. However, it is punishable by jail time if you falsify this information. As you can probably already assume, this exemption is abused quite a bit here in Houston.
I'll probably be cashing out of my house in the next year or so. It's just getting way to expensive to live in the HISD jurisdiction...especially when I don't have kids. We'll probably be seeing houses in the 300-1m range losing value really soon.

[crone]

Originally Posted by PedroMartinez

The housing market has ups and downs as well.

Schools need to make cuts in the bad times just as everyone else. So if sales taxes decline due to a bad economy, schools need to cut expenses just like me.

The tax revenue roll has to be certified by September 1.

The revenue is available whenever the taxes are due in January.

When is a good time after September 1 to lay off teachers?

IMO, they could all cut 10% just like the rest of us. But what about the classrooms? They would cut teachers just to make a point before cutting administrators.

[crone]

There was a bill by Bettencort this session that the ARB members be certified engineers or MBAs. If it passes, they will need to double the pay for ARB members. I don't see MBAs and engineers working for $ 25 an hour. Another reason to raise our taxes.