Shouldn’t we at least talk about the notion of capping school property taxes?

A recent poll found 74% of New Yorkers think it’s a good idea. A commission appointed by our previous governor recommended it after several months of study and more than a dozen public meetings around the state.

And yet, the state Legislature is poised to adjourn for the year without seriously considering the idea. There were no legislative hearings on the commission’s report, and Gov. David Paterson couldn’t even get his bill to cap property taxes introduced in the Legislature.

Whether or not you think capping school property taxes is a good idea (full disclosure: I do), what does it say about our legislative process that an idea with such broad appeal addressing a problem that is clearly impacting on millions of New York residents isn’t taken seriously by our lawmakers?

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CGR recently recruited a staff member from out of town. After he and his wife had found a house they liked (comparable to the home they were selling), they were confronted with what is a familiar problem—the property tax bill. The house they were about to buy was going to cost them nearly 50% more in property taxes each year. Familiar story, right? Darn those folks in North Carolina and Florida and Utah for their low property taxes! How can we compete?

But my colleague was moving from Orchard Park, a Buffalo suburb, not from Raleigh or Tampa or Salt Lake City! That’s right—Erie County property taxes are lower than Monroe County’s.

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It is a good time to be a farmer. Farm product prices rose 18% from 2006 to 2007. From the first quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2008, farm product prices went up 15% with crop prices jumping 20%.

Joseph Glauber, Chief Economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, testified before Congress last week on rising food prices. He recited a litany of factors influencing world food prices, including a string of poor wheat harvests in Australia, Canada and parts of the U.S., and growing demand for high quality food from rapidly-developing economies like China and India.

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I did it! I got my taxes filed on time AGAIN. This may not seem so miraculous to many of you, but I’m on a 12 step program for late filers. Early each year I seek out a group of my fellows for support in my struggle: “Hi, my name’s Kent. And I’m addicted to Form 4868.” If you don’t know what Form 4868 is, well, I’m begging you, PLEASE, don’t start. You’ll tell yourself it will just be just this once, but . . .

In honor of having stayed on the wagon for another year, I figured I’d write about taxes.

Some weeks ago I received an email containing a comparison of taxes paid under Clinton v. Bush II. Sent by a good friend, I was one of many names on the list. In the message, my friend challenged someone to confirm these figures, which claimed to show deep reductions in taxes paid under George Bush, deep reductions that became proportionately smaller as income rose.

The subtext of the message was something like, “I know that Bush cut taxes. But only for the fat cats, not for regular people.”

When no one else replied, I took on the task.

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The nation’s economy is in trouble. How bad it is and how long it will last is open to speculation. Economists’ prognostications are treated with a good bit of skepticism—and for good reason. Our track record would shame a weather forecaster in a third-tier media market. In our defense, the economy rises and falls for a combination of real and perceived reasons. And perception is often more powerful than reality. At the moment we confront a real problem of global liquidity that has been revealed in an ongoing series of disclosures, each more surprising than the last, often in obscure markets that are unexpectedly significant. Each new revelation erodes the sense that we really know what’s going on in the markets or, more to the point, what it all means or when this steady stream of bad news will end. It is this uncertainty and ignorance that feeds negative perceptions about the future, perceptions that may be right or wrong but influence behavior nonetheless.

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