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In Florida, Ohio, and other Republican-led states, conservative anti-tax activists have found a new mission: eliminating all property taxes.
“I think there’s a philosophical debate that we need to have about property tax,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told local business owners in Jacksonville this spring, criticizing cities that had raised property taxes this year.
Vivek Ramaswamy said something similar in March as he launched his campaign for governor of Ohio, promising to “bring down property taxes in this state immediately, eventually down to zero,” and adding: “If you own land, it should not feel like it’s a lease from the government.”
Karla Wagner, the organizer of the anti-property tax AxMITax campaign in Michigan, jumped into Michigan’s GOP gubernatorial primary last week and is running in part on getting rid of property taxes. As she told Semafor: “If we want to turn the state around, it’s going to take some very bold and drastic measures.”
Yet Republicans who want to end property taxes have a big problem on their hands — namely, a lack of alternative funding that could replace lost revenue for popular public services that the taxes pay for. Efforts to end property levies with ballot measures have floundered for the same reason, and some politicians who pitch abolition face related accusations that eliminating property taxes will inevitably lead to higher sales taxes.
But those risks haven’t stopped an anti-tax campaign that sees property taxes as inherently unfair from gaining momentum in a party that likes the idea of slashing voters’ more visible tax bills. Republicans like DeSantis have warned of homes lost to unelected assessors. Grassroots groups have found new recruits for once-obscure ax-the-tax efforts.
President Donald Trump himself has recently mused about an end to capital gains taxes on homes; on social media, property tax critics have perceived that as the commander-in-chief joining the cause.
“We’re in the middle of the new property tax revolt,” said Jared Walczak, the vice president of state projects at the DC-based Tax Foundation. “Some people are paying higher property taxes as appraisals go up, and are wondering what they’re getting. That has been paired with this under-the-surface movement of people who have philosophical objections to property taxes.”
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The anti-property tax fervor hasn’t translated to much action yet. Some small cities have gotten rid of their taxes, but no states have. An effort to kill the tax for cities and towns in Nebraska last year failed to get enough signatures to make the ballot; a similar measure in North Dakota lost by 26 points, even as Trump was carrying the state by 36 points.
Republican governors have passed property tax refund proposals and, in some cases, successfully capped what cities can charge residents. But the lack of funding alternatives has fueled effective messaging campaigns about the void that abolition would leave.
Advertising from North Dakota’s Keep It Local coalition, which opposed the no-tax measure, warned that passage would “create a $3.15 billion budget hole,” threatening funding for “police and public safety” unless legislators found new revenue to replace it.
Room for Disagreement
Anti-property tax activists have a simple solution to the loss of revenue: just spend less.
Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison, who has written local legislation to end “immoral” and “unethical” property taxes, said that the predictions of sky-high sales taxes to make up for lost revenue were overstated. Remove the tax, and local governments would have a reason to cut spending. Too many of his fellow Republicans, he said, were not willing to consider it.
“They don’t want to upset cities, counties and school districts that are getting rich, hand over fist, taxing Texas citizens out of their homes,” Harrison said. “They don’t want to do what that would necessitate, and that is cut spending. They are every bit as addicted to spending as the Democrats.”
Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, said that voters and politicians had gotten used to property tax reforms that don’t save them much money. A high-profile announcement of “property tax cuts” meant temporary relief from the state and higher property taxes later. Abolition could cut that off.
“Bring spending down, and taxes down, to the growth of inflation plus population,” said Norquist. “That reduces much of the pain from property taxes.”
That’s one argument that DeSantis and other Republicans have made for abolition. The other is that there is something fundamentally unfair and distorting about property taxes. Foreigners could pay sales taxes; income taxes could be eliminated at the state level.
“This is supposed to be your private property, but yet you could own your home for 50 years and you still gotta pay the government just to live on your property,” DeSantis said at the Jacksonville roundtable.
David’s view
The Trump administration’s sales pitch for tariffs is the most innovative addition to GOP tax policy in quite some time. There’s no other tax that the administration boasts about collecting revenue from. There’s no other tax that, it suggests, might be able to pay for lower income taxes, no tax on overtime or tips, or the other cuts embedded in Trump policy. The mindset: If a tax is hurting economic activity, it can and should be replaced by a sort of consumption tax.
The anti-property tax movement is driven by that mindset: that it’s unfair and unwise to make homeowners keep paying the government for something they own. It’s given some Republicans a new offer to voters — if they don’t like the downside of higher real estate prices, or reliance on this tax to cover other costs, then they might be able to get rid of that cost.
But it’s early, and voters have been skeptical of promises that they can nix property taxes without some hidden downside. That was how the North Dakota measure lost, and that may be why Ramaswamy has talked less recently about ending property taxes and more about “relief” that would fall short of that.
What does that leave Democrats with? In some states, like Texas, they run against high property taxes as a Republican-caused problem, one that they could fix with fairer, progressive taxation. At the moment, voters are being told that they could get relief for less — maybe for nothing. The only political impediment is their skepticism.
Notable
- In the Tallahassee Democrat, Gray Rohrer looks at how important property tax revenue has been to DeSantis’ state budgets. “Whether to require local governments to collect more property taxes for schools has been a major flashpoint in budget debates among Republican lawmakers in recent years.”
- In the Nebraska Examiner, Zach Wendling has an update on Nebraska’s EPIC campaign to stop cities from collecting “property, income and inheritance taxes.” The plan, if it passes, is to make the state legislature in Lincoln figure out how to get more revenue.
Correction: A prior version of this story misspelled Wagner’s name.