Me in the NYT: Abolishing Property Taxes is a Bad Idea

My new piece in the New York Times on the growing calls by some in the Republican party to abolish property taxes.

I have a new piece in the New York Times (gift link) weighing in on the growing calls by some in the Republican party to abolish property taxes. I argue that this is a bad idea that will alienate next generation suburban voters.

While there was a slight shift back towards Trump in 2024, many American suburbs, once solidly red, have been shifting towards the Democrats.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Suburbs have become more diverse, which means they have more residents from groups that have traditionally skewed Democrat. Educated voters in general have been trending left, itself a complex phenomenon. This affects college-educated suburbanites. Donald Trump turned off a lot of suburbanites, especially women. My observation is that the higher functioning your community, the less Trump appealed, which is why, for example, he performed weaker in Utah. The suburbs tend to be high functioning. And as the GOP has become more working class, it’s becoming coded as low status, which tends to shift people who aspire to be high status to the left (particularly as the core institutions professional class people are attached to have themselves shifted left).

I don’t want to be reductionistic about the causes here. But I do believe there’s one overlooked factor in this shift: traditional moderate suburban Republican voters do not want Tea Party type governance, and that’s the only thing on offer from state Republican parties.

Suburbanites today want to have nice communities with high quality public goods and services. A lot of state GOPs are very hostile to that and want to impose their own ideas of austerity governance as well, listening to the minority of vocal anti-tax types. And those people are typically a minority. Where I live, there was a Tea Party type candidate on the ballot in the last mayoral election - and he came in third in the Republican primary.

Abolishing property taxes is very much in this traditional state GOP line of thinking. It’s only going to continue sending educated suburban voters towards the Democrats. Losing suburban educated voters in addition to the urban ones they’ve already lost would be a catastrophe for the GOP.

There are many other arguments to be made as to why property taxes are an appropriate way for government to raise money, but this was the focus of my op-ed. Here’s an excerpt:

Over the past couple of decades, there’s been a sea change among college-educated suburbanites when it comes to their expectations from local government. They don’t want a night watchman state that does the bare minimum. Suburbanites increasingly expect local government to provide high-quality public goods, services and amenities, such as modern playgrounds and trail networks. They want to have a bustling walkable downtown. They want public amenities to match their private ones.

And they are willing to pay for it. Very Republican Saratoga Springs, Utah, voted by a large margin last year to raise sales taxes to pay for arts, parks and recreation. Medina County, Ohio, near Cleveland, where President Trump won over 60 percent of the vote in 2024, approved a tax levy for the operation and expansion of parks. In the past decade, of almost 30 school property tax referendums in largely Republican suburban Indianapolis, only two failed. Suburbs don’t always vote to approve taxes, but they frequently do — even in very Republican areas.

Click over to read the whole thing (gift link).

Property taxes are high in some red states like Texas, so it’s not a bad thing to take a hard look at those taxation levels and reform where necessary. But abolition is something else entirely.

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