It’s that simple. If you don’t have kids you don’t pay the school tax. Some may not agree but this just makes sense to me. Anything that helps home ownership and the related costs is good in my head. This would help overall lowering property taxes for owners without kids. Then and only then when the owner has kids do the school taxes apply. Not before. The eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeend
Furthermore if you have children and choose to homeschool or are paying for private school, you should not have to pay taxes to the school district.
Unless you are using any benefit from the school district IE: Sports, evaluations or interventions- you shouldn’t pay a nickel to them!
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It has long been part of our social contract that the cost of schooling our children is shared by all, as an educated person is of value to our society. It does seem that the government run schools have broken their part of that contract, as we can see that students are less and less educated every year. I am hoping that with President-Elect Trump’s promise to eliminate the federal Dept. of Education, the collective states will be able to revive the educational systems that produced the leaders that made the United States the leader of the free world.
There is some merit in your proposal though. I would counter with reducing a family’s school tax based on some combination of home ownership, retirement status, and age.
For example, mortgage fully paid off - 30% discount. Retired? Another 25% discount. 70 years old? (or 75, or 65 - not sure where this should go) another 25% discount. Assessed value should also be frozen for tax purposes at one of these milestones.
These discounts give incentive for people to stay in the same community and hopefully invest in better communities. Retirees will see a lessening burden, instead of the neverending increases.
…But as a grown-up, you already received your free education. You’re paying taxes to cover the free 13 years of free public school education that you already got, from when you were a child.
In addition, you benefit from having an educated workforce that employers can hire. You benefit from the money that teachers and school employers pay to other companies from their salaries as consumers. You benefit by being able to communicate with educated people. If it wasn’t for school, no one would even be able to read your policy. In addition, if childfree people stopped paying taxes towards schools, then schools would have even less funding than what they have now. Public school = a public good.
Also, what interest does the public have in lowering costs of home-ownership for able-bodied adults who don’t even have the added expense that goes with housing and caring for children? With all the extra time you have from not being a parent, if you want to save money, you can always use your free time to work a second job or go to college. Working parents do not have that option/advantage./choice.
What? First, our public education was never free. Someone is always paying for it.
Second, I am not paying taxes for the education I received when I was a child. The people paying taxes back then paid for my education. The taxes I pay now cover the education of today’s students.
The problem is not paying taxes to educate our youth. The problem is paying always increasing taxes into a broken system, that produces less educated students every year. We have to demand better results from the money we spend. On average, this country spends more money per student than much of the world, yet we routinely perform poorly in comparison. Unfortunately, it seems much of the money spent on education pays for a ridiculously overpayed bureaucracy with school boards, superintendants, and principals making much more money than they should be, while teachers often use their own money to buy classroom supplies.
Public education was free to you when you were a child. YOU received the education, not the parent. That’s why YOU need to cover the cost when you become an adult by paying taxes.
We should instead support school choice, academic transparency and other educational reforms.