Tax laws need to be simplified

To The Eagle:

Mike Mouliot, writing in last week's Eagle, focuses like a laser on the realities of our local property tax woes.

Sad truth of the matter is that even after overcoming his predecessor's backlog, training barriers, computer glitches and county commissioner obduracy, our nimble and hard-charging new assessor, Bill Coons, is unlikely to have much success at jockeying our taxes into any zone that reflects either fairness or reality. What is needed is a change, actually a simplification, of state tax law recognizing a fact of life that the financial wizards on Wall Street were painfully reminded of in the 2008 financial meltdown: the value of a property (or commodity or widget) is determined by what it actually sells for, nothing else.

Dealing with real property taxes, this means your home is assessed at exactly what you pay for it, and this value never changes until you sell it to the next guy, who then gets to pay taxes on the hopefully higher value. This was the essence of California's legendary Proposition 13, fondly remembered by those of us of a certain age. Besides having the moral advantage of being the only truly honest method of appraising property, it has the added advantage to the elderly taxpayer of not trapping him into vastly inflated taxes, impoverishing his final years. The advantage to the county is simplicity; no need for annual reappraisals or expensive software or budget-busting clerical help. Taxes can be computed on the back of an envelope or farmed out to a seventh grade math class.

Having been dragged kicking and screaming back to the brink of reality, our legislators in Olympia have finally started listening to Joe Zarelli, our lonely Republican SW Washington senator who has long been a crusader for budget sanity and spending restraint. Now might be an advantageous time to contact him and urge him to follow up budget balancing with some good old-fashioned tax reform.

Howard Brawn

Puget Island