A flawed comparison of property taxes

Mike Hashimoto of the Dallas Morning News is irresponsibly suggesting that, comparing Dallas to neighboring cities, Dallas already pays too much in porperty taxes and thus the City Council should not pass a property tax increase this year to solve its budget problems. It's difficult to list all the reasons why his comparison is so flawed.

But the major reason is the most common argument: apples and oranges. Any comparison like this must be with comparable cities, at least those with a similar population. Not only that, the comparison completely ignores property values. The study he quotes uses a home with a $175,00 value as its base. But it doesn't account for the percentage of $175,000 homes in each community. I'm betting the percentage in Addison, to use just one of his examples, is much higher than it is in Dallas, If property values as a whole are greater, the tax rate can be lower.

What his comparison also ignores is that Dallas is unique among cities in the area in that the majority of its population are renters and not homeowners, a fact that also makes Hashimoto's argument completely irrelevant. But this is another example of how Tea Party conservatives like Hashimoto can take figures to make a half truth to try to convince people of things that are simply false. Shame on him.