This system was created by the Legislature with an eye to 'helping' taxpayers use property tax prebates to pay for property taxes, rather than other expenses.
This type of heavy-handed, holier-than-thou, father-knows-best attitude is not what we need from our elected officials. What we really need is a method of funding education that is simple and fair and is affordable.
We do not need legislators worrying that the poor simple taxpayers will be 'confused' by receiving checks from the state and then property tax bills. Let's at least presume that people with the mental wherewithal to obtain a mortgage and buy a house can figure out their tax bills and let's also assume they have the common sense and assuredly the free will to spend their money as they see fit.
The insult of legislators presuming they know what's best in terms of how taxpayers spend their money notwithstanding, this program creates some very real potential breeches in taxpayers' private financial information. In an era when far too much private information is in jeopardy of being lost or stolen, this system adds insult to injury.
Given a town's tax rate and given a tax bill, plus the town appraisal for a property, it's easy enough to figure out who qualifies for income sensitivity and given the math skills (probably seventh-grade algebra) plus access to the state's worksheet for determining income sensitivity, it won't be that hard to create rough estimates of the household incomes of all taxpayers in a town.
Legislators responded to this by noting that tax bills will list as credits all payments from income tax refunds as well as income sensitivity so there will be no way of knowing specifically what someone's 'prebate' is/was and the amount of household income that would generate that amount, given the appraised value and the tax rate.
This system is insulting to the intelligence of taxpayers, plus it creates giant loopholes through which reams of personal, private financial information can be estimated, determined or approximated.
Which legislator wants to be the first to see some math whiz create and post on the internet a database with estimated household income for all of the properties in their district?
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