Tax Class 101 (and 8 and 13 and...)

Hey out there, you homeowners and ranchers and business folk and other ordinary, everyday Montanans. Have you been feeling the urge recently to vote to raise your own taxes? I hope so, because if you have, Charter Communications has just the thing for you! It’s a complicated story and it goes like this.

For tax purposes, all property in Montana is placed in one of fourteen property tax classes, so that, for example, homes go in Class 4, agricultural land in class 3, business equipment in class 8, and so forth. And these classes vary by tax rate, which is the percentage of the market value of the property that is actually considered taxable. For example, the taxable value of a home is less than 3% of its market value, while the taxable value of a local utility is 7% of its market value. Given this difference in tax rates, what class your property is assigned to can make a major difference in the taxes you’ll pay, and that can get to be a whoppin’ big deal.*

Especially if you’re Charter Communications. Charter (formerly Bresnan) is a cable company that supplies cable TV, Internet access and telephone service to Montana customers. Back in 2008, the Department of Revenue determined that Charter fit the definition of  a telecommunications company and as such, all its property belonged in Class 13, with a 6% tax rate. Before that, only about 10% of the company’s property was in class 13, while the lion’s share was in class 8, where the tax rate was 3%. So the effect of the Department’s determination was to almost double Charter’s tax rate, and to raise its annual property tax bill by 329%, from $1.7 million to $7.3 million. That’s a lot of dough, so Charter appealed, all the way to the Montana Supreme Court. And the Court, to the company’s dismay, upheld the Department’s decision in a 5-2 ruling last December.

So now Charter is promoting a ballot measure that would reverse the Supremes by putting all the company’s property back in Class 8. Whether or not you will get a chance to vote on this deal is unclear at this point. It has to pass some legal hurdles in the Attorney General’s office first, and then by June 20 it has to get the signatures of 24,175 registered voters to get on the November ballot. But Charter – and as far as I can see, only Charter - stands to gain quite a bit if the initiative passes, and you can bet they will be pulling out all the stops to get those votes. And who knows, they may get a sympathetic reception: after all, doubling somebody’s tax rate with the stroke of a pen does sound a little over the top.

But hold on a second. There’s something here that doesn’t quite add up.

If the effect of Charter’s reclassification was to almost double its tax rate, that should have increased its tax bill by a little less than 100%, no? But the company’s bill went up much more than that, by 329%. Where in the dickens did that extra 229% come from?

Well, it turns out the move from Class 8 to Class 13 didn’t just raise Charter’s tax rate. It also changed the way the Department of Revenue appraised the market value of Charter’s property in the first place.

When it was in Class 8, Charter’s property – its cables and computers and switches and other bits and pieces of equipment – were treated as just that: bits and pieces of equipment, each of which was evaluated on its own, and some of which were apparently undervalued. No account was taken of the fact that all those pieces were interconnected  into a system, and that because that system could generate a lot of revenue for the company, it was worth more than the sum of all those pieces considered in isolation. But when the property was moved into Class 13, all that changed. The way the Department of Revenue then appraised the company captured its “system value.” That means that Charter was worth a lot more than previously thought, and that prior to reclassification it had been significantly undervalued. It also means most of the tax increase that Charter is complaining about results from the fact that its property is now being properly appraised.

So what Charter is asking you for is not just to send it back to Class 8 and reduce its tax rate. It also wants you to vote for its again being drastically undervalued. And that’s just another way of saying it wants to avoid paying its fair share.

Of course Charter is not going to tell you any of this stuff. All they’re going to tell you, over and over again, is that you are going to have to pay for a 300% tax increase in your cable bill. Of course your cable bill itself won’t go up anywhere near that much, but why fret about details.

Another wrinkle that Charter will probably sweep under the rug is that if its scheme works, state and local government tax revenues will fall by several million dollars.  Local governments will recoup the lost revenue by raising everybody else but Charter’s taxes and the state will have less money for local schools. So if you think you’re going to vote for this thing and are starting to count the big bucks you’re going to save on your cable bill, take a look at your tax bill and think again.

*If you really want all the gruesome details about the property tax system, you can find them in the Department of Revenue’s Biennial Report, available on line here.

Ryan's Devastating Vision

The House this week approved the latest budget plan dreamed up by Paul Ryan, on, of course, a party line vote. The plan, if it ever goes anywhere, is supposed to produce a balanced Federal budget in 10 years, the Holy Grail of Republican budget policy. 

Even the Republicans in the 2013 Montana legislature took time out from other pressing matters to send a resolution to Congress pleading for a balanced budget, any misgivings that they may have had about the macroeconomic folly of doing so apparently swept away when Sen. Jason Priest announced, with evident satisfaction, that “Keynes is dead.” *

The good news is that Ryan’s budget isn’t going anywhere. Democrats in the Senate will not even look at it, and everybody knows that. The bad news is that, as USA Today put it in a news report, the budget is “the defining fiscal vision of how the Republican Party would govern.” Here, from an analysis just released by the White House, is what that Republican vision would mean for Montana.

Prescription drug coverage for 10,952 Medicare recipients would be reduced.

1,780 fewer student would receive Pell grants and total Pell grant funding would be reduced by $8.6 million.

Federal Medicaid funding for the state over the next decade would be reduced by $2.04 billion.

Reductions in Title I funding would mean that 60 fewer schools, 5,290 fewer students, and 60 fewer teachers and support staff could be supported. 70 fewer special education teachers would be supported. 530 fewer children would receive Head Start services.

Social Service Block Grants would be reduced by $5.4 million.

170 kids would lose access to child care.

3,000 fewer people would receive Training and Employment Services,

19,300 fewer people would receive Job Search Assistance.

570 fewer families would receive Housing Choice Vouchers.

62 fewer victims of domestic violence would be served by the STOP Violence Against Women Program.

What’s going on here is pretty clear: a headlong rush to balance the budget either by taking it out on the vulnerable folks who don’t vote for Republicans or contribute to their campaigns, or by kicking the Federal deficit problem downstairs to the states and hoping we will solve it.

If that’s what you think constitutes well run government, I guess you should vote Republican in November.

* Priest has a strange and off-putting tendency to personalize his distaste for Keynesian macroeconomics.  A few years ago he referred to Keynes, who was bisexual, as a “big homo.”

Republican Politics: The Art and Jesse Show

If you are at all inclined to wade into the morass that passes for Republican party politics these days, here’s a bit of advice: don’t call Art Wittich an extremist. It makes him really testy and the results are not pleasant. Just ask Jesse O’Hara.

O’Hara is a recently retired Great Falls school teacher and moderate Republican member of the Montana House who is now termed out. He had the temerity recently to publish an opinion piece in which he took on the Republican leadership of the Senate, including Majority Leader Wittich, for derailing the GOP. O’Hara has a lot to say about “dark money,” Republican “purity tests,” obstructionism, Libertarians running as phony Republicans, failure to govern and so forth. None of that seems to have upset Wittich, but what did get his goat was being called an extremist, and his response, published last week, shows just how badly his goat was gotten. It is also a marvel of personal offensiveness and political inventiveness unjustified by the facts.

On the personal side, Wittich says he was surprised by O’Hara’s piece, because O’Hara, after retiring, moved to Florida, where, Wittich claims, “the only time he leaves his beach chair is to walk to the mail box to  collect his teacher pension and state health care benefits.” One has to assume that Wittich doesn’t actually have spies on the beach in Florida, and denigrates O’Hara here with a snarky tongue-in-cheek, but the implication lingers: O’Hara, and by extension, I suppose, all retired teachers receiving their TRS checks (full disclosure: I’m one of them) are wallowing at the public trough. Chiselers. Welfare queens.

Wittich carries this particular canard with him when he tries to shed the extremist label by claiming that all he did was “lead 75 percent of the Senate Republican Caucus in opposing the backroom political wheeling by O’Hara and his crossover Republicans dealing with the Democrats.”  One of these nefarious deals was “passing a $125 million …bailout of the state employee pension system, making taxpayers… again guarantee O’Hara and his friends’ retirement, instead of their own.”

How Wittich can apparently forget that these public employees spent their lives teaching our kids, or patrolling and plowing the highways, or assisting the disabled, or firefighting, or otherwise serving the public is beyond me. When they were hired to do all those things, they were told they would get paid, have health insurance and eventually receive a retirement check. The compensation package wasn’t lavish, but it was the deal the state offered and the deal the employees took. And it was the deal that Democrats and moderate Republicans were honoring when they “bailed out” the retirement systems, which had been hammered in the financial meltdown, to the tune of about $1.25 per member of the public. But when the going got tough, Wittich would apparently have preferred that the public renege on its deal with its employees. You can decide for yourself whether a deadbeat and an extremist are the same thing.

Another bipartisan effort Wittich is proud to have opposed was the attempt to expand Medicaid coverage to over 70,000 more people even when “they are able but unwilling to work.”  The 70,000 people Wittich is talking about here are low income Montanans – men, women, and children – living at or below 138 percent of the poverty level, and it’s hard to imagine that anybody – let alone a state Senator - can be so deluded about the workings of poverty to suggest that unwillingness to work is its principal cause. Has Wittich really never heard of the working poor?*

But it’s worse. Even when Wittich had the opportunity to vote on a bill to expand Medicaid coverage just to poor people who had jobs or were looking for them, he voted against it.**

If you are sensing a theme here, it is probably that Wittich and his political allies believe they are surrounded by people – public employees and low income families to name a few – who are trying to exploit them, to get something for nothing, to feather their own nests. It’s the politics of resentment and class warfare, and as far as I can see, O’Hara’s got it right: It’s extremism.

*If he hasn’t, he should take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics publication A Profile of the Working Poor, 2010.

**HB 623. You can look at voting records, follow debates, and read the text of the bill, as amended in the Senate, by clicking here.