Governor Braun's property tax gimmick
Republicans in Indiana state government should not be contributing to demographic collapse.
Indiana Governor Mike Braun has floated the idea of eliminating property taxes for senior citizens who have paid off their mortgage: "The other thing I hear is, you know, once you’ve paid your mortgage off, why should you then have a fixed cost?"
Politically, this is a smart move. Senior citizens vote and young people are less likely to vote, so eliminating property taxes for seniors is a political win and will increase votes for people who support the proposal. But just because something is politically popular does not mean that it is a good policy.
The primary problem here is that this is will ultimately be a regressive tax against younger people, especially young families. This is especially true on a frozen levy, where local government has a set amount it can raise and calculates tax rates based on that. While the Indiana constitution limits the tax rate to a percentage of assessed evaluation, local governments will be incentivized to play games with assessments to get the tax collections up.
We live at a time where we are facing demographic collapse. People are not having children, and the total number of births in 2025 was less than the total number of births in 1966. This was with a population roughly half the size we have today. We should not be making it more difficult for young families who want to have children by reducing the tax burden of a class of people who are statistically wealthier than young people who are establishing their households. This looks like an older generation pulling up the ladder they climbed behind them. There are many factors that have contributed to this demographic collapse, but the least state government could do is not make it worse.
I am not sure how this proposed policy fits with the equal protection clause of Article 1, Section 23 of the Indiana Constitution, or with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. State government pays for the operating budgets of local schools, with other things paid by property taxes, so there's no argument that seniors are paying for schools they do not use. (Though their grandchildren and great grandchildren might.) Local government relies heavily on local property taxes, and senior citizens benefit from services provided by local government (police and fire protection, the court system, trash collection and much more) as much as young families. This looks more like a political gimmick than a serious tax policy.
There is an argument to be made for eliminating the property tax and having local governments find alternative sources of revenue. But if we are going to keep the property tax (and realistically the chances of abolishing it any time in the next 30-50 years is very low) then we should not be setting aside a special class to be free riders on local government services while the people who are statistically less wealthy are required to pick up a higher share of the tax burden, even if that special class of people is much more likely to turn out and vote than the people who are getting a higher burden as a result. We should not confuse political gimmicks with substantive policy.