Property Taxation

It's kind of unnerving for me to read responses to my piece "Shameless in Pottstown" without reading one comment about property taxing for education being the most egregious wrong of all the ills facing Pottstown residents. The thrust of most of my writings about Pottstown lately has been about taxing property for education in all its inequities, especially, for elderly owners of homes who have little way to earn extra money to pay increases in taxes. These placid elderly who bring stability to a town are forced to sell which then changes the wants and needs for the new citizens who move in. 

It will take a vocal, energized electorate to get Harrisburg to change the tax structure. Most importantly it will take a new governor; specifically, voting out Tom Corbett, once and for all. Secondly, it will need new people in the legislature, ones who can see the needs of older communities that are encumbered with the old agrarian concept of property taxation paying for education. Ones who see, a broad based tax most likely based on consumption as the new method for financing of education, are needed.

A country, unwilling to change as the needs and wants of its citizenry change, is a country headed toward decay not unlike grand empires that history records their eventual demise. Change is good just as life evolves on a constant scale. Are you up to change or are you stuck in the past ?

Ronald C. Downie