How did Wisconsin get to ranking in the top five in state and local taxes in the nation, while the state’s per capita income ranks around 25th?

Disrespect from the political class for the taxpayer, as demonstrated by Media Trackers:

On a per capita basis, Wisconsin taxpayers are paying more in property taxes now than they did just over 20 years ago. Numbers from the state Department of Revenue, and first touted by the office of state Rep. Michael Schraa (R), show that per capita property taxes were higher in 2010 than they were in 1990, even when adjusted for inflation. Property taxes as measured by revenues and tax bills had trended upwards under previous governors before a property tax freeze was implemented in Governor Walker’s first budget.

Walker has insisted that his second biannual budget, which is being debated by the legislature, must include an extension of the property tax freeze. Because the measure also ties in with Walker’s move to control overall public school spending, some lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, have expressed concern over plans to potentially reduce the percentage – and possibly amount – of revenue coming into local government through property taxes.

Republican Senator Luther Olsen has indicated that believes schools should get more money because many of them are strapped for cash. Asked by Gannett Wisconsin Media about what he plans to do about school funding, Olsen promised to “die trying” to secure more money for schools through changes in the state budget.

“If you look at the governor’s budget, the money he does give to schools is property tax relief,” Olsen complained. Schools just “can’t handle that,” the 62 year-old concluded in his Gannett interview.

So is property tax relief an unnecessary endeavor because the state is not generating enough revenue from property taxes?

Some of the more accessible property tax data is available in 5-year increments, making a study of property tax trends between 1990 and 2010 a reasonable way to study overall property tax revenues.

In 1990, the total value of the Wisconsin property tax base was $141.4 billion, and property taxpayers paid $4.07 billion in property taxes for that tax year. In 2010, the value of the property tax base had grown to $495.9 billion and taxpayers paid $9.34 billion in taxes.

Wisconsin’s population saw a significant increase over that same time period. It is possible to look at the per capita rate of property taxation and index it for inflation to see how the per capita property tax burden has fared in that two decade span. Not everyone in Wisconsin pays property taxes, but property taxes impact living costs and indirectly or directly affect every resident in the state.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Wisconsin’s population in 1990 was 4,891,769. In 2010, Wisconsin’s population was 5,686,986. That means that in 1990 the per capita property tax paid was $831.73. By 2010, the per capita property tax paid had risen to $1,642.83. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the 1990 per capita tax would have been $1,387.63 in 2010 when adjusted for inflation.

The difference in inflation-adjusted 1990 per capita property tax payments and per capita property taxes in 2010 is $255.20, or a total of $1.45 billion when multiplied out across the state’s 2010 population.

Except for those living in facilities exempt from property taxes — prisoners, residents of mental institutions and college residential students come to mind — everyone pays property taxes, either directly in the case of homeowners, or indirectly in the case of renters. When adjusted for inflation, your property taxes, whether you pay directly or indirectly, increased by 18 percent from 1990 to 2010. Have the quality of state and local governmental services improved by 18 percent in the past two decades? (A suggestion that government services have deteriorated by at least that much is more likely to be accurate.) Other than gasoline (whose price has nearly tripled since 1990), has the price of anything you buy increased by nearly one-fifth without any improvement in features or quality at all in the past two decades? This comes in a state near the bottom in personal income growth over those two decades (and longer).

(Note: The numbers in the above paragraph were corrected by an alert reader. Remember, journalism is the opposite of math.)

Media Trackers goes on to say that “A variety of factors contribute to rising property values and changes in local property tax rates.” One of them is the lack of state and local spending and tax controls in the state Constitution. Unlike in most states, the only thing that restricts spending or taxes is the whim of the Legislature and local politicians. Gov. Tommy Thompson enacted the Qualified Economic Offer law to restrict teacher salary increases. Gov. James Doyle got rid of it. Thompson also enacted the school district revenue caps, but the Legislature can change that.

Some Republican legislators are proposing taking technical colleges off property taxes and increasing the state sales tax from 5 percent to 6 percent to fund technical colleges. This has been proposed before, and this is not necessarily a bad idea. (Though it really needs to be discussed separately from the state budget process.) Given the fact, however,  that every single initiative to reduce property taxes — in rough chronological order, instituting the income tax, instituting a 3-percent sales tax, increasing the sales tax to 4 percent, increasing the sales tax to 5 percent, and allowing counties to institute a 0.5-percent sales tax — has failed to reduce property taxes, you can guess how likely this proposal is to reduce property taxes.

Media  Trackers adds:

When President Barack Obama declared, “We don’t have a spending problem,” earlier this year, conservatives mocked him. “The United States has a revenue problem. Taxes at all levels of government are too low,” wrote two far-left progressive policy analysts in The American Prospect in 2012. Conservatives insist that the proper way to view the problem is as a spending problem because government expenditures are creating a perceived need for more revenue when in fact, tax collections are up.

Freezing property taxes slows the rise in per capita property tax revenues. Because property values can and are rising coming out of the housing slump, as the MacIver Institute has pointed out, property tax revenues will not stay stagnant. But under Walker’s plan, neither will they rapidly outpace inflation with property owners seen as a sort of magical ATM machine for local governments looking for more revenue. …

The problem is that if property taxpayers are protected only by Walker’s freeze, what happens when Walker is no longer governor? The 1990–2010 period had, remember, Republican Thompson and Democrat Doyle, along with Republican, Democratic and split control of the Legislature. Little happened to protect property taxpayers in the former governor’s term, and nothing happened to protect taxpayers, period, in the latter governor’s term.

If Republicans were serious about tax relief, they would introduce a Taxpayer Bill of Rights mechanism — in the state Constitution, not merely in state law that can be overturned by less taxpayer-friendly politicians — that (1) strictly limited growth in spending to some combination of  inflation and population growth, and (2) required voter approval for tax increases. I notice no such proposal in this Legislature or from this governor.