Letters to the Editors - Spring 2006
Taxing True Wealth
To the Editors:
I was pleased to read Stephen Long’s editorial assertion that “The property tax system is broken, and the societal consequences are dire.” He reached that conclusion after noting that “the property tax is in place everywhere, but missing from it is any attempt to make it a fair reckoning,” because real estate is the only kind of wealth taxed. That, he wrote, “contributes significantly to the chopping up of the once-rural Northeast.”
Actually, the situation is much worse than Long’s description. True, real estate is typically a small fraction of what truly wealthy people own, so they pay a tax on only a small portion of their wealth. But most people of modest means have mortgages on their homes, so they own only part of their houses – and that portion is most or all of what they own. Consequently, they are being taxed on a multiple of their wealth – often a high multiple – while wealthy people are taxed on only a fraction of their wealth – often a very small fraction. And the distribution of wealth is even more skewed than income: the wealthiest one percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth.
The consequences are also worse than pressure to subdivide our forests, though that is bad enough. High property taxes create continuous and severe pressure to under-invest in education, law enforcement (such as on timber trespass), town roads, and other important facilities.
Yet, for every dollar’s worth of real estate, the modern economy has at least five dollars’ worth of other kinds of wealth, which is much harder to hide with computerized record keeping than it was in the old days. If all of this wealth were taxed at the same rate as real estate, property taxes could be one-fifth or less of what they are today. Even if it were impossible to track ownership of wealth perfectly, the system would be much fairer than it is now.
When Vermont was reforming its education finance system in the late 1990s, I advocated for expanding the statewide property tax then under consideration to include all wealth. The idea was too unfamiliar for serious consideration by the Vermont Legislature. Northern Woodlands is to be commended for making the argument for such a sensible reform familiar to its readers.
Richard Andrews, Springfield, Vermont
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Taxing True Wealth
To the Editors:
Stephen Long’s Winter 2005 Editorial proclaiming that the property tax system in New England is broken was a breath of fresh air. How much longer will we rely on this arcane and outdated means by which towns raise funds to meet community needs? Using an estimate of property value made sense in an age when New Englanders made their living in an agricultural economy, and the amount of plowed land, or number of cattle, was an indicator of your relative ability to pay. A property tax in the twenty-first century is ridiculous, though, since the estimated real estate value of property bears little resemblance to one’s ability to contribute through taxes to the community good.
Instead of having all our homes, land, and vehicles arbitrarily assessed by thousands of local assessors in each and every town throughout the region, imagine local taxes being based on income, instead, which of course is a much more direct indicator of one’s ability to contribute. Imagine our contribution to support local services being based on last year’s household income, instead of how many bathrooms we have, or whether or not our basements are finished. Imagine, instead, a system where we each take line XYZ from our state or federal income tax form (the taxable income line), multiply it by a percentage (0.ABCD), and write a check for that amount to the town of “West Hooperville.” Period.
And each town’s finance committee would decide what this 0.ABCD “factor” would be, based on the town’s budget. Non-residents who own land in town could be taxed the same way, but perhaps at a different rate (0.EFGH). Miraculously simple and far more rational. And even cheaper – no need to hire assessors! Older people on modest fixed incomes would not pay high taxes just because they are the fourth generation to live in the stately family home in the center of town or own a lot of farmland or woods. People wouldn’t need to appeal an arbitrary assessment that determined the value of their house increased due to a hot real estate market driven by out-of-state demands for second homes. We wouldn’t need complicated and controversial current-use property tax programs because property would not be taxed, and woodland owners and farmers would not need a fair assessment.
It is time for property taxes to go the way of ice tongs, buggy whips, and kerosene lamps. There is a better, simpler, and fairer way to determine a household’s contribution to local coffers. You may say I am a dreamer, but I imagine a time when assessors and their offices and records are also a thing of the past. If land is not taxed as a commodity, maybe people will view it more as the invaluable source of significant public benefits that it is.
David Kittredge, Shutesbury, Massachusetts
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Sawmill Surprise
To the Editors:
Michael Snyder’s fine article on tapping maple trees in the Winter 2005 issue reminded me of a visit I made to a hardwood sawmill in New York State a few years ago. As is typical of sawmills in this part of the country, the mill manager’s office contained a collection of saw-wrecking items embedded in various logs and struck by the headrig, usually with expensive consequences.
This mill had the typical collection of mangled hardware: a horseshoe, ceramic insulators, nails, lag bolts, and maple tapping spiles. The mill manager held up one of the spiles and commented that while it wasn’t uncommon to hit tapping hardware in sugar maple logs, it was pretty rare to find one lurking, as this one had been, in an oak log.
Eric Johnson, Old Forge, New York
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Commodified Water
To the Editors:
Winter 2005 is another fine issue – you folks do such excellent work in assembling a rich variety of themes. The piece on the wolf in Transylvania, and relating it to our regional scene, was inspired.
But, I particularly wish to commend Hugo Liepmann for writing, and you for publishing, his Another View on “Community Water.” As he so well points out, this is a critical topic, in these days where water is increasingly being commodified, and corporations are anxious to exploit it for profit. Water will be the resource issue in the next decades, even more so than oil. Unfortunately (perhaps I should say, disgracefully), at the World Water Forum in the Hague in 2000, after a little discussion, water was recognized only as a basic human “need” and not a basic human “right.” The World Bank and large water corporations like Suez and Vivendi carried the day, to make it a for-profit resource.
Three cheers for the citizens of Cochabamba, Bolivia, whose water supply system had been privatized by a subsidiary of Bechtel corporation (government had been pressured by World Bank to privatize), and who took to the streets in defiance of the military, to take back their water. Water utility bills had increased 35 percent, and families whose monthly income was around $100 saw their water charges rise to $20 per month. The city was totally shut down for four days by blockades and strikes; sadly, before the mayor and president yielded on the issue, a 17-year-old boy was shot. The Cochabamba Declaration on Water is a model of what Liepmann writes about, proclaiming this blue gold as a human right, and giving control back to a municipal system. (Note: Bechtel is suing Bolivia under the World Trade Organization provisions for millions in lost revenue.)
Perrier, Evian, Naya, Poland Spring, La Croix, San Pelligrino, Purely Alaskan, Vittel, and a host of other purveyors of bottled water are monetizing water, and in many cases impairing local water sources. Nestle, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Procter and Gamble, and Danone have all gotten into this lucrative act. Nestle alone markets 68 brands. It is estimated that one-quarter of all bottled water is taken directly from the tap, and it is certainly not guaranteed to be free of contaminants. I urge readers to fill recyclable bottles or other containers with their own local/household water, and help break this increasing stranglehold that corporations are achieving over what should be a public/community resource. A fine reference on this whole subject is Blue Gold: The battle against corporate theft of the world’s water by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Canada, 2002).
And, to bring it back to Northern Woodlands primary theme, forested watersheds are hydrologically the safest land cover, and provide usually the highest-quality water.
Lawrence Hamilton, Charlotte, Vermont
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Winter Issue Unbalanced
To the Editors:
I have been reading your magazine since the beginning, thanks to my grandson. I have enjoyed it and would give it high marks. I have reservations about the last issue, though. The editorial on taxes, the article on “community water,” and “Wolves as Neighbors” concern me. These three are controversial, and both sides of the story deserve to be told.
New Hampshire is an island surrounded on all sides by income- and sales-tax states. We are one of the fastest-growing states (is that good or bad?), and inasmuch as Killington, Vermont, voted recently to secede from Vermont and join New Hampshire, does that send a message?
On the water issue, Nashua, New Hampshire, is using eminent domain to take control of a private water company. Can the town of Milan seize the Enman Farm for the never-failing spring that runs 3 gallons per minute and turn it over to a bottling company? Good question. Is a bottled-water company that is big business, hires workers, and makes a profit, bad? Do we want the government to run everything?
On the wolf issue, they were introduced into Yellowstone Park at a cost of millions, against the wishes of those that live nearby. Have you heard the quote, “they who know wolves, hate them, they who don’t know them, love them?
I would like to hear “the other side” of these issues. Do we need an offshoot of the Sierra Club in the Northern Woodlands? I think not!
Donald Enman, Milan, New Hampshire
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Kudos
To the Editors:
I am always happy to see Northern Woodlands in my mailbox. I am a small woodlot owner in my off-hours. In my “on” hours, I am an arborist – a second career for me and one I wouldn’t trade for anything.
I am acutely aware that I don’t know everything, and the information pieces in your publication fill in many gaps, act as reviews, and cause me to reflect on aspects of our forests, in general, and trees and plants, specifically. I am happy with your twofer subscription offer and over the years have given a year’s worth to several friends and associates who I feel would enjoy such a unique gift. I pass the remains of each issue along regularly. I say “remains,” because many articles and features find their way into my files.
The calendar is always the first to go into a special notebook. As the months roll by, I find myself using it as a handy reference for things to look forward to every month. I have all the months separated over a span of several years. It is a superb reference.
I look back at the collection of articles that have been saved and those yet to be placed in my files and see that Joseph Smith just about always has something that I want to keep.
By far, however, it’s Virginia Barlow’s pieces that capture my attention and are valuable enough for me to save. I don’t use the byline to guide me but the article itself. Most times, it’s “By Virginia Barlow!” She passes on so much useful information. Give her a raise!
In my past life, I taught chemistry. You can see why I would be sensitive to “chemical” information. In the Winter 2005 issue on page 16, center column, the first sentence in the second complete paragraph has a slight error: “In solution, salt separates into sodium and chloride ions….” A small error since sodium chloride is already made up of sodium ions and chloride ions. They are already separate yet held in place in the crystal lattice by electrostatic attraction – the result of the electron excess (of the chlorine atoms) and the corresponding deficiency (of the sodium atoms). Just a reminder that this lattice is a 3-dimensional item. The ions alternate: sodium, chloride, sodium, etc., front and back, left and right, and up and down (do ions recognize such directionality or do they merely respond to their surroundings? The latter, I think). Oh Geez! It was Virginia Barlow who authored this portion of “Knots & Bolts.” Golly Moses, even ace writers have feet that sometimes track clay into their work (how’s that for mixing up our language?). No harm done. To Virginia: keep up the stellar work!! To the editors: she still deserves that raise (know that I’m not related in any way).
Thanks for all your time and energy.
Bob Salesi, Penobscot, Maine
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