Live Tax-Free and Die

After mining out state budgets for 50 years, conservative lawmakers across the country are now turning their pickaxes to local governments’ largest source of revenue: property taxes.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/08/apr-2026-magazine-live-tax-free-and-die/


Credit: Rick Bowmer/AP Photo

Late last year, the godfather of supply-side economics dropped in on a Georgia state Senate special committee hearing. He spoke of the urgent need to dump their income tax, a “killer, killer, killer,” akin to “a nuclear weapon,” that has destroyed the 11 states that have instituted it as of 1960: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. “Each and every one of those states in population has had a cataclysmic decline relative to the rest of the nation. It’s just amazing,” said Arthur Laffer, inventor of the “Laffer curve,” the discredited theory that claims lowering taxes raises tax revenue. Georgia could avoid the same fate if they got rid of their income tax, which funds nearly 60 percent of the state’s entire $34.8 billion budget.

This was a familiar refrain from a conservative anti-tax champion. But before Laffer left, he asked to make one more point, something that staked out new territory for his movement. “I know I’m pushing on my time on you, but I got one thing else I’d like to mention, and it’s very important in Georgia, and in all the states except for one,” he said. “You have a big, big, big … big property tax problem.” That’s the real policy holding the state back from prospering. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Freezing those property taxes would bring Georgia all the way back, Laffer counseled. “You could really do it,” he told the lawmakers. “You wouldn’t believe what would happen to Georgia. Florida wouldn’t have a chance. Everyone in Florida would move to Georgia. Not that you want everyone there, by the way.”



This is MAGA's new front in the war on working people, falsely packaged as a boon to the poor and an answer to the affordability crisis. It expands the GOP’s half-century-long project to reduce taxes of all kinds to deprive governments of raising money to pay for services, saddling citizens with unsafe roads, traffic congestion, canceled traffic projects, lower teacher pay, higher teacher turnover, larger class sizes, ruined parks, and people losing their health insurance. Twenty-six states have cut their personal and/or corporate income taxes since 2021, and four intend to reduce them to zero: Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. But every single state in the union, red, blue, or purple, has a property tax. And reducing or eliminating them will erode services further by cutting off the source of revenue for local governments.

Municipalities collect the tax and spend the proceeds primarily on schools, as well as roads, park upkeep, and numerous other municipal services. Even just a few years ago, killing property taxes entirely would have been dismissed as a radical libertarian fantasy. A whopping 70 percent of local government revenue comes from them. But conservatives are like sharks, and if they don’t keep finding new taxes to promise voters to cut, they die. A new group of hard-right extremists—familiar names like Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk—has blithely decided that cities and towns can make do with next to nothing to fund their activities, and they may even succeed somewhere with this insane experiment.

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