A person doesn’t know how much he has to be thankful for until he has to pay taxes on it.

Taxes

One of the concerns that I am hearing from the people I talk to is the tax issue. People are very concerned about property taxes in particular. The property tax increase has forced some long term residents out of their homes that they’ve owned for 40-50 years because they can no longer afford the taxes. We have to find some relief for the people. This last session, we had several property tax options on the table. We had several options that were pushed more than others that were just a tax shift. It picked winners and losers instead of giving tax relief to everyone. The problem with tax relief is that you need to decrease the spending. If you look at the budget as a bucket, it needs to be full. If you take some taxes out of the bucket then you must make up that difference with money from somewhere or someone else. When your budget grows by 18%, then you need an increase in revenue to cover that. A small property tax relief and a huge budget increase are not going to work together. A small group of conservatives fought for more for the people of Montana. We need to decrease spending or we will never truly get tax relief.