In my line of work, I frequently talk to people who don’t particularly understand the property tax process. Some of those find themselves both thoroughly annoyed and baffled when the budget has risen by a much announced 5%, but their tax increase has been double or triple that, or in some cases, ten times that.

The point that was obviously not made clear in my original post is that it is not exactly helpful to announce that “property taxes will rise by 5%”, as while that is technically correct, it seems to feed people the idea that their tax is going to go up by 5%. I’m of the opinion that consumers of information will tend to personalize that information. Thus, someone hearing this information will paraphrase the news as, “MY tax is going up by 5%”. I think it is more helpful to be clear that the budget is increasing by 5% rather than property taxes themselves.

On further reflection, a deeper meaning that I would have included in the post had I put more care into its writing would have been that it is unhelpful to present property taxes as increasing. It is the same as saying that my allocation of income to household bills is increasing. It is a step away from the actual source of the increase. Property taxes increase because the budget increases, just as my household bills increase because my heating bill is increasing. To present it as the former in either case misses the actual cause of the increase, and only speaks to the effect. In my mind it would be clearer, if only at a sub-conscious level, to state that the municipal budget itself is increasing, which will tend to make the root cause of the increase that much more visible.