Property Taxes: Duty or Burden?

At WayneWho headquarters, we usually dismiss the idea of taking content from another provider and just throwing it up on our blog. In this case, we were reading the letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal and thought that the letter writers presented a reasoned debate (we think the editors probably thought so as well), so we wanted to put it out there for local discussion.

The article that originally spawned the discussion was over a technique Wal-Mart uses, which is to hire consultants/accountants/attorneys to structure their company in each state to best reduce their property taxes.

Letter #1
I find it interesting that the federal government and high tax states constantly have to fight taxpayers who utilize tax shelters. Instead of wasting taxpayer dollars chasing down abusive tax shelters, maybe they should look at the tax laws of states such as Delaware that apparently don't have the same problems. The common thread here isn't the companies that rightfully attempt to minimize their own taxes, but the high tax rates that cause them to reduce their tax burden.

Wal-Mart should be applauded for cutting their effective tax rates in half because those savings are passed through to shareholders in higher stock value and to customers as lower prices. Contrary to what tax authorities would like us to believe, companies don't pay taxes; consumers do. As Judge Learned Hand once wrote: "Anyone may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes."

(Writer's name deleted by WayneWho staff)
Elko, Minn.

Letter #2
I have worked as a tax attorney in state government, and I buy, without hesitation, the argument that it's nobody's patriotic duty to pay any more in taxes than what the law requires. However, it turns my stomach that there are so many institutions playing very fast and loose with "what the law requires." Sham transactions like the various Wal-Mart examples you wrote about are in plentiful supply. The law is what it is, and Wal-Mart and others and their Ernst & Young enablers aren't above it. I would like to pay whatever amount of taxes I feel like paying too, but our system isn't founded on vigilante justice.

Now maybe you can help the general public start connecting the dots. When people and businesses don't pay their fair share of taxes - to the tune of multiple millions of dollars - there's less money coming in to run the state. That means tax rates need to go up to generate the revenue to pay for building and maintaining those silly little things like roads and bridges and schools and prisons that people take for granted. Or else they don't get built or maintained, and things like bridges collapsing into rivers and our kids' leaking, mold-infested schools should come as no surprise to anyone.

Oliver Wendell Holmes got it right when he said "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society."

(Writer's name deleted by WayneWho staff)
West Hartford, Conn.