STATEMENT: The following is a statement from Nebraska State Senators Steve Erdman and Steve Halloran of Districts 47 and 33, respectively.
On Monday Gov. Jim Pillen announced that he has put together a working group to explore new ways to reform property valuations. The public needs to know that there is no way for the government to reform the property valuation process, except by eliminating the property tax system altogether.
The Nebraska State Legislature has been trying to fix the property tax system ever since it was introduced back in 1967. Nebraska’s property tax system is an experiment in taxation which has gone wrong and cannot be fixed. Most recently LB 1107 which passed in 2020 and LB 243 and LB 754 which passed earlier this year have done nothing more than slightly reduce the amount of your ever-increasing property taxes. The fact of the matter is that your property valuations and your property taxes will continue to go up each year that the current system remains in place.
Nebraskans no longer have time to wait for another government working group to try and solve a problem which cannot be fixed. Blueprint Nebraska was a working group which could not fix the tax problem last year and we are fooling ourselves to think that this new working group will do any better. At best, any solution this working group proposes will be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Time has run out for trying to fix the property tax system and the data clearly shows that people all across the United States are now leaving high tax states for states with an overall low tax burden.
There is proposed legislation. That legislation is called the EPIC Option Consumption Tax, which would eliminate the property tax, the state income tax, the state sales tax, and the inheritance tax and replace all of these taxes with a consumption tax on personal services and new goods for consumption at a rate of only 7.5 percent. This is the only solution for fixing the valuation problem. To learn more about the EPIC Option Consumption Tax, please visit the website at www.epicoption.org.
Sen, Steve Erdman, LD47
Sen. Steve Halloran, LD33
