A version of the following commentary appeared in the St. Louis Business Journal.
Everyone wants to help kids and senior citizens, right? Who could oppose a new sales tax in the City of St. Louis to fund early childhood education and daycare? And who could be against a new property tax in St. Louis County for services designed to help seniors stay in their homes? Well, I could. Politicizing charity and mandating it through law is dangerous. St. Louisans would be wise to think twice before going down this road.
Proposition B is a half-cent sales tax for early childhood services in the City of St. Louis on the November ballot. If passed, it would create a new board that would authorize childcare subsidies for families and direct funds to childcare providers, including schools and for-profit daycare businesses.
Proposition S is a five-cent property tax increase for senior services on the November ballot in the county. If approved by voters, it too would create a new board to oversee the distribution of funds to charities that serve older adults. Not surprisingly, invaluable local gadfly Tom Sullivan has documented how almost all of the political support for Prop S has come from well-funded charities that would benefit from it.
Charity should not be politicized, yet that is exactly what these proposals would do. Board members of various St. Louis-area charities that might receive funds would have something new to consider when they decide whom to support in various political races—one can’t risk backing the wrong horse and putting the charity’s funding in jeopardy. It’s machine politics at its most insidious.
Another concerning thing about both of these new taxes is that their funds would not be limited to lower-income people. Any family in the city, no matter how wealthy, would be eligible for childcare subsidies. While the allowed childcare subsidy for wealthy families would be low, it is preposterous that they would get anything. The same goes for senior services in the county. Seniors are the wealthiest group in our society. While some of the charities that would receive funds have income limits for their services, others do not, and there is nothing in the county’s plan that limits participation to low-income seniors. We would be raising taxes on working people and the young so that wealthy families in the city and well-off seniors in the county could receive taxpayer-funded subsidies.
The St. Louis County proposal would also lead to the problematic issue of people voting on property tax increases that they do not pay. The single best aspect of property taxation is that it imposes the costs of local services on the people who benefit from them. But because of the senior property tax freeze, many seniors who receive these new services will not pay the taxes. That is now how democracy is supposed to work.
Any future city or county funds would involve creating special taxing districts, and the last thing St. Louis needs is another obscure taxing entity with little accountability and even less oversight. For example, the children’s service fund in Lafayette County, near Kansas City, engaged in troubling fiscal practices for years. After a whistleblower brought this to light, the state auditor investigated and referred the fund to authorities for possible Medicaid fraud.
Will some people benefit if St. Louis voters pass these new taxes? Of course. But creating new, obscure taxing agencies, entangling philanthropy with politics, directing public money to the wealthy, and making charities dependent on government largesse will not improve life in St. Louis. Let’s allow these charities do what they were intended to do—help our neighbors—without the government getting involved.
