Seniors will feel the sting of tax increases
Coda
Greg Bean

In my neighborhood of East Bruns-wick, there are several elderly women and men struggling to get by.

Most of these wonderful people have lived in the community for most of their adult lives. They raised their families there in modest houses. And after the kids moved away and their partners died, they carried on as best they could, trying to make ends meet with small pensions and Social Security. Their houses are usually tidy, but in need of a paint job, and few of the elders drive. One walks to the small grocery twice a day to purchase supplies, then walks back home again. There are people like them in every neighborhood in the state.

Last year, the federal government increased Social Security payments to the 52 million Americans receiving them by 2.7 percent. In 2006, benefits will raise by 4.1 percent. Over the two-year period, payments will have increased by 6.8 percent.

Last year, wages and benefits paid to civilian workers rose by the smallest amount in nine years, 3.1 percent, down from the 3.7 percent rise in 2004. Analysts said the slowdown reflected an increase in benefits costs, like health insurance, which rose by 4.5 percent last year and 6.9 percent in 2004. All told, wages and benefits increased by an average of about 3 percent over the two-year period.

Inflation and cost of living increases, meanwhile, have trundled on apace. Nationally, the rate of inflation in 2005 was 3.39 percent, and in 2004 it was 2.68 percent. All told, inflation and cost of living increased by an average of about 3 percent over the two-year period.

So it isn't just those living on fixed incomes feeling the pinch, since the average working person is also finding it impossible to get ahead in the battle between wages and cost of living. When annual tax increases are factored in, it becomes apparent that, on average, we're all falling behind.

But those on fixed incomes are feeling the squeeze more acutely - and my heart went out to them this week with news that in our community, the school budget proposed for 2006-07 would raise taxes another 31 cents on each $100 of assessed valuation. For the owner of a property assessed at $100,000, that means $308 more in school taxes next year, $25 a month.

This comes on the heels of a 28-cent increase in 2005-06, a 25-cent increase in 2004-05, a 31-cent increase in 2003-04 and a 31-cent increase in 2002-03. For those of you with calculators, those increases in any given year are more than double the average 3 percent increases in both income and inflation. The proposed spending package in East Brunswick for 2006 represents a 6 percent increase, due largely to salaries, benefits, growing enrollment and state aid which has been flat for at least two years.

East Brunswick, which has a very good educational system, certainly isn't unique when it comes to upwardly spiraling educational costs. As a matter of fact, among the many communities covered by Greater Media Newspapers in Middlesex, Mon-mouth and Ocean counties, it's pretty average.

It's clear that statewide, the wheels are coming off the school funding wagon. And before too much longer we're going to have to take drastic action - maybe call a constitutional convention to change the way public schools are subsidized in New Jersey, or impose strict percentage caps in budget increases like the Citizens for Limited Taxation did in Massachusetts a few years ago when they passed a law that said school and municipal budgets could only be increased 3 percent a year without an override by voters - to fix it.

But in the meantime, we need to begin a serious dialogue about how to get this onerous tax burden off the backs of vulnerable senior citizens living on strictly fixed incomes.

I'm no expert in these matters, but in the interest of kicking off the discussion I'll float an idea (admittedly, it's not a new idea, but maybe one that deserves reconsideration).

I think we'd all agree that it's unfair to expect senior citizens, who haven't had children in the public school system for 40 or 50 years, to carry the same educational tax burden as a family with several children currently in local schools, or thinking of having children who will be educated in those schools.

How hard would it be to come up with a graduated property tax system wherein taxpayers in their child-bearing or child-raising years - the people most likely to use the community educational system - pay a higher rate of tax, sort of a user fee?

Then, if those folks want things like courtesy busing, new facilities, art and band programs and the like, they can pay for them with a higher rate of tax.

As taxpayers grow older - when they reach an age when the average family's children have graduated high school - that rate of tax would begin a gradual decrease. And it would continue to decrease annually until taxpayers reach the age of retirement and become eligible for Social Security. Currently, the age for Social Security full retirement eligibility is 65, but that is expected to rise to 67 in the next few years.

At that point, senior citizens would still be expected to bear their share of the municipal tax burden that pays for community government and services, but their burden for school taxes would be reduced to zero.

As I said, this is not a new idea, and in discussing it around the office, almost everyone says it wouldn't work. But I'm not convinced, at least not yet. And I won't be until someone lets me know exactly why it wouldn't work, and proposes a better solution.

Luckily, the editorial and op-ed sections of my company's newspapers are a wonderful forum in which to have that discussion.

I'd like to initiate a community roundtable on this subject, and the subject of educational funding in general, among our thousands of readers in the pages of this newspaper. If you have an idea, send it in. We'll print as many as we can. As a wise man once said, "All of us are smarter than any one of us."

Maybe together we'll come up with a plan that works.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.