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Originally Posted by ghfromaltonbay
....Here is a copy of Charles Osgood's report. I heard it too last Monday on his daily CBS report. (They run repeats on the weekend of the most popular segments.)...Tom Thompson doesn't buy that for a minute..." It's a gimmick that assessors have come up with to come through the back door and stick their hands deeper in your pockets and extract more tax dollars for the municipalities, that's what it is folks." said Thompson.
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This quote from Thompson is one of the oft most repeated fallacies in this debate. The assessors do not stick their hands in anyone's pockets and no "new" money is raised when a town or municipality is re-assessed!
Property taxes go up when overall spending goes up. Property taxes go down when overall spending goes down. All the assessment does is to determine how much of that up or down you have to pay for your particular piece of property.
There are many good arguments to make on both sides of the issue when it comes to New Hampshire's methods of taxation. The property tax system is really not that hard to comprehend. It does no one on either side of the debate any good when folks like Thompson, who should know better, purposely misrepresent the issues to try to defend a position that is in their best interest by making false and misleading statements as the one attributed to him in the post cited.
FLL hit the nail right on the head in an earlier post. I too find it particularly ironic that Mr. Thompson is raising so much hell over a property tax system that his father pursued vigorously as the governor of New Hampshire and a system that Mr. Thompson & his family have embodied for decades....only to have a significant change of heart when the State ordered all communities in New Hampshire to level the playing field and the surviving Thompson's now balk when they are asked to pay their fair share!
