This article appears in the April 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Late last year, the godfather of supply-side economics dropped in on a Georgia state Senate special committee hearing. He spoke of the urgent need to dump their income tax, a “killer, killer, killer,” akin to “a nuclear weapon,” that has destroyed the 11 states that have instituted it as of 1960: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.
“Each and every one of those states in population has had a cataclysmic decline relative to the rest of the nation. It’s just amazing,” said Arthur Laffer, inventor of the “Laffer curve,” the discredited theory that claims lowering taxes raises tax revenue. Georgia could avoid the same fate if they got rid of their income tax, which funds nearly 60 percent of the state’s entire $34.8 billion budget.
More from Whitney Curry Wimbish
This was a familiar refrain from a conservative anti-tax champion. But before Laffer left, he asked to make one more point, something that staked out new territory for his movement.
“I know I’m pushing on my time on you, but I got one thing else I’d like to mention, and it’s very important in Georgia, and in all the states except for one,” he said. “You have a big, big, big … big property tax problem.” That’s the real policy holding the state back from prospering. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Freezing those property taxes would bring Georgia all the way back, Laffer counseled.
“You could really do it,” he told the lawmakers. “You wouldn’t believe what would happen to Georgia. Florida wouldn’t have a chance. Everyone in Florida would move to Georgia. Not that you want everyone there, by the way.”
THIS IS MAGA’S NEW FRONT in the war on working people, falsely packaged as a boon to the poor and an answer to the affordability crisis. It expands the GOP’s half-century-long project to reduce taxes of all kinds to deprive governments of raising money to pay for services, saddling citizens with unsafe roads, traffic congestion, canceled traffic projects, lower teacher pay, higher teacher turnover, larger class sizes, ruined parks, and people losing their health insurance. Twenty-six states have cut their personal and/or corporate income taxes since 2021, and four intend to reduce them to zero: Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
But every single state in the union, red, blue, or purple, has a property tax. And reducing or eliminating them will erode services further by cutting off the source of revenue for local governments. Municipalities collect the tax and spend the proceeds primarily on schools, as well as roads, park upkeep, and numerous other municipal services.
Even just a few years ago, killing property taxes entirely would have been dismissed as a radical libertarian fantasy. A whopping 70 percent of local government revenue comes from them. But conservatives are like sharks, and if they don’t keep finding new taxes to promise voters to cut, they die. A new group of hard-right extremists—familiar names like Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk—has blithely decided that cities and towns can make do with next to nothing to fund their activities, and they may even succeed somewhere with this insane experiment.
Even just a few years ago, killing property taxes entirely would have been dismissed as a radical libertarian fantasy.
The rebellion is being driven by a gift bestowed on property owners: rising home prices, which translate into higher taxes. Property taxes are typically levied as a percentage of assessed property value, so those with the highest-value properties pay the most, including mansions, vacation homes, and businesses. Our historic housing shortage is driving these values up, and therefore the property taxes people pay. It’s sparked anger, and demagogues are capitalizing on this, similar to the tax revolt in 1978, when California passed Proposition 13. But while that initiative prevented reassessments of home values after a sale, the new and preferred conservative property tax reform is simply abolition.
The wealthiest property owners would benefit the most from this latest anti-tax crusade, said Anna Phillips, policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. State lawmakers would also benefit, though in a different way, she said. Local officials typically turn to state officials for help making up funding shortfalls, giving them greater power over how much municipalities spend and on what. “The state becomes more powerful in that local governments are disempowered,” Phillips said. “You’ll see the state put its thumb on the scales on how the money is used.”
Some lawmakers lean heavily on that dynamic in their pitch to constituents, economists said, as a way to soften how much the loss of property taxes will hit the community. But when states themselves are also cutting their own revenue streams to cope with federal funding cuts, as they are now due to $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts and hundreds of billions in food assistance reductions in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, backfilling a severe local government loss from eliminating property tax is not a sure thing.
Other advocates say they’ll make up the difference with sales taxes. But if taxed goods are unaffordable and residents spend less, that funding eats away at itself. Most of the actual proposals are darkly honest: They offer no explanation for how the lost revenue would be recouped.
“There’s not a model for doing this,” said Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Laffer said Georgia would have no need to raise sales taxes after cutting property and income taxes, because scores of people would move to the state and start spending their money.
“To envision even theoretically that working we would have to multiply the state population several times over, going from an 11.5 million person state to a 30 million person state,” said Daniel Kanso, vice president of public policy at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. “It defies logic.”
IN ADDITION TO GEORGIA, lawmakers in Florida, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, and Ohio also want to eliminate property taxes.
With the support of Republican Gov. DeSantis, Florida state representatives voted 80-30 along party lines in February to include a measure on this year’s general-election ballot asking voters to wipe out all nonschool taxes for properties with a homestead exemption. State economists expect doing so would cost cities, counties, and other tax districts, such as waste management districts, nearly $15 billion a year. House Democrats say cutting the tax will force local governments to raise fees and sales taxes. But Republicans say they want to encourage “a culture of thrift throughout the state.”
Michigan has two attacks under way on its property tax, which draws between $17 billion and $19 billion for local governments and accounts for about 15 percent of every local school district’s budget. In December, Republican legislator Steve Carra proposed cutting property taxes for families without kids in public schools. His HB 5376 says anyone who “has no dependent utilizing public school or receiving publicly funded educational services” would not have to pay any school-related property taxes by 2031, a project that would cost school districts $7 billion.
“Michigan taxpayers deserve fairness in how their hard-earned money is spent,” Carra said in a press release about the exemption, which people who homeschool their kids could claim.
The exemption would be phased in, starting with a 40 percent reduction in taxes in 2027 and then an increase of 15 percentage points every year until 2031.
The group AxMITax is also trying to eliminate property taxes entirely through a ballot measure in this November’s general election, led by Republican gubernatorial candidate Karla Wagner. As of early February, Wagner said they had collected the necessary 446,198 signatures.
A similar dynamic is playing out in Ohio. As activists collect signatures for a ballot measure to eliminate property taxes across the state, Republican state Sen. Bill Blessing proposed a measure to reform the tax. Under his Joint Resolution 7, Ohio would tax the land, but not the property or any improvements. “If we’re going to tax improvements, we get less of them,” he reportedly said in February, adding that the “likely” outcome of his reform would be “more money in the aggregate, while lowering tax bills for the individual and reducing housing costs due to the added supply.”
Any state that eliminates its property tax will be the first; North Dakota voters rejected the idea in 2024, when they voted 63 percent against a measure that would have banned property taxes based on assessed property value.
Peter Gess, economic policy director for Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said the reasoning anti-tax crusaders give can sound convincing to those who haven’t given it much thought. He’s been hearing the same arguments as the one in Michigan, as well as one that argues that paying property tax is the equivalent of paying rent for something you own. But without that money, communities wouldn’t have the schools, roads, sewage treatment, parks, sanitation, and trash services they need to survive.
“You really wouldn’t have a community without it,” he said. “It’s hard to think about ways of overcoming a loss of income tax and property tax, and both of those together just really doesn’t make sense … It is hard to think about how you can make up all of that with sales tax without making sales tax astronomically high.”
SHORTLY AFTER ART LAFFER APPEARED on a Zoom screen in Georgia, state senators voted to cut the income tax to the bone. “We can, and will, eliminate the ENTIRE TAX BURDEN on individual taxpayers making less than $50,000 (or $100,000 for married couples filing jointly) AND, at the same time reduce the tax liability for every other family and business in Georgia,” the committee wrote. Senate Bill 476 lowers the flat personal income tax rate from 5.19 percent to 4.99 percent and increases the standard deduction from $24,000 to $100,000 for joint filers. Bill 477 lowers the personal income tax rate to 3.99 percent by 2028 and boosts the standard deduction to $32,000 and $16,000.
If approved by the lower house, that would wipe out $16 billion of the state’s overall budget, $12 billion of which would go to those earning more than $100,000, Kanso said. It would barely make a difference to everyone else; Georgians pay average total taxes of just $3,000 total, Kanso said, making it the seventh-least expensive in the country. They’d feel it in other ways, though. The only way to make up that revenue would be to reduce funding to public schools, whose funding is constitutionally protected, or to Medicaid, which is already on a starvation diet of $5.5 billion annually to insure two million people, Kanso said.
Not long after, Georgia lawmakers voted down House Resolution 1114, which would have reduced property taxes to zero by 2032, by a 99-73 margin. The proposal would have cut well over half of local spending, Kanso said. As of 2023, property tax in Georgia composed $17 billion of a total $25.8 billion worth of municipal spending statewide.
The discrepancy shows that abolishing property taxes, while an emerging red-meat issue for the anti-government crowd, still doesn’t quite have the buy-in needed from the average Republican. But these are early days, and the noise for sacrificing yet another tool of functional government will grow louder. A few more centibillionaires shrieking that property tax “means that your house is a de facto lease from the government” and the base might just warm to the idea.
These choices about what to tax “fundamentally have real human costs, in terms of lives,” said Kanso. “It’s just a very bleak prospect to imagine.”
This article appears in Apr 2026 issue.
