I’ve been writing this column once a month for 25 years. Last month marked the 300th column. Let’s do one more, number 301. And let’s look back. What was I writing about, that first year, in 2001 and 2002?
The October 2001 column was my first about property taxes. Indiana was struggling to respond to the Town of St. John decision by the Indiana Supreme Court, which had tossed out the old property assessment system and required valuation at the predicted selling price, meaning market value. It was going to raise taxes on homeowners, and I speculated that the General Assembly would be debating that issue in coming months. Coming months? Make that, in the coming 25 years! More than one-third of my 300 columns were about property taxes.
In December 2001 I wrote about peaks and troughs, meaning the beginnings and endings of recessions, as marked by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The bureau had just announced that a recession had begun the previous March. I noted that if it was an average length recession, it would end in February 2002.
The joke was on me. The NBER eventually set the trough at November 2001. When I wrote in December, the recession was already over!
The January 2002 column was about the inventory tax. Back then business inventories were subject to the property tax. The assessment date was March 1, so retailers, especially auto dealers, would hold “February tax sales” to reduce their inventories as much as possible. The tax probably discouraged business investment. Many thought that without it, Indiana could be a logistics center, since so many interstates crisscross our state. Many businesses and legislators wanted to eliminate the tax. In the column, I said it might take a constitutional amendment to get rid of it.
That amendment came in November 2004, and the inventory tax disappeared by 2007. There seems to be a lot of warehouses up and down our interstates these days. The end of the inventory tax is one reason.
All the columns from February to June 2002 were about the tax debate in the General Assembly, which ended on June 22 after a special session. The result was historic, I wrote. Indiana would be a market value state for property assessment. We would pay for schools with a lot more state aid and a lot less in property taxes. We would eliminate the corporate gross income tax, which taxed business revenues, not profits.
Historic, maybe, but not conclusive. It took years to implement market value assessment, and in March 2008 I was writing about another reform, “the biggest, most important” since 1973.
Last month’s column was about the “third big reform of the past 50 years.” We reformed, then reformed the reform, then reformed that reform. Will we finally get it right? Probably not. The economy, the courts and the voters keep throwing curves, and our property tax system sometimes strikes out, responding in ways we don’t like. Then there’s the never-ending tension between wanting public services but not wanting to pay for them. Or wanting someone else to pay.
In August 2002 I was back to the economy. The recovery was slow, and the unemployment rate refused to come down. There was worry about a “double-dip,” a second recession right after the first. My guess was that the expansion would continue, and that was right, up to December 2007.
Then the Great Recession started. But in July 2008 I was still wondering if we were in a recession. The NBER marked the December peak later that year. If only I could whisper to myself, back in time, “Hey, pal, we are in recession and it’s almost half over.” Now we’re wondering about recession again. Of the six main indicators that the NBER uses to determine when a recession starts, three have peaked and are lower now. We’re probably not in recession, but if we are, it started last spring. I’m listening for whispers from my future self. Nothing so far.
I like writing this column. But I’ve been retired for four years, and I’m not as up on Indiana issues as I used to be. My wife and I are traveling more. There’s a granddaughter now. It’s a good time to stop. Thank you for reading.
