Texas Politicians and the Ninth Commandment

Three weeks ago, I wrote that most Texas politicians have been falsely claiming they provided $18 billion in tax relief, not the $12.7 billion they actually provided.

Today, I’ll be back in the Texas capitol testifying before the Texas House Select Study Committee on Sustainable Property Tax Relief with evidence to back up that statement and my claim that what the Legislature is doing on property taxes is not working. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first I want to lay a foundation to help us understand why Texas politicians can’t, or won’t, stop making false claims about their work.

Exodus 20:16 gives us the Ninth Commandment: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Christianity has long held this to require more than just not lying about our neighbor.

Question 144 in the Westminster Larger Catechism says that it requires “from the heart sincerely, freely, clearly_, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth.” It supports this exposition with Ephesians 4:25: “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor …” On the negative side, WLC Question 145 says the Ninth commandments tells us we must not “prejudice the truth,” meaning we must not obscure the truth.

With this in place, let’s get back to the details.

In response to rapidly rising property taxes, Texans starting clamoring for property tax relief back in the late 1990s. Since then, property taxes have increased from $18.9 billion (1998) to $82.6 billion. Unless you define property tax relief as meaning property taxes are a little lower than they would have otherwise been, Texas taxpayers have received no relief at all. The chart at the top of this article affirms this by showing the growth of property taxes over the last five years.

This provides the backdrop for why many state leaders and members of the Texas Legislature might want to obscure the truth about property taxes: after almost thirty years of requests from Texas voters, Texas politicians have provided no property tax relief. If Texas voters truly understood this—like they did about school choice and the Ken Paxton impeachment this year, it might be harmful to the reelection efforts of a number of incumbents.

In the testimony I’ll present to the committee today, I quote the first four statements below; I’ll add a couple of more to make sure the Texas Senate is well represented and another one that was just posted on X last night:

“Today, I am signing a law that will ensure more than $18 billion in property tax cuts—the largest property tax cut in Texas history.” – Gov. Greg Abbott. 

“The Senate unanimously passed … the largest property tax cut in Texas history, and likely the world.” – Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick

“Providing Texans with the largest state property tax cut in American history.” – Speaker Dade Phelan

“The House has passed … the largest property tax cut in TX history!” – Rep. Morgan Meyer

“We can be proud that … we are … voting on an astounding $18 billion property tax cut, which is the largest in the state’s history …” – Sen. Paul Bettencourt

“The $5.3 billion that is in here for compression … is in addition to previous compression so it actually lowers M&O rates by 10 cents … it is new compression, is that right?” – Sen. Joan Huffman, in a conversation with Sen. Bettencourt, who affirmed her analysis, during a Senate Finance hearing

“In 2023, the Texas Legislature passed $18 billion in property tax relief, the largest cut in Texas history.” – Rep. Dustin Burrows

There are two claims made in these statements that obscure the truth because they do not clearly and fully present the truth. The first claim is there was an $18 billion property tax cut. Here is Texas economist Vance Ginn explaining why this is not the case:

$5.3 billion of this $18 billion was in Section 18.79 of the General Appropriations Act (HB 1), passed in the regular session to maintain past property tax relief efforts. This resulted in just $12.7 billion in new property tax relief

To further explain this, what the members of the Legislature did was count funding already in the budget that covered previous tax relief as “new” tax relief. You can see this is what Huffman and Bettencourt are trying to convince the public of in their conversation.

Why did Texas politicians do this? Perhaps one reason is that before the 2023 Legislative session, Gov. Abbott promised Texans he would dedicate half of the state’s $32.7 billion budget surplus to property tax relief. But with legislative leaders only willing to spend $12.7 billion on property tax relief because they had other plans for the rest of the surplus, Abbott would not be keeping his promise his promise if he signed on to that. So, Abbott, Patrick, Phelan, and other legislative leaders came up with a plan: they’d go back and find $5.3 billion property tax relief from 2019 and 2021 and tell voters it was “new.”

In case you are wondering, this is not technical dispute or question of he said, she said. In 2023, the Texas Legislature only dedicated $12.7 billion of spending to provide new property tax relief. The $5.3 billion was paying for previous relief already baked into the system. To make this point clear, the Legislature also provided money for property tax relief in 2015, 2006, and 1997. Why didn’t they go ahead and claim the more than $15 billion from those previous efforts over the last 25 years as “new” relief? Because everyone would have laughed at them. The same thing might have happened with the $5.3 billion if the media had been doing its job, but most of the media were no more interested in Texans getting tax relief than were the politicians.

The next claim made by politicians is that the property tax cut was largest in the state’s history. This is easy to refute because there was no general tax cut. Using the latest data from the Texas Comptroller’s office, I estimate property taxes increased this year by $681 million. Thus, the Legislature’s $12.7 billion effort did not result in lower overall taxes.

To be clear, many if not most homeowners received property tax cuts this year because of the increase in the homestead exemption. But many businesses and apartment dwellers did not. And many, if not most, will see whatever relief they experienced this year swallowed up by a tax increase next year.

When the members claimed they had passed the largest property tax cut in history—Texas, the U.S., the world, or wherever else they might point to, what they meant was the $18 billion was more than the $16 billion the Texas Legislature dedicated to property tax relief in 2006. This provides another reason why many politicians obscured the truth about the $18 billion: while $18 billion is bigger than $16 billion, $12.7 billion is not.

But why did not even the $12.7 billion cut property tax revenue across the board? First, because the $12.7 billion has to pay for property tax relief over two years, so the amount dedicated to reducing property taxes was only $6.35 billion—the other $6.35 billion simply maintains the reduction in the second year. This is a fact legislators routinely fail to inform their constituents of. Second, because the Texas Legislature has refused to do anything about property tax increases by school districts and local governments. Every time the Texas Legislature does something about reducing property taxes, schools and local governments raise taxes and swallow up most savings that should have gone to taxpayers. The members of the Legislature know about this but are unwilling to do anything meaningful about it. The table below shows how much the different local taxing entities increased property tax revenue this year.

Property taxes are not the only way in which Texas politicians attempt to obscure the truth and hide what they are doing from Texas voters. The Texas budget is another area. I won’t go into the details here, but you can rest assured both the size of Texas government and the growth of Texas government are much larger than the Legislature leads us to believe. Here and here are the details.

Wrapping up, the table above shows what priority the politicians placed on tax relief. Not only did tax relief get less than half of the budget surplus funds, it only made up 19% of all new spending approved by the Texas Legislature in 2023. Clearly, while avoiding electoral harm from an electorate upset about property taxes was a political priority of Texas politicians, providing real, lasting property tax relief to taxpayers was not a policy priority. Instead, legislators prioritized satisfying Austin-based special interests who were clamoring for increased spending on their pet projects.

Yet this truth is not what most Texas politicians speak to the voters. Instead, they attempt to obscure the truth with phrases like “the largest property tax cut in Texas history, and likely the world.” And the media helps them cover up the facts by refusing to dig into the details, much like they did with Russia-gate and are doing with the Trump assassination attempts. Our political leaders should look to the Ninth Commandment as a guide for helping them repent of obscuring the truth and of partnering with the media in doing so.