MULLAN: School taxes hurt business

The story about Mullan in The Press missed a big part of the reason the town is dying. In a word, taxes. Not all taxes, as the city budget is only around $250,000, but school district taxes.

Mullan has its own school district, with 108 students. The school district spends about $2.4 million per year, or in other words, more than $22,000 per student. A small group of voters (fewer than 100, many of them employees of the top-heavy district) keep passing additional bonds, some without an expiration date.

So how can a town of 700 think they can afford such a luxury? Surprisingly, the culprit is the homeowner’s exemption that serves to push the brunt of taxes onto businesses. Because the strongly Democrat town residents feel good about passing levy after levy believing that the levies will not really cost them anything because the mine pays more than half the property taxes, they have driven the businesses away or out of existence. The ultimate price they will pay is the demise of their community.

The homeowner’s exemption doesn’t cut taxes so much as it simply hides them, and forces vendors to raise prices we all pay. When the people refuse to pay the ever-increasing prices or the vendors decide to stop bleeding their profits into unsustainable taxes, they simply shut their doors. The community then becomes a ghost town, even if they have a profitable silver mine that should serve to keep the town thriving.

As Frederic Bastiat correctly observed in “The Law,” “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Sadly, Mullan is the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

CHRISTI FAVOUR

Post Falls