Goodnight letter: Corporate property taxes

What part of Article VII, Section 8 of the Idaho Constitution do I not understand? Or do our legislators, including Rep. Janet Trujillo, just understand it differently?

Section 8 reads: “CORPORATE PROPERTY MUST BE TAXED. The power to tax corporations or corporate property, both real and personal, shall never be relinquished or suspended, and all corporations in this state or doing business therein, shall be subject to taxation for state, county, school, municipal, and other purposes, on real and personal property owned or used by them, and not by this constitution exempted from taxation within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax.”

In 2013, the Legislature exempted the first $100,000 of businesses’ personal property from taxation. Now Trujillo wants to increase that to $250,000 and many legislators want to eliminate the personal property tax completely.

Such tax cuts shift the burden of support for counties, cities and schools from business to homeowners and seem to me to be unconstitutional.

Simple little me would think that eliminating the personal property tax in whole or in part should require amendment to our Constitution. But maybe I just don’t understand the strict construction of Article VII, Section 8.

This story was originally published February 10, 2017 at 10:45 PM with the headline "Goodnight letter: Corporate property taxes."