Here’s an idea from the Letters page of the Newark (OH) Advocate: Whatever your school tax is when you are 65, that’s what you pay for the rest of your life.

The advantage to schools are numerous. First of all, members of the older generation are more likely to vote for a school levy if they know their school tax won’t increase.

Secondly, members of the younger generation most likely will feel the same — that someday their school tax won’t increase, especially at a time when their income decreases.

Another advantage to members of the older generation is they won’t have to move out of their homes because they no longer can afford to keep up with constantly mounting school tax.

I’m not sure this is a good idea for several reasons.

First, if one’s taxes are staying constant from year to year, then the value of the payments are dropping in real dollars.

Second, the income of fixed-income households goes up with cost-of-living adjustments, in effect dropping the rate someone is being taxed.

Third, the retirement age is no longer set at 65. If I’m lucky mine would stay at 67. I expect it to hit 70 before I get there, and no, I don’t trust that I’ll get a dime. That’d be a really nice break in the school tax for those years I’m at full income with frozen school taxes. :)

Fourth, there is no self-preservation incentive to keep older people from raising other people’s taxes.

When we bought our house we looked at school taxes which vary a good deal from district to district. Higher taxes were an incentive not to buy a house in certain school districts. If a voting bloc decides to keep raising taxes without personal consequences, that school district will find less and less people moving into their districts.

Maybe a school tax isn’t the best way to pay for public education. Maybe the school districts should solicit the votes of “seasoned citizens” by having the students provide services. When I was in choir, we made rounds to professional care facilities and gave Christmas concerts (sorry, ACLU). Maybe athletics is getting so much liability that we need to let some stress off of winning and have kids just play pickup games. Whatever the situation, shielding a group of people from the consequences of their own decisions is just buying votes and will lead to other unintended consequences.