June 9, 2026
— Jeff Ward, Lehigh Valley News Briefs
Any politician who tells you they will eliminate school property taxes is blowing smoke or smoking pot.
If a school district has bonds to pay off, it can’t eliminate the tax. As kids say, they “literally” can’t. It’s impossible.
School bonds are backed by the ability of districts to tax property. Bonds include includes rules, known as covenants, that say the debt is backed by my property, your property, our property.
Each bond is a contract, and Wall Street and other bondholders aren’t going to give up the certainty of payment for the whims of Harrisburg.
Some people say debt holders don’t care how they get paid as long as they get paid.
Those people are wrong. The debt holders care very much about how they will get back millions of dollars plus interest. Bond buyers view property as stable, “as safe as houses,” while other taxes may fluctuate with the economy or the political nonsense in the State Capitol.
While some Pennsylvania politicians have claimed to support bills to eliminate school taxes, those bills are shell games. Sales tax and income tax would go up, other taxes might be added, and property taxes would continue as long as school districts have debt.
Pennsylvanians would pay more daily at stores, pay more tax on income and perhaps face taxes that don’t exist now.
Then imagine the face of a resident checking the mail and still finding a property tax bill. Smaller but hardly eliminated.
So it’s just a shell game. In every tax shuffle, some people win, some lose, but there is no mechanism to address the big problem of cost.
So we have politics and then we have reality. The Bethlehem Area School District has raised taxes 4%. In the Easton Area district, they’re set to go up 3.5% and the story continues around the Lehigh Valley.
There is no end in sight.
Pennsylvania will spend more than half of its reserve fund if Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2026-27 budget is approved, so don’t expect the state to step in.
So the next time an elected state official says they will pass a law to abolish school taxes (we’ve been hearing that for about 30 years), they’re not just wrong. They’re insulting your intelligence and they’ve been doing this for decades.
It’s part of the political game.
Don’t let them get away with it. They have authority to compel you to pay taxes, so demand that they tell you the truth.
Lehigh Valley News Briefs 