186 ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

increase. As well as I can remember last year it was some fantastic
amount of 50 or 60 cents (in Baltimore City).

So you see that reform is achieving its purpose. It is taking some of
this burden from those people on a fixed income who have to support
their properties that they have earned and paid for. Now I think if
you look at it this way it simplifies itself. The property tax is very
basically a tax on what you have accumulated—the saving, the equity
that you have in your home. An income tax is a tax on what you are
accumulating.

To give you an example of how different this can be to different
people, take the case of a person who has a very nice home that was
purchased during his or her productive years and which is assessed
at maybe $17, 000 or $18, 000, and a person of that type who is making
almost nothing in current income. Property tax escalation puts that
person out of business. He can't meet it. He has to sell that house.

On the other hand, take the advantages if you rely totally on the
property tax experienced by a person who is making a lot of money
per year, and who is stashing his money away for the future and living
in a very modest dwelling and has many children in the public school
system, yet who is in a position where (with counties) relying on the
property tax he's not paying his share of the load. Take a person who
is saving his money to buy a farm later on, who has three children in
the public schools at a cost of maybe $1500 a year, who is paying only
$300 in property taxes. That person under tax reform is going to pay
his share of the load, as well as the person who is on a fixed income,
unable to meet the rising costs of government and keep his home that
he has accumulated and paid for with his taxes during his productive
years.

That's what tax reform is about. It's not to throw a lot of new taxes
on the people—it's to transfer the burden of taxation from the prop-
erty tax entirely from the local government as it has been, to partially
on the State government—on other forms of taxation that will help to
equalize and balance the efforts of all our citizens.

Now you've heard many people say the graduated tax is terrible.
Well, the graduated income tax has been in effect in this country for
a very long period of time. It's a Federal system — we don't graduate
ours like they do theirs—and some of the people who complain most
violently about what this mildly graduated State tax does to them don't
take into consideration that what they pay in additional State income