New York State is a grand champion in squeezing the majority of its citizens in a vise with one jaw being a combination of its famously dysfunctional legislature and the dumping of unfunded mandates on local governments. If political scientists gave an annual award to the most dysfunctional state in the union, it would go to New York State in most years. Occasionally Mississippi would get the award, but it would usually go to our fair state.

One great big result if this dysfunctionality is that there is an exceptionally open door for powerful, well-organized groups to pursue and achieve legislation that favors their narrow interests. This imbalance is one of the quandaries of all democracies. In typical New York style, we do things on a grand scale.

State governments across the country are downloading unfunded mandates on local governments. Municipalities and counties have to meet the mandated burdens via property and sales taxes. Given the way New York State government works, or rather does not, we have a system that is especially adept at telling locals what to do and not giving them the budgetary resources to do so.

A coalition of grassroots citizens' groups, nonprofit organizations, policy research institutes, unions, and farm organizations have decided to do something about this state of affairs. They call themselves the Omnibus Consortium. The "Omnibus" part of the coalition's name comes from a model for tax reform legislation, the Omnibus Property Tax Relief and Reform Bill, authored by the director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, Frank Mauro.

The Omnibus Consortium has united behind a first-step legislative proposal, the Property Tax Circuit Breaker bill (S. 4239) that was introduced this April by New York State Senator Liz Krueger. Like a circuit breaker that cuts the electric connection when too much current is flowing, bill S. 4239 would provide significant relief to home owners whose property taxes rise above a trigger level of their family income.

The objective is to put an end to too many horror stories of people losing their homes because unfunded state mandates result in such high property taxes that they must sell their homes to avoid foreclosure. And with our current upended housing market, that means it's hard to sell those homes at prices that cover mortgage and tax obligations. The net result is a growing number of foreclosures that would not happen if state taxes on high incomes were restored to previous levels. This restored state revenue could fund the mandates pushed down to towns and counties.

The Hudson Valley, and Ulster County in particular, is a focal point in organizing the coalition that is tackling this issue. That's logical, given the way that the Valley's population has been booming while most of the state outside the Greater New York economic region is a demographic basket case. Buoyant demography means two of the statewide coalition's four central team members are from Ulster County: County legislator, Susan Zimet, who chairs the Ulster County Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding and Tax Reform (Ulster BRC); and Gardiner's Gioia Shebar, the coordinator of TaxNightmare.org.

TaxNighmare.org is an emblematic and exemplary instance of citizens' movements that have been created across the state to deal with inequities and inefficiencies of over-reliance on property taxes for financing education and other state-mandated services. Its creation was sparked six years ago at a social gathering when discussion turned to how overly high property taxes discouraged people in Gardiner from preserving land as open, green space. Another person jumped in with comments about how friends had just reluctantly sold their house because of high property taxes and moved to South Carolina.

If I imagine what kinetic energy would look like if it was incarnated as a human being, it would look like Gioia Shebar. If I was asked to name someone who personified the word "focused," I'd nominate Gioia. She was a key figure in the local movement to save the Shawangunk Ridge's Awosting Reserve from developers' bulldozers and also in the reform movement that elected an environmentally friendly town board in Gardiner.

Her mental wheels began turning towards the property tax issue. In Gioia's case, turning means doing, and that resulted in being a founding member and the coordinator of TaxNightmare.org. By 2006, the group had grown to a point where it organized a regional forum on property tax distortions at SUNY-New Paltz. TaxNighmare.org is southern Ulster County's principal grassroots voice and advocate for an issue that touches all of us as directly as can be.

Before moving on to the specifics of Senator Krueger's proposed Property Tax Circuit Breaker bill, we should look at the other jaw of the property tax vise that squeezes the majority of New York State's citizens.

Jaw number two is the prize for the most unequal distribution of income among all developing countries clearly going to the United States. That's thanks to three decades' worth of successful lobbying by the rich and powerful to lower their tax obligations both at the national and state levels. We have not seen this kind of inequality since the Robber Baron era of the late nineteenth century.

Equally successful lobbying removed the New Deal checks and balances on a financial system that got us into the Great Depression, and now into the current mess. Then stir in earnings by top executives that are many more times the average employee's wages than is the case in any European country or Japan.

We have developed a very curious culture on tax issues: we scream the loudest about income tax burdens while being the champion among industrialized countries in terms of having the lowest income tax rates. Some of that tax burden is shifted on to sales and real estate taxes, which take a bigger chunk of the incomes of the majority of citizens than is the case for the wealthy, whose lawyers and accountants are quite good at sheltering real estate from taxes.

The net results of these skewed tax arrangements include pinched school budgets that have much to do with the declining scholastic performance of our students compared to those of other nations — or the literally crumbling infrastructure of our roads and bridges. That's naming just a few of the consequences of a pretty free tax ride for people at the top. These consequences do not bode well for the future performance of our economy.

Senator Krueger's circuit breaker bill addresses one dimension of this problem: it would provide some short-term relief for home owners in the middle and lower income levels. The other side of the coin is addressing the income tax structure to at least restore the tax revenues coming from upper income classes to where they were around 1970.

But, first steps first. If Bill S. 4239 passes, the circuit breaker for a family earning less than $100,000 per year would kick in if property taxes exceeded 9 percent of household income in 2009. New York State would return 70 percent of the excess. For 2010, the threshold would be lowered to 8.5 percent, and renters could apply 15 percent of their monthly rent as their property tax equivalent. The threshold would be lowered again to 7.5 percent in 2011 and 6 percent in 2012. Renters could apply 20 percent of the rent towards the rebate.

Then, as total family income increases up to $150,000, and then $250,000, the circuit breakers cut in, but only at a progressively higher ratio of property taxes to family income. To my eyes, I think that it's stretching things to implicitly classify families earning between $150,000 and $250,000 as middle class and thus deserving of property tax relief, although it does have an interesting potential to bring in these affluent but not super-affluent voters as supporters of Bill S. 4239.

I encourage readers to visit these relevant web sites to see what is at stake in terms of equity and the economic future of these sites, and to follow their links to your elected state representatives to encourage them to support the circuit breaker legislation: omnibustaxsolution.org; fiscalpolicy.org/propertytaxresources.html; and, of course, our excellent local advocates, TaxNightmare.org.

If we want to rebuild the economy of New York State, and reverse the outflow of our citizens to other states, we must tackle our crazy property tax arrangements.

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