Proposals by the Legislature and governor to concurrently empower local governments with sales taxing authority and undercut local government by putting limits on property taxes will create a kind of public finance shell game, leaving taxpayers confused about who’s responsible for their taxes.

A tax increase may be bad, but a stealth tax increase is worse. You don’t know where it comes from. Proposals at the Legislature, with the governor’s help, seem likely to increase the fog already surrounding the origin of taxes in Minnesota.

The Legislature and governor are working to hammer out a compromise on a law restricting property taxes, an authority for decades left to local schools, cities and counties. On the flip side, the Legislature and governor have already approved allowing local governments to levy sales taxes, something that at least initially and historically was left to the state.

It seems it would be more appropriate to just throw out the whole system and start over. It’s confusing to taxpayers to find they are taxed at both ends, but not sure who is really responsible. It’s a public finance shell game that a taxpayer cannot win.

The connection between state funding and state responsibilities and local funding and local responsibilities is becoming more fuzzy rather than more clear. Should state money through the local government aid program allow one city to have streets plowed in two hours while another takes two days?

Will limits to a city’s ability to levy property taxes prevent it from carrying out state-mandated laws? Cities, like Mankato, that have become regional centers use their market power to collect revenue through local sales taxes, even though not everyone who pays that tax gets a government benefit.

The system we are moving to seems to splinter accountability at best. More sales tax by local governments and more restrictions on property taxes by state government skews the line of responsibility.

If the state feels a need to limit local spending, it should be able to limit only that spending of money provided by the state, through local government aid, for example. At the same time, the state shouldn’t pile on the mandates and then limit the local government’s ability to enforce them.

Most local governments have imposed sales taxes because they, and often their residents, feel the state is imposing mandates but not providing the funding. They adopt sales taxes so all of the expenses imposed by the state aren’t levied on a regressive property tax system.

While the Legislature and the governor move toward compromise on these issues where tax policy is pureed, perhaps they ought to take a taste themselves before force feeding it to the taxpayers.