True, renters don’t directly pay property taxes, so they never see how much taxes are paid by the property owners and passed along to them in their rent. And while sales tax is printed on every receipt, I bet I have a better idea of how much I paid in property taxes last year than you do of how much sales tax you paid on your McDonald’s breakfast sandwich that you had this morning. People don’t look that closely at their receipts to scrutinize how much they are paying in sales taxes.
On the tax deductibility side, property taxes have been deductible on federal income tax forms for as long as I can remember. Taxpayers were given the option as part of the Bush tax cuts of being able to deduct EITHER their state income taxes paid or their state sales taxes paid, but this option goes away next year (for the 2010 tax year) unless congress acts to extend this provision (unlikely with a democrat congress). This is a big “Screw-you” from the democrats to all taxpayers living in states with no state income tax or in states with higher sales taxes than income taxes. I would prefer not to compound this democrat screw-you with a GOP screw-you to Texas taxpayers.
It still comes down to really owning your property, or just renting it from an entity that allows your taxes to automatically be raised by 10% every year with no direct action by an elected politician. As a guideline, if Democrats are for/against it, you should side opposite them - and the Democrats and RINOs are REALLY against eliminating the property tax.
You have to wonder if allowing the sales tax deduction was an early chess move to give property tax proponents ammunition in this very debate - don’t do that, since you can deduce property taxes but the sales tax deduction is going away! Raising sales (consumption) taxes are bad - we need to keep taxings the means of production, er, I mean, property, so we can provide vital services and never face the voter when our appraisal districts give us our 10% raises every year. That’s GOOOD!