SEA 1: Indiana Republicans Raise Taxes on the Poorest Hoosiers
Homeowners get (up to) a $300 tax credit. Businesses and farmers get tax breaks on equipment and capitalization. Municipalities get screwed (royally) on revenue. Renters and the poor get nothing.
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I started writing this on Facebook Tuesday afternoon. Then I realized I wasn’t quite ready to admit I’ve reached the age where I post overlong political screeds on Facebook as a matter of course.
So I quickly deleted the post and pasted what I had over here as the start of a new draft of this newsletter.
SEA 1, passed in the Senate just after midnight on Tuesday morning, is ostensibly intended to lower property taxes for homeowners in Indiana.
This is it. The Big Property Tax Relief Bill Indiana governor Mike Braun has been crowing about since he hit the campaign trail with big promises of a $4.1 billion reduction in property taxes in Indiana.
Here’s what the bill does. Are you ready for it? It’s big, let me tell you.
Are you sure you’re ready? This is such a massive piece of modern, out of sight, big-ly legislation, that you might be surprised to find it coming from a man whose hairline is so ashamed it’s actively fleeing from his scalp.
SEA 1—you can, if you’re a masochist, read the entire bill in the previous link—provides a generous, $300 credit (maximum) to every Indiana property owner who pays $3,000 or more in property taxes per annum.
Wow! $300! Why, spread it out over 12 months, and it’s possible my mortgage will go down as much as 25 bucks a month. With that money, I could probably afford to finally get Disney+ and watch that 12-hour long Beatles documentary from 2020 I still haven’t seen.
Or maybe I can get a large combo meal at Chik-fil-A. With an ice cream cone for dessert.
That $300 is, by the way, the most property owners can earn. If you pay less than $3,000, then it’s 10% of the total. So, if your annual property tax bill is $2,457, you will receive a credit of $245.70. And so on down the line. Gee whiz, Mike. Thanks!
But while property owners get their Disney+ and Chik-fil-A money, renters—nearly a third of Hoosiers—get nothing. And they’re the ones most in need of relief. What relief will they get in a state whose GOP leadership thinks having paved roads is a luxury?
In the grand tapestry of American housing, renters often find themselves woven into the lower-income threads. As the housing affordability crisis of the last several years has made crystal clear, many people don’t often choose to be renters. Renters, on average, earn less than homeowners and allocate a larger portion of their income to housing costs. This financial strain leaves little room for savings or investments, perpetuating a cycle where homeownership—and the wealth it can build—remains out of reach.
Recent data underscores this disparity. Nearly half of renter households in the U.S. are considered cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. For the lowest-income renters, the situation is even more dire, with many dedicating over half of their income to rent. Since the pandemic, as housing costs for both buyers and renters have skyrocketed, the burden has disproportionately fallen on renters—particularly those without access to generational wealth or stable employment.
Unlike homeowners, who benefit from fixed mortgage rates and appreciating property values—my dad was already drilling me when I was as young as 5 that you pay back a mortgage with inflated money—renters are subject to the volatility of the market, limited tenant protections (especially in Indiana!), AI-enhanced price gouging, and a shrinking supply of affordable units. This growing gap between income and rent has widened racial and economic disparities, especially in urban centers, and raises urgent questions about who gets to access housing security—and who gets left behind.
This isn't just a housing issue, in other words; it's a broader economic concern that affects stability, mobility, and the ability to build wealth.
Now, here’s the reality check we all need: property taxes in Indiana are already quite low. The state's average effective property tax rate is approximately 0.76%, which is below the national average of 0.90%. This lower rate is partly due to Indiana's property tax caps, which Mitch Daniels added to the Indiana Constitution in 2010. This amendment limits taxes to 1% of assessed value for homesteads, 2% for other residential properties and farmland, and 3% for commercial and industrial properties.
So of course a pro-business, anti-poor state like Indiana would double down on those caps rather than do something wild—like invest in human capital or enshrine a right to housing, education, or health care. That would require a different political imagination entirely, one that sees Hoosiers as people rather than property owners or numbers.
Instead, Indiana’s GOP, ever faithful to the logic of privatization and austerity, and tied to whatever ridiculous and damaging whim Donald Trump sends down from on high, continues to engineer its state government not to protect its most vulnerable residents, but to guarantee comfort and predictability for capital—especially business capital.
Make no mistake: the GOP is all about making sure that wealth stays where it’s already concentrated, and then adding more on top of that whenever they think voters aren’t looking. Meanwhile, renters, public schools, police, fire, and the social infrastructure that could actually help working-class people build stable lives are left scrambling for crumbs. In Indiana politics, property and businesses gets protection; people get empty promises.
When comparing Indiana's property tax rates to those of neighboring Midwestern states, the differences are even more obvious:
Illinois: Illinois has one of the highest effective property tax rates in the nation at 2.18%.
Ohio: Ohio's effective property tax rate stands at 1.43%.
Michigan: Michigan's rate is approximately 1.31%.
Kentucky: Kentucky, which is not technically part of the Midwest, has a lower rate at 0.83%.
Wisconsin: Wisconsin's effective property tax rate is around 1.53%.
If you’ve heard folks around Indy complaining about their property tax bills lately, they’re not wrong—and they’re not alone. Even though Indiana’s effective property tax rate hovers around a modest 0.77%, lower than the national average and far below big-city rates in places like Chicago (2.1%) or Detroit (2.2%), the bills themselves are climbing fast. In fact, from 2019 to 2024, the Indianapolis metro saw the fastest-growing property tax bills in the country—up a whopping 66.7%. My own property taxes shot up from around $3,100 in 2022 to nearly $5,000 in 2024.
However, Marion county (Indianapolis) still has some of the lowest property tax rates of any major US metropolitan area.
So while lawmakers in the Statehouse are patting themselves on the back for being “low-tax,” the average homeowner in Marion or Hamilton County might be wondering why their escrow account just imploded, like mine did. Turns out you can’t eat a percentage; you just have to pay the bill.
Braun-ability
In reality, this “historic tax relief” will do three things:
SEA 1 will give people who own property up to a $300 credit on their property taxes. Whoop di doo.
Local municipalities will lose tens of millions of dollars in revenue, which many will try to make up for by raising income taxes (yes, in Indiana we pay county income tax, too). Renters who don't own property (nearly 1 in 3 Hoosiers) won't receive any tax credits and will likely have a higher tax liability because of the income tax hike that will come as a result of this bill.
It will decimate what's left of Indiana's social and civic infrastructure, which includes things like fire, police, public libraries, schools. The Indiana Capitol Chronicle estimates that this "tax relief" will cost Indiana municipalities $1.5 billion over the next three years. Much of that will come from our public schools. This is precisely the plan.
It also mandates that school districts share local property tax revenues with charter schools, a move that diverts funds from traditional public schools to institutions that lack equivalent oversight and the input of local parents and communities.
This is a tax increase on the poorest Hoosiers disguised as property tax relief for “homeowners.”
SEA 1 is—let me be clear about this—a tax increase on the poor and lower middle class disguised as tax relief. Republicans won’t tell you they’re raising taxes, obviously, but what they will do is create legislative conditions that make higher taxes an inevitability, just to keep the machine of state and county governments limping along for another few years until Braun figures out what his next political move is. Or maybe he’s hoping Donald will call him up to Washington and ask him to move in to the White House. I don’t know what to expect from this sycophantic moron.
And Braun? His track record speaks for itself.
Mike Braun's tenure as Indiana's governor has been marked by a series of controversial decisions that reflect his total alignment with and fervent allegiance to pro-business and conservative agendas. The same pro-business and conservative agenda that has turned Indiana into such a wasteland.
In 2024, Braun’s Senate campaign was fined $159,000 by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for failing to disclose $11.5 million in loans and contributions, one of the largest fines ever imposed in Senate campaign history. As governor, he’s signed executive orders limiting Indiana's environmental regulations to federal standards and removing "environmental justice" considerations from state permitting processes, a move criticized for potentially undermining protections for marginalized communities.
He’s proposed cuts to public health funding and introduced work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP recipients—policies that critics argue could disproportionately affect low-income Hoosiers.
Braun has also championed SEA 202, a controversial law that reshapes Indiana's higher education landscape by forcing something called "intellectual diversity" into university diversity programs and tenure evaluations. It inserts political ideology into tenure and curriculum decisions and further erodes academic freedom in Indiana’s public universities, one of the few bright spots in the Hoosier state.
His entire agenda reflects a steady assault on public institutions and the people they serve.
My fellow Hoosiers, enough is enough. Republicans have a stranglehold on Indiana, and they have for the last 25+ years.
What, I ask, do we have to show for it? A $300 (or less) refund check?
With a quarter century to run things with zero effective pushback from Democrats or really anybody, to hear the pundits and politicos tell it, Indiana should be a free market paradise. But it's not. In fact, Indiana ranks near or at the bottom of most of the big social, educational, and economic metrics, especially when you get outside the major population centers (of which we really only have the one—Indy). It's a backwards state with backwards leadership. It's been time for a change.
The GOP has had their chance for a quarter century, and all we have to show for it is the glaring lack of investment in human capital and government infrastructure that has become the hallmark of Republican governance. Modern Republicanism is a cult of personality centered around the President. Braun himself styles himself as a “little Trump” figure.
Languaging
Something I realized while drafting this: the term homeowner carries with it a glow of emotional warmth and moral virtue, a kind of semantic halo that evokes stability, responsibility, and the American Dream in flannel pajamas. It’s a word wrapped in the affective language of family, safety, and personal achievement. Language that makes it difficult to scrutinize.
But I prefer the term property owner. Not just because it’s more precise (a lot of the “homeowners” in Indiana are actually corporate entities from other states making bank on the poor), but because it removes the Hallmark movie gloss and let’s us get serious about who owns what in America.
Homeowner naturalizes possession. Property owner reminds us what’s really at stake: ownership—not just of a dwelling, but of capital, of land, of space that might otherwise be shared.
It draws our attention to who gets taxed, who gets relief, who rents from whom, and why. So much of contemporary policymaking—including Indiana’s SEA 1—hinges on near-sacred deference to the homeowner, while renters, tenants, the unhoused, and the working poor are reduced to line items or ignored entirely.
Let’s start using the term property owner. If we can’t change the political reality of Indiana right now, we can at least insist on using language that reflects it.
Reality is something the Indiana GOP—and Republicans nationwide—seem to have in short supply.