Nearly 30 years ago, just after my wife and I moved to Charlemont to begin a farm, a piece appeared in the Recorder that caught my attention. I’ve been waiting for its logic to assert itself, but since it hasn’t yet, I am going to repeat what I remember of it.

The author observed that when our towns decided to finance themselves through a tax on real estate, there was a rough equivalence between one’s overall wealth and one’s property. A larger farm generally signified greater wealth.

That correlation no longer obtains. One can work in a small home office and make a great deal of money, and that fact is not reflected in one’s real estate taxes.

The correlation that does exist, still imperfectly, is between wealth and income. Why do we not raise revenues for our town by a tax on incomes? Would that not be intrinsically more fair?

The information is readily at hand through our federal income tax returns. All we would need to do would be to calculate the rate of tax needed to fund our budgets and then levy the rate according to income. It would be very interesting, if only as a thought experiment, to see what those numbers look like.

I don’t know how to make that happen, but I believe that our town — and all our towns — would rest upon a more just foundation if we raised money proportional to our ability to pay, not according to the property we happen to own.

John Hoffman

Charlemont