Some new thoughts on the proposed tax cap, as it’s called. (This would be a limit on how much school districts could increase their total haul from property taxes from one year to the next.)

I dismissed it recently, saying what we really needed was a spending cap.

E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center, an offshoot of the Manhattan Institute, wanted to know why I thought the state’s largest teachers’ union, NYSUT, was so adamantly opposed to a tax cap if it wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

Good point, I had to admit.

I figured that any spending no longer covered by local property taxes would simply be made up out of the state budget, and spending would therefore continue to go up and up.

McMahon says no, because the schools (and NYSUT) would then be competing with everyone else at the state trough – with Medicaid, with hospitals, with the other public-employee unions – and the state couldn’t afford to satisfy them all. In some years the schools would have to tighten their belts, which for the teachers’ union, of course, is a horrifying prospect.

Makes sense.

For a fuller discussion, please see my column in the print edition of today’s Daily Gazette.