IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that the property tax protest movements in our state tend to be peopled disproportionately by senior citizens.

Critics of these movements often charge that older South Carolinians are less interested in the success of our state years or decades into the future, and therefore are less willing to support the property taxes that pay for the schools that educate our children, who will determine our state’s future prosperity. (About half of property taxes go to schools.) Some seniors feed this notion, by arguing that they’ve paid their share of taxes, and now it’s somebody else’s turn.

But while a missing sense of responsibility for future generations may play a role, there are some much more basic economic reasons that disdain for paying property taxes increases with age.

Most homeowners write a mortgage check every month. Included in that check is usually one-twelfth of our annual property tax bill. Although we receive a statement each year telling us what our property taxes are, we don’t feel tax increases in one lump sum.

That changes the moment you pay off your mortgage. At that point, there’s no more escrow. So every year, you have to write a single check for the entire property tax bill. (State law lets counties offer a quarterly payment schedule, but few homeowners know about this.) Generally, the older you are, the greater likelihood that you have paid off your mortgage and therefore have to write that one big check to the county every year.

The tax structure affects older homeowners in an additional way. The reason they are more likely to own their homes free and clear is because they are more likely to have lived in their homes for several decades. Because counties are required to reassess the value of real property every five years, the taxable value of most houses increases every five years. That makes some sense: If we sold our house today, we’d probably get a lot more money than we paid when we bought it 10 or 20 years or 30 years ago.

The problem is that we only experience that extra value when we sell our house. Its value to us doesn’t change as long as we’re living in it. This hits older homeowners in three ways. First, since they tend to have lived in their homes longer than younger homeowners, they see the greatest difference between their original and current taxable values. Second, most older homeowners are retired, and so their income doesn’t tend to increase from year to year, but their homes’ values, and thus their property taxes, do. Finally, older homeowners tend to have a greater desire to stay in their current homes.

This situation creates multiple problems.

From an individual perspective, it can create financial difficulties for older homeowners, who might not have considered the effects of reassessment when making retirement plans. In the most extreme cases, it can force them to sell their homes, at a time when stability is most important.

From a societal perspective, it can cause resentment, and undermine public support for basic, essential public institutions — especially schools.

Legislators have occasionally tried to address these problems, but they’ve done so by creating more exemptions and fund transfers, which have distorted the tax system and created inequities that they didn’t expect. A law that lets local governments cap the increase in property values at 15 percent per reassessment has been largely ignored, because it is arbitrary, and raises several important policy questions.

It’s against this backdrop that we now see several tax overhaul proposals that could address the problem in a more uniform way.

The simplest approach is to eliminate or reduce residential property taxes, as plans by Sen. David Thomas, Reps. Rick Quinn and Vincent Sheheen and a group of school finance officers would do. While the tax-reduction plans would still leave older homeowners feeling the impact of reassessment more than younger homeowners, the total bill would be much less, thus easing the burden.

House Ways and Means Chairman Bobby Harrell takes a different approach: Eliminate reassessment altogether. Under his proposal, your house’s value would be based on the sales price. It wouldn’t change until you sold your house or made major improvements. That would allow people to more accurately factor in long-term tax liability when making home purchases. It also would mean the burden of paying for schools and local government would fall more heavily on those who have purchased their homes recently; depending on how it’s done, it could shift some of that tax burden more toward automobiles and businesses as well.

The Harrell proposal would radically change the way we look at property taxes in South Carolina; it has far-reaching implications, which we will explore later in this series.

But whatever you think about other aspects of the various tax reform proposals, the potential of eliminating the war between the schools and seniors is a huge plus.

To read earlier parts of this series, go to www.thestate.com/ mld/state/news/opinion. Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.