“The real problem with your latest about 10,000 people in a community paying $1,000 each is that all the 10,000 people don’t pay for the schools. Only the people that own the property in the district pay for the schools. The people that live in apartments and God knows where else don’t pay a damn’ thing except in the little bit that the rental agents collect and forward to the county for the schools.”

IT WAS tempting just to ignore this phone message, from a caller who was upset about a recent column I wrote about impact fees. After all, he clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. It’s always ... interesting to be lectured to by such folks.

But while most people would not be so bold as to call my arguments “specious” when in fact they were the ones who had their facts completely backwards, this caller’s misperception about renters is pretty widespread.

So before the tax reform debate goes any further, it might be useful to step back and explain how the property tax affects “the people that live in apartments and God knows where else.”

The fact is that renters pay substantially higher residential property taxes than those of us who make enough money to own our own homes.

Not directly, of course.

The people who own the rental property are the ones who get the tax bill. But like any other business person, the apartment owner has to charge enough money to cover all of his costs, and make a profit. The property tax bill is part of that calculation, in the same way that Wal-Mart includes its property taxes and its corporate income taxes in the calculation of how much it charges for a bar of soap. If the property is located in a high-tax area, the rent will be higher; if it’s in a low-tax area, the rent will be lower.

Do rents change every time property taxes change? Of course not. Depending on what the competition is like, the landlord might decide he can’t raise the rent at one point, or that he doesn’t have to lower it at another point.

That’s no different from the way any business handles price increases: When Bi-Lo has to pay more for apples, it doesn’t automatically raise the price it charges for them; sometimes it might have to keep the price down to compete with Wal-Mart.

But you can be sure that when you check out, at Bi-Lo or Wal-Mart, the price you pay includes your share of the company’s property taxes and corporate income taxes, in addition to the sales tax. In the same way, renters pay the property taxes on the property they rent.

And it’s no small amount.

Taxes on rental property start off 50 percent higher than taxes on residential property, because state law requires that homeowner taxes be assessed based on 4 percent of the value of the property, while rental and other commercial property is taxed based on 6 percent of the value.

But that’s just the start, because homeowners don’t have to pay school property taxes on the first $100,000 of their homes’ value; that exemption does not go to rental property. Neither does rental property get the $50,000 exemption from property taxes that senior citizens who own their own homes receive — no matter how old the property owner or the renter.

Those exemptions don’t add up to much on a multi-million-dollar apartment complex (although the 50 percent-higher assessment rate certainly does). But if the rental unit is an individual house worth $100,000 or less, then the difference is substantial.

I went to Lexington County’s handy property tax calculator (at http://www.lex-co.com/) for an illustration. The owner of a $100,000 rental house in Lexington 1 pays $2,126 in property taxes this year. If the house is owner-occupied, the tax is $924 — or less than half. If the homeowner is 65, the property tax drops to $462, which is less than a quarter of the taxes paid by the 65-year-old owner of the rental house next door.

Renters in South Carolina tend to be people who are too poor to buy their own homes. And argue all you want about whether it’s fair to tax poor people at a lower rate than we tax the middle-class and the wealthy: There is simply no way to argue that they should be taxed at a rate that is double or even quadruple the rate paid by those who are better off.

A Clemson report on property taxes notes that the rental tax is “less visible” to the public and policymakers than the homeowner property tax, because renters’ property taxes are “mostly (sometimes entirely) reflected in their rent.” I’d like to think that explains why the Legislature has never seen fit to do anything about a state policy that effectively charges higher property taxes to people who are too poor to own property.

We’ll likely find out in the coming session, because the cat’s out of the bag. Somehow, the Senate panel that is working to produce a tax reform package has become aware of this disparity, and it has included a provision to give an income tax credit to renters to help make up for the higher taxes they’re being indirectly charged.

But notably, when senators realized that a 2-cent increase in the sales tax wouldn’t pay for all the tax cuts they wanted to make, one of their first actions was to cut the rental tax credit by a third. As for the House, it currently has no relief for rental property or for renters in its tax reform package.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.