“It’s time to adopt taxpayer protections that cap government budget growth at inflation and require overcollections to be automatically returned to taxpayers, not kept or spent.”
A conversation last weekend at the Corvallis Grange Hall exposed just how bad Montana’s tax problem is. A local woman told me her family is selling the cabin they’ve had for generations because they can’t afford to pay the property taxes after the 2025 legislature’s changes. She put the problem in stark terms: “They said they were raising taxes on wealthy out-of-staters to help us, but what they really did is raise taxes on Montanans so much we are forced to sell our property. And who is gonna buy the property? Wealthy out-of-staters. Go figure!”
Her experience is not an outlier. We’ve heard and read many similar stories over the past few months. Many taxpayers are succumbing to the government’s squeeze, forced to sell their small piece of the Last Best Place to someone with far less connection to this beautiful land. Enough is enough.
The path to real, permanent tax relief is straightforward: Montana families live within their means and the government should too. State, school, and local governments should grow no faster than Montana families’ ability to pay for it. It’s time to adopt taxpayer protections that cap government budget growth at inflation and require overcollections to be automatically returned to taxpayers, not kept or spent.
Remember, this pain taxpayers are feeling is fundamentally a policy choice. Every dollar collected from taxpayers by government was collected deliberately at the direction of tax rates, mill levies etc. set by our elected leaders to pay for the activities they’ve chosen to pursue. Montanans overwhelmingly want tax relief now, but politicians aren’t delivering because they aren’t addressing the root cause of our tax problem: the growth of government.
Frontier Institute’s latest 2026 Real Government Budgets report documents the scale of the problem. State and local government revenues grew more than double the rate of inflation over the last decade, combined taking a cumulative $6.85 billion more from taxpayers than inflation-paced growth would have allowed.
What are governments doing with all this revenue? By and large, they are choosing to keep and use excess revenues rather than return them back to taxpayers.
Despite making some progress cutting income taxes, state revenue collections continue to far outpace inflation. In fact, the state has taken and kept $3.41 billion in surplus revenues over the last five years rather than returning the money to taxpayers in the form of even lower taxes. Instead, those funds have accumulated on the balance sheet, locked away in committed accounts reserved for the government’s use, funding things like new subsidies for “affordable” housing and childcare at the taxpayer’s expense.
This reality strongly supports Governor Gianforte’s call for further income tax cuts in 2027, ideally lowering us to a single, low, flat income tax. But relief ultimately shouldn’t depend on political negotiations, it should be automatic.
At the local level, the cities and counties consistently implementing large property tax hikes are the same ones spending your property tax dollars on expensive lobbyists, voting themselves a pay raise, supporting DEI, or paying fines for bungling basic financial reporting.
The solution is for taxpayers to demand a return to fiscal responsibility. Cap government growth at inflation and automatically return the rest to taxpayers. Apply this taxpayer protection principle at every level of government — state, schools, and local. When the government over-collects, the excess goes back to the people, not into growing government. That forces politicians to prioritize and cut waste, permanently lowering our tax burden and keeping the cost of government within the bounds what Montana families can afford.
Visit ProtectMontanaTaxpayers.com to join the taxpayer protection movement.
This column originally appeared in Lee Newspapers.
