Prosperity Brief: Stop Government From Trapping People
Ownership, mobility, innovation, and sound money all depend on restraining government.
Hello friends,
My work this week kept coming back to one theme: government keeps finding new ways to trap people.
Property taxes trap homeowners in perpetual payments to government. Exit taxes try to trap residents in failing states. Regulatory barriers threaten to trap innovation before it can grow. Bloated state budgets trap taxpayers with rising future burdens. And the Fed’s oversized balance sheet traps markets in a cycle of distortion and dependency.
Different issues. Same root problem.
Government grows, taxpayers pay, markets distort, and freedom shrinks.
That is why spending restraint, property rights, sound money, and economic freedom are not abstract ideas. They are the difference between owning your home or renting from government, moving freely or being punished for leaving, building the future or regulating it away, and saving in dollars that hold value or dollars that keep losing purchasing power.
Here’s the week’s breakdown.
Stop Renting From Government
A property tax revolt is building across America, and it is overdue.
You can pay off your mortgage, maintain your home, insure it, improve it, and still receive a government bill every year just to keep what you already own. Miss enough payments, and the government can ultimately take the property.
That is not true ownership.
That is renting from the government forever.
This is why states such as Florida, Texas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Montana, and others are debating property tax relief or elimination. But too many proposals still miss the core point: property taxes are primarily a spending problem.
My latest piece, Stop Renting From the Government: Consider Wyoming, builds on my new Wyoming brief showing that the state spent roughly $4 billion above a population-growth-plus-inflation benchmark from FY 2017 to FY 2025 while building major reserves. The fiscal capacity for meaningful relief exists. What’s missing is the political discipline to restrain spending and return surplus dollars to taxpayers.
That same principle drives my new national report, Securing Ownership by Eliminating Property Taxes, which uses Montana as a case study. Montana is especially important because it has no broad statewide sales tax, yet spending has still outpaced sustainable limits. That proves the problem is not a lack of revenue. The problem is government spending too much.
Homestead exemptions, assessment caps, targeted rebates, and one-time checks may sound good politically, but they mostly shift burdens and leave the spending machine untouched. The better path is strict state and local spending limits tied to population growth plus inflation, surplus-driven rate compression, school finance reform, and constitutional taxpayer protections.
Read the Wyoming piece here, the Montana framework here, and share the Wyoming property tax thread on X.
Let AI Build
AI infrastructure is not abstract.
It needs land, power, fiber, water, transmission, and data centers on the ground. Kansas can either welcome that opportunity with light-touch rules and fast permitting, or it can let local zoning, regulatory uncertainty, and political fear hand the future to larger, politically connected firms that can afford the compliance costs.
In my piece for Kansas Policy Institute, Kansas Should Welcome AI Growth, Not Zone It Away, I argue that Kansas does not need subsidies or corporate welfare to benefit from AI infrastructure. It needs predictable, market-driven rules that let builders build, communities benefit, and competition work.
Regulatory bottlenecks rarely protect the little guy. More often, they protect incumbents by raising the cost of entry.
The AI economy will not wait for states to get comfortable. The infrastructure will be built somewhere. The question is whether Kansas and other states want more opportunity, investment, tax base, and energy innovation, or whether they want to regulate the future away.
Exit Taxes Admit Failure
When people and capital leave high-tax states, politicians have two choices.
They can reform the policies that drove people away, or they can punish people for leaving.
Too many are choosing the second option.
In my latest piece for AIER, Exit Taxes Won’t Save Failing States, I argue that exit taxes are not serious fiscal policy. They are a confession of failure.
Economic freedom means people can move to where they are treated best. Families leave when taxes are too high, housing is too expensive, regulation is too heavy, crime is too high, or opportunity is better elsewhere. Businesses move when the policy environment becomes hostile to investment, hiring, and growth.
The right response is not to trap people.
The right response is to compete for them.
Flatten taxes. Restrain spending. Reduce red tape. Protect property rights. Make the state worth staying in.
Exit taxes are the policy equivalent of a bad business charging customers a fee to stop shopping there.
Texas Needs Accountability
Episode 200 of the Let People Prosper Show is here, and we did not spend it on a highlight reel.
I sat down with Jeramy Kitchen, president of Texas Policy Research, for a serious conversation on whether the “Texas Miracle” still matches reality. We talked about rising government spending, persistent property tax pain, school finance, corporate welfare, and the need for real accountability in a state that too often relies on branding instead of restraint.
Texas still has enormous advantages: no personal income tax, a dynamic economy, energy abundance, entrepreneurship, and a strong culture of work. But those advantages must be protected. A reputation for freedom is not self-executing.
The state has to earn it every session.
That means real spending restraint, property tax elimination through surplus-driven compression, broader school choice, less corporate welfare, and more respect for taxpayers.
You can listen to Episode 200 on Apple Podcasts, watch it on YouTube, and share the episode thread on X.
Shrink the Fed
With Kevin Warsh now sworn in as Federal Reserve Chair, the moment demands more than rate talk.
The deeper issue is the Fed’s balance sheet, which remains far too large and continues to distort markets, punish savers, reward leverage, and enable congressional fiscal recklessness.
In Kevin Warsh’s Fed Moment, I argue that real monetary reform should mean a rules-based framework for price stability, a path toward a 0 percent inflation target, and a dramatically smaller balance sheet. My North Star is a Fed balance sheet capped near 6 percent of GDP, compared with roughly 20 percent today, until it can be eliminated.
That means letting short-term assets mature without rolling them over, exiting mortgage-backed securities, and returning the Fed to a narrow lender-of-last-resort role until we can ultimately move beyond central banking altogether.
This connects directly to property taxes, exit taxes, and state spending. When government grows faster than the productive economy, people pay through higher taxes, higher prices, distorted markets, trapped mobility, and weaker prosperity.
Sound money and spending restraint go together.
The Bottom Line
This week’s lesson is clear: government is too often trying to trap people.
Property taxes trap homeowners in perpetual payments. Exit taxes try to trap residents geographically. Regulatory barriers trap innovation. Monetary distortions trap markets in dependency. Excessive spending traps taxpayers with rising future burdens.
The answer is not better central planning.
The answer is to constrain government, protect property rights, restore sound money, and let free people and markets allocate resources better than politicians ever can.
That is how we let people prosper.
Five Takeaways for Policymakers
1. Property tax relief without spending limits is cosmetic.
States should enact binding expenditure limits tied to population growth plus inflation, use surpluses for rate compression, and protect taxpayers constitutionally.
2. Exit taxes signal failure.
If people are leaving, fix the tax, spending, regulatory, and public safety problems that pushed them out.
3. AI infrastructure needs permission to grow.
States should streamline permitting, avoid subsidies, reject local regulatory choke points, and let competition work.
4. The Fed’s size matters as much as rates.
A bloated balance sheet distorts markets and enables fiscal recklessness. Rules-based reform and balance-sheet reduction should be central.
5. Texas and every other state must earn their reputation daily.
Prioritize taxpayers over cronies, transparency over branding, and spending restraint over expansion.
Join the Conversation
Thank you for reading and sharing this work. If this added value, please forward it to a policymaker, staffer, journalist, homeowner, business owner, or friend who cares about ownership, mobility, sound money, and prosperity.
I’d especially like to hear from you: What is the best path to eliminating property taxes in your state?
Drop your thoughts in the comments, share this post with someone who should read it, and follow me on X for real-time updates.
You can find more of my writings on my website, and subscribe to the Let People Prosper newsletter.
Vance Ginn, Ph.D.
President, Ginn Economic Consulting