Big Idea, Bad Idea: Texas Tax Policy Report
A report on the property-tax-for-sales-tax swap, published in July 2012 during the interim before the 83rd Legislature. The page records the original file paths and archive dates.
Open the recordReports
Documents published on this domain, and the method behind the numbers this site publishes today. The 2013 archive is preserved as a record — including what is still missing from it.
What was archived, and what is missing
The domain was captured by the Internet Archive from September 2013 with a single-page presentation and a file directory. Every archived path was inventoried from the archive's CDX index before anything was rebuilt: 594 unique URLs across 2013–2024, of which 364 returned HTML with a 200 status. Only a handful of those belong to the 2013–2015 Texas tax identity — the rest belong to later, unrelated uses of the domain.
The original PDFs have not yet been re-downloaded: the archive's replay endpoint has been returning HTTP 429 to this network. Rather than paraphrase documents we cannot read, the report page states that limitation plainly and keeps the original paths alive with 301 redirects.
How the current numbers are produced
Rate data is not stored by hand. A build script downloads four Texas Comptroller spreadsheets — the city sales-and-use-tax rate file and the 2025 county, city and school-district rate-and-levy reports — parses them without modification, and writes two datasets the calculators read.
| Source file | Records | Used by |
|---|---|---|
| City sales and use tax rates | 2,998 areas | Sales tax calculator |
| 2025 county rates and levies | 254 counties | Property tax calculator |
| 2025 school district rates and levies | 1,549 districts | Property tax and homestead calculators |
| 2025 city rates and levies | 1,244 cities | Property tax calculator |
Both datasets are downloadable at Data, with the column layout documented so the arithmetic can be reproduced independently.
Corrections
If a figure here contradicts the current Comptroller publication, the publication wins and the page is corrected with a dated note. Send the page URL and the number you believe is wrong to editor@texastaxtruth.com.