I’ve heard both Democrats and Republicans indirectly evoke this fund. They tend to be political neophytes presenting themselves as an alternative to the “career politicians“ in Harrisburg, and I suspect the ploy is more a symptom of naivete than outright duplicity.

Here’s how it comes up.

Everybody agrees property taxes are a problem. With the state picking up only about 37 percent of education funding in Pennsylvania, the brunt of it falls on property taxpayers.

The set-up is particularly burdensome for seniors on fixed incomes. To add insult to injury, the current system isn’t even based on actual student enrollment, which tends to hurt growing areas such as York County.

The question is, how to fix it? Plenty of proposals are bouncing around Harrisburg, but general consensus is that an increase somewhere else — income or sales taxes — must be part of the solution.

So candidates for state office often promise to drastically reduce property taxes, or even eliminate them altogether. But candidates don’t like to tell potential voters that they’re going to raise taxes. So some of them promise that they’re going to pull off this elimination of property taxes without a corresponding raise anywhere else.

How will they make up for the shortfall? They’ll cut state spending. They’re not sure yet exactly what they’ll cut, but they’re confident that they’ll find enough expendable items in the state budget to seamlessly patch that financial hole.

Let's consider this for a second.

According to the state Department of Education, Pennsylvanians paid $9.45 billion in property taxes in 2005-06, the most recent year compiled. Even if you think that Pennsylvania could stand to cut education spending, we’re talking about a big chunk of change.

Presumably, these cuts wouldn’t do any major harm to Pennsylvanians’ quality of life. Presumably, they’d appeal to a broad enough cross-section of lawmakers to make it past the House, the Senate, and the governor’s desk. Because if the candidate has no chance of delivering them, what’s the difference?

And despite all that, these cuts miraculously didn’t occur to anybody in Harrisburg until this particular visionary comes along and says “Hey, why don’t we just get rid of this big expense that costs a zillion dollars and doesn’t do anything, and use the money to ger rid of property taxes?“

Then both the House and Senate chambers reverberate with a meaty “thwack“ as everybody slaps their foreheads in unison and exclaims “Of course! Why didn’t we think of that?“

I’m not suggesting that unnecessary spending doesn’t occur in Harrisburg. If you went line-by-line through the state budget, you could probably find plenty of things to cut. For all I know, it might contain $9.45 billion of fat just waiting to be hacked.

My point is, I get wary whenever a candidate says that he or she will drastically reduce spending, but can’t say where those reductions will come from.

As I mentioned, that claim frequently comes from candidates who flaunt their political outsider status. In doing so, they usually emphasize how they’ll be honest with their constituents, unlike the conniving politicians already in Harrisburg.

But if you’re promising voters that you’ll get rid of property taxes for them, and if you base that promise on a purely theoretical funding source that probably doesn’t exist, you’re not setting a very good precedent for being straight with people.