Thank you for raising this question! It's a really good one; in fact, it's the one I had that prompted me to look into this after watching Roth and Anderson go at it. Remember, we all are going to pay for rail with taxes; the question is how does the burden of paying get spread around. Extending the GE surcharge for 10 years will cost us about $2.6 billion, or about $250 per resident per year -- or about $1,000 for a family of four. (The number is slower when you factor in the "export rate," but that rate's the same for property taxes, so I'm not factoring it in for the sake of discussion. If we included that rate, we're talking about $700 annually for a family of four.) The argument is that paying this same amount of money through a property tax is fairer because the costs are borne more by wealthy people and corporate landowners, who do not always pass on property tax costs to tenants through higher rents.