After more than four and a half decades of covering school budgets and finances, I consider myself slightly above average at understanding such things.

So there was massive frustration when the recent school property tax bill came, and I could not make sense of it.

I knew my taxes would be going down but was surprised by how much.

After turning 65 my school taxes were frozen, but with the newly-lowered school property tax rate and the newly-increased homestead exemption, my freeze amount was set to go down about $330, which is a nice savings.

So when it dropped by $750 on top of that, I went to work trying to understand why. The math just wouldn’t add up – not even close.

It took some digging, but I finally located an article by Channel 8 WFAA in Dallas that had gotten the formula from State Sen. Paul Bettencourt’s office, the author of the property tax relief bill.

The article’s author had been similarly frustrated with the math, and he was somewhat relieved to learn the even the senator’s office and the lieutenant governor’s had some back and forth before agreeing to the correct calculations.

Even though the math finally worked, the reasoning still escaped me, until I realized I was looking at it through the wrong lens.

Arithmetic is logical, constant and infallible.

But once I began to look at it through political eyes, it made a lot more sense.

There is a push among some in state government to eliminate the school property tax entirely, even though they have yet to show their work on how that might be achieved.

It is estimated that about two million Texans will see their frozen school property taxes drop to zero, and many more of us who will see it drop dramatically (around 75% in our case).

And since frozen tax amounts can only go down (unless you make a major improvement to your home), it would seem there is no way for this rug to be pulled from under us.

The logical part of the brain says this subtracting of the lowered amount from the already lowered amount is nonsensical. But if the goal is to show people that school taxes can be lowered a lot if not eliminated, for political reasons, then it could make some sense.

And since the proposed law (which you will be voting on on Nov. 7) also says that any losses sustained by school districts will be made up by the state, the ISDs seem to be in a position not to suffer from so many tax payers sending them less money.

Of course, for this to continue past the current two-year budget cycle, the Texas economy will need to continue to generate these multi-billion budget surpluses. No guarantee there, though the near term seems to be in good shape.

If not, the money will have to come from somewhere, and since us elders have ours frozen at these ridiculously lower levels, we apologize in advance if you are among those who might have to help make up the difference.

If that does occur, I will gladly furnish you the contact information of your state lawmakers who made this happen.

And if you haven’t figured it out by now, I will be voting “Yes” on Tuesday for Proposition Four. Nothing personal, you understand.