Short answer: Lehigh County Controller and Democratic nominee for District 16, Mark Pinsley, asked Lehigh County to study a tax on investments before raising property taxes on homeowners. He never introduced a tax, and none was ever voted on.
As he told WFMZ: “I’m not proposing a wealth tax.” He said he was asking the county to study an alternative to the property tax, with one goal: finding a way not to put the bill on middle-class and working-class families.
You’ve probably heard about the “Pinsley wealth tax” by now. Here’s the problem with that name: Mark never brought a tax to a vote. He didn’t bring an ordinance to the commissioners, didn’t ask for a vote, and couldn’t have passed one if he wanted to. In Pennsylvania, only the Board of Commissioners can levy or repeal a county tax. The controller’s job is to watch the money and sound the alarm.
So that’s what he did. Lehigh County has been running recurring deficits and leaning on its reserves to cover them. On May 1, 2026, the Controller’s Office put out a 22-page financial analysis of one option Pennsylvania law already allows. Full report: Lehigh County Controller’s Office, “Lehigh County Wealth Tax Analysis”, Report SR26-01 (May 1, 2026)
In the report, Mark describes his role this way:
As Controller, my responsibility is not to advocate first for tax increases or service cuts. My responsibility is to identify risks early, show the numbers plainly, and present options before residents are handed the bill.
Presenting an option and proposing a tax are two different things.
What the report actually asked for
Nothing in the report told commissioners to impose a tax. Its four recommendations were:
1. Set up a working group, or send the idea to the Finance Committee, to study it and report back. 2. Build a multi-year financial forecast so the county knows what it actually needs. 3. Hire outside tax counsel to look at the legal questions, including exemptions, collection and whether the tax would hold up constitutionally. 4. Hold public hearings before any major tax shift is considered.
In short: study it, run the numbers, get independent legal advice, and let the public weigh in. That’s a request for homework, not a tax bill.
Why he wrote it
The report opens with a warning. Without real service cuts or new recurring revenue, the county could face growing structural deficits for years. If those gaps get covered only through the property tax, the report estimated the increase could approach 21%.
Cutting isn’t easy either. According to the report, roughly 72 cents of every locally raised dollar already goes to courts, corrections, the District Attorney and other public safety work. Much of the rest funds human services, where cutting county dollars can mean losing matching state and federal money too.
That’s why the report looked at another tool already on the books: a tax on intangible financial property like stocks and bonds, which Lehigh County actually used in the early 1990s. The idea was to see whether some of the load could move off homeowners. The report says so directly. It examines “whether part of that burden could be shifted toward certain financial wealth instead.”
It also doesn’t pretend this is the only answer:
This report does not claim there is only one solution. It does claim that the County should evaluate every serious option before defaulting to large property tax increases.
The point was to protect the people who are already stretched: seniors on fixed incomes, working families, people in modest homes who keep getting handed the bill.
Who would and wouldn’t have paid
The report lists what could be included: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, brokerage accounts, and certain partnership and passive business interests.
It also lists what would be left out. That includes your primary home and home equity, your 401(k) and IRA, your checking account and everyday savings, your car and personal belongings, owner-operated small businesses, and family farms run by their owners.
Those exclusions were written into the proposal from the start. According to the report’s estimates, households earning $200,000 or more would have paid about 92% of the revenue. Households earning under $100,000, taken together, would have paid about 3.5%.
The $25.5 million was a measurement, not a goal
Critics keep pointing to the $25.5 million figure. That number is what the report estimated a 0.4% rate on those assets could produce. It describes the size of the tax base. It isn’t a request.
In fact, the report’s second recommendation says the county should build a detailed forecast first, so any proposal could be sized against “actual need rather than a target figure.” Figure out what the county needs, then decide. That’s the order the report laid out.
What Commissioner Beitler left out
Commissioner Ron Beitler had every right to oppose this. He could argue it was illegal, impractical, or just a bad idea. Plenty of people agreed with him.
But the way the proposal has been described did something else. The report itself used the words “wealth tax,” so the label isn’t the issue. Attaching Mark’s name to it is. Calling it the “Pinsley wealth tax” turned a study into legislation and a request for review into a decision. It hung one official’s name on a tax that was never introduced, never voted on, and never enacted.
Most people won’t read a 22-page controller’s report. They’ll see a post that says “Pinsley wealth tax” and reasonably assume Mark tried to put one into law. That’s not what happened.
Before the June hearing, Commissioner Beitler told WFMZ the proposal was “a tax on the savings assets and small business resources of everyday working Americans.” Yet the report excluded retirement accounts, checking accounts, everyday savings and primary homes, along with owner-operated small businesses and family farms. By the report’s own estimate, households earning under $100,000 would have paid about 3.5% of the total. If he thought those protections wouldn’t hold up, he could have said that. Leaving them out entirely didn’t give people the full picture.
He could have just said, “I disagree with the Controller’s recommendation that we study this.” That would have been honest. The framing he chose may have worked politically, but it wasn’t a fair account of the record.
Where things stand now
The idea never got a vote. At the June 17 Finance Committee hearing, four of the nine commissioners said they wouldn’t support it (Lehigh Valley Public Media).
Earlier, County Executive Josh Siegel had told WFMZ the concept had merit and was worth exploring. On August 31, his proposed 2027 budget instead called for a 17.72% property tax increase, raising the rate from 3.78 to 4.45 mills. He also ruled out the alternative entirely: “The discussion is dead.”
That is exactly what the report warned about four months earlier. The deficits didn’t go away, and the bill is headed straight to homeowners. Commissioners must pass the budget by October 31.
Debate what he actually did
You can oppose the idea. You can argue the county should fix its finances some other way. You can challenge the legal reasoning in the report. All of that is fair.
What isn’t fair is telling people the Controller put forward a finished tax plan when his own recommendation called for more analysis, outside legal review, committee study and public hearings before anything happened.
Mark Pinsley didn’t introduce a tax. He asked the county to look for another way before turning to homeowners yet again. People can disagree with that, but they deserve to know what he actually did.
