It’s simple math.

Imagine you work two jobs. Some of you probably do.

You pool the money from those two jobs and use that income to cover your bills — your house payment, your car, your utilities, your groceries.

Now, imagine being laid off from one of those jobs.

You now have but a few choices. You can try to get a raise at one of your other jobs large enough to cover the gap left by the lost paycheck. You can try to get a different second job that pays as much as the one you lost.

If those two things don’t work, you have to cut on the expense side. You have to buy fewer groceries, let your car go, move out of your house, let the lights get shut off. Maybe a combination of one or more of those things.

That’s exactly the predicament in which the backers of a ballot proposal to eliminate property taxes in Michigan would put us.

A group called AxeMITax has gotten preliminary approval to start collecting signatures to put the proposal before voters. They plan to do so right away.

Their proposal would eliminate property taxes — the primary source of funding for local governments — and instead direct more of the other taxes collected by the state — income tax, sales tax and so-called “sin taxes” on things such as alcohol and cigarettes — back to local governments.

But the math just doesn’t add up.

Take, for example, Alpena. Property taxes account for about $4.4 million of the city’s $11 million budget, or about 40% of the city’s total income. Anna Soik, Alpena clerk, treasurer and financial director, told News staff writer Steve Schulwitz for a story in a recent edition that the formula spelled out by the AxeMITax proposal would only add a couple hundred thousand to the money the city receives from the state, nowhere near enough to account for the $4.4 million lost from the elimination of property taxes.

So what does Alpena do? What does it cut? Police? Fire? Ambulance services? Parks? Snow plowing? Street maintenance?

If the state did decide to pay back enough to cities to make them whole, that would take from state coffers, and the state would have to decide what it wanted to cut.

The only other option would be to raise the rates of the other taxes the state collects to bring in more revenue, which would make the things we buy more expensive and/or mean we have less to take home in our paychecks. Then we’re right back to deciding whether we let go of our car, our house, our groceries …

We can talk about tax rates. We can talk about whether the government spends too much. That’s why we have elections.

But the wholesale elimination of nearly half of local governments’ income isn’t the solution.

We urge Northeast Michiganders not to sign the petition so this proposal never makes it to the ballot.