The slow-motion property tax revolt that began with local and then coordinated statewide efforts to cap local tax increases is taking a new, insidious and absurd form. Some residents of age-restricted housing are banding together to lobby for a statewide property tax abatement because, they argue, they have no children in school and receive fewer municipal services than other residents.

Last week, the Monitor's Margot Sanger-Katz reported that when the effort's organizer, a recent Massachusetts arrival living in Litchfield, put out the call, roughly 100 people in senior citizen complexes gathered to seek changes in tax policy.

"We simply don't draw on the same amount of town services that a family of four that has an acre and a half does," John Poulos told Sanger-Katz.

"As a group of people right now, we feel like the people in Boston must have felt when they threw the tea in the bay. We're paying taxes and we're not getting anything for them," said another.

The selfishness and myopia of the people seeking this benefit at the expense of their neighbors is hard to stomach.

Depending on their income level, senior citizens in almost every New Hampshire community already get a tax break. Many of the retirees attracted to New Hampshire didn't come simply to savor the state's fine quality of life, and they certainly didn't come for the weather. Other than Alaska, New Hampshire is the only state that has no sales or income tax, so retirement income goes farther here. Seniors who earn more than a few thousand dollars in interest and dividend payments do pay a tax on that income, but so does everyone else.

Compared to younger residents, senior citizens do less for the local economy, though they often have higher incomes than the young workers with families who are struggling to pay their taxes. Household expenditures fall steadily from age 54 onward. Past age 75, the cohort's spending rate is less than half that of middle-aged residents. People spend more in their retirement on health care and transportation but less on entertainment, alcohol and tobacco and just about everything else.

The heavy reliance by senior citizens on Medicare and Medicaid raises health care costs for those with private insurance. Since neither federal program pays the full cost of health care, health care providers shift as much of the difference as they can to other payers.

Now, about that oldest of plaints, that senior citizens have no children in school so they should pay less in property taxes. Please. People who never had children pay property taxes their whole lives.

When longtime New Hampshire residents move to age-restricted housing, at least in normal markets when houses can be easily bought and sold, it increases pressure on school budgets.

Big homes that for years or even decades held one or two people are typically purchased by families with children. That generational change is a bigger factor in school enrollments than almost any other. Similarly, the seniors who downsize and move to New Hampshire open up family housing in their former communities.

The retirees seeking this sweetener sent their children to school, usually at the expense of other taxpayers, and now they want a break for themselves, not based on their income, but simply because they are in their golden years. The idea is preposterous.