[quote=SD Realtor]UR you are taking a microscopic view while mine is more macro in nature. I take the aggregate taxation policy into account not just the property tax issue because I believe they are intertwined.
I believe that the aggregate of the taxation policy for California is one that should be a focus. That is, if you are a homeowner and a wage earner in California your total taxation is pretty damn hefty.
I think that those who believe that increasing taxes (WHATEVER THEY ARE, property, income, sales) I don’t care you choose it, for a given entity, be it state, local, federal, should be done with some BENEFIT for the taxpayer.
So if you want to raise my state taxes, all I ask is that you show me a benefit. Show me you can balance a budget for a year or two with CURRENT revenues. If that can be done then fantastic, go ahead and increase my taxes after that and show me my benefit.
The big problem here is an assumption by you and any other tax increase advocate. Your assumption is that by raising my taxes our school scores will improve or state services will improve. However we have just HAD AN INCREASE in income taxes and NEITHER happened. In fact, we are continuing to deteriorate.
LOGIC follows that it is perfectly reasonable for me to assume that another increase in any state related tax will NOT improve my life, or the schools, or any service that my family enjoys. It is NOT UNREASONABLE to ask that the state govt clean the ledger, balance the budget with what they have, then if they want to add services in a well defined and orderly manner, and can do that with raising taxes but STAYING WITHIN BUDGET then I am okay with it.
However to just agree that implicitly raising more more revenue and more revenue for the state legislature without them showing any improvement in budget keeping is completely ridiculous. Its like going to the doctor and saying ouch my head hurts and the doctor asks you why you keep bumping it against the wall?[/quote]
One thing people need to keep in mind… Revenues and expenses can vary wildly in the public sector. A wise person would suggest saving through the boom times in order to prepare for the bad times, but in government, if there is “excess” money being put away during the good times (as perceived by taxpayers), they will insist that taxes are too high, and demand lower taxes.
In a way, the govt is damned if they save, and damned if they don’t. IMHO, this is one of the reasons they have to budget the way they do — use it, or lose it. They really can’t do otherwise unless the masses grasp the fact that public entities need to have significant savings in order to get them through the hard times.
If the taxpayers’ advocates don’t get them on the revenue side, the special interests (including large developers/land owners, “special interests,” unions, and private entities who do all kinds of business with the govt) will get them on the spending side.
Right now, they are trying to budget, but it’s a moving target. They keep expecting revenues to increase, or at least remain stable; and expenditures to decrease or remain stable, but the prolonging of the recession (prolonged, because of the bailouts and unwillingness to let things bottom more quickly) is making it very difficult for them to budget.
As I’ve said many times before, it is the duration of the recession/depression that will kill us, not the depth. It would have been far, far better if they would have allowed things to fall more quickly and dramatically. It would have hurt more initially, but we would have gotten to a sustainable foundation from which we could have recovered. As it stands, they have piled trillions of dollars of debt on taxpayers’ shoulders, and we will be ground down for many, many years to come. All because the sheeple were convinced that the world would have somehow fallen apart if we didn’t save the financial industry (and the criminals who control it).
But you already know all this, SDR. I’m preaching to the choir. 😉
