Prop. 13 still highly popular, poll finds - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee
Even though the state is insolvent. Question: if they shut the doors on the local library, stop mowing the grass at the park, fire half the teachers at the elementary school, and lay off a bunch of cops and firefighters--then will people get the connection between property taxation and local public services? However, I agree with Jerry Brown's comment: ""Government has a lot of explaining to do to the people, and unless we can demonstrate a higher level of effectiveness, it would be very hard to get the people to give us new taxes."
Thanks to Fred Pilot for the link.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/09/23/3932118/prop-13-still-highly-popular-poll.html#ixzz1Ymd8Rz1r
4 comments:
This shows that for the foreseeable, one of the main drivers of local government privatization isn't going away. If property owners don't want to fund local government, they'll pay another layer privatized taxes (HOA assessments) to make up the difference and end up with (and suffer) privatized local government by corporation.
And HOA assessments need to be challenged as unconstitutional taxation by corporations so that the HOA mess and all the unscrupulous vendors can be put done away with.
This is why I keep pointing out the contradictions in peoples' attitudes. I hear all this complaining about paying HOA assessments from the same people who don't want to pay property taxes either. Make up your mind--you can have public local government or private local government. Both of them cost money to operate. I prefer public local government because I like democracy, transparency, and the constitution, and I don't object to paying for it. The people who want private local government are ultimately supporting secretive, authoritarian, managerial plutocracies whether they know it or not.
The individual is being told in BOTH cases that they simply must pay, pay, pay into these entities for the "common good". I think it is fair to protest HOA assessments entirely.
As to property taxes, surely there is room for dispute as to the proper source of taxes (property, income, etc.) as well as the amount. No one (except the recipient) likes to find out that their property taxes are being used to pay for excessive salaries benefits for public employees (e.g., California) or that their income taxes are being squandered on "good for the community" type projects (e.g., Solyndra was supposed to be advancing solar technology but it appears that the only thing that was advanced was the bank accounts of its executives).
As stated so well by former Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson:
"there was a reason why, all across our country, citizens less and less support general taxes into a common pool to be distributed by political decision-makers. There's a reason why people vote for Republicans and Democrats who claim that they won't raise those common taxes, and the reason is, our citizens, whether we like it or not, have decided that it's not in their best interest to permit themselves to be taxed in common and the money put into a common pool to be distributed based on political will. They have rightfully, I think, ascertained that when that occurs, the investment of the tax revenue is not made in the best interest of their welfare, but rather in the best interest of the welfare of the elected class."
(Leonard C. Gilroy, "Reflections of a Texas Transportation Trailblazer", Reason.org, December 31, 2007 )
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