Posted on 05/25/2009 11:48:54 AM PDT by chevydude26
"The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.
The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. It’s inequitable because older homeowners often pay far less property tax than their younger neighbors. It’s unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on income taxes, which fall steeply during recessions.
Even more important, however, Proposition 13 made it extremely hard to raise taxes, even in emergencies: no state tax rate may be increased without a two-thirds majority in both houses of the State Legislature. And this provision has interacted disastrously with state political trends.
For California, where the Republicans began their transformation from the party of Eisenhower to the party of Reagan, is also the place where they began their next transformation, into the party of Rush Limbaugh. As the political tide has turned against California Republicans, the party’s remaining members have become ever more extreme, ever less interested in the actual business of governing."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
this guy is the biggest water carrier for the democratic party i have ever seen...he's got to be some sort of caricature right
Your shift key is broken.
As far as I know, Prop 13 placed no restrictions on the power of the Legislature to curb spending in order to meet projected revenues. Time to give the Nobel back PK.
Wake up people! Liberal ideals sound all great and wonderful. But in the harsh light of the real world liberal ideas are a failure. It sucks sure, the world is a mean, unfair, competitive place. Accept it, account for it, and work for success.
I think we need a Constitutional Amendment to ban government from owning property, collecting taxes or distributing monies or goods to individuals or corporations.
That should fix it.
Huh? Property taxes are the problem with the state budget? Here in Texas, we have NO state property taxes, only local and county.
The man is an idiot and an economic fool.
...It is because Arnold wanting to be more like a Democrat than a Conservative like Rush Limbaugh that has gotten the Golden State its tarnished bond rating on Wall Street...heck, many of us who are residents are praying for Limbaugh-like statesmen to come in and overhaul the wreckage.
Some of us weren’t lucky enough to get baskets full of bribe money from Enron for “consulting fees”, so we can’t afford sky high property taxes like Krugman.
Well said.
“This man is an idiot and an economic fool.”
He has been demonstrating that for years!
This guy is about the stupidest Nobel Prize winner in history. Raising taxes and giving the money over to wasteful bureaucrats is not the ticket to prosperity. How can the man write an entire column about the California government and not mention its runaway spending?
Maybe he's just shiftless. :)
How does this dolt hold any job that isn’t McDonalds related?
To paraphrase the church lady, “Might it be, could it be, CONSERVATIVES?” No, it’s liberals and their kowtowing to every leftist interest group, minorities, unions, feminists, “environmentalists”, illegal aliens, etc. No, no, blame the responsible folks for the miscreant politicians’ misdeeds. Bob
Any tax at all on homestead property is immoral!
New York has problems very similar to California’s. Are Republicans the culprit there too?
It seems like more than a coincidence that America’s two big blue states are both drowning in debt.
Prop 13 was and continues to be a disaster.
Sadly, an example of why I&R is not a good idea.
Representative republic means NO direct democracy. I&R is direct democracy. IOW, allowing the inmates to run the asylum.
This guy’s supposed to be an economist?
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