State of California is broke

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

There are other problems here, most notably the proposition -- "too much democracy" -- problem, but the primary problem is Prop 13, which created/empowered two generations of citizens to say, "i got mine, who cares about yours?"

these are people who rail about taxation yet literally should not be allowed from their driveways since they don't pay their fair share to pave the street. their argument is, 'i put my kids through school, i paid my taxes all these years, why should i pay anything more now?'

why? because this is not 1978. and here's just one example: for a couple years i lived in hermosa beach next door to a wonderful couple, both retired and in their upper sixties. they bought their house in 1968. in 1978, their assessment was frozen at $700 per year. conservatively, they are currently sitting on a $3,000,000 property.

i don't want them taxed out of their house. i just want them to pay what is fair. if they were assessed at today's value, they'd pay $30,000; i don't want that for them or anyone who (EDITED to change "likes likes" to "looks like") looks like them, but $700 a year in hermosa beach, california is not fair. and anyone who starts yammering about unions, or spending problems, or any of the rest of that nonsense just doesn't get it.

 

Not wading through 3 pages of non-Californians telling me what's wrong with my state, so apologies if this has been noted...

The problem with the Jarvis tax issue is NOT home property taxes; the problem is that it has been illegally applied to corporate property taxes, too, so people like Wal-Mart and Albertson's are able to skirt by paying their fair share of property taxes by having armies of lawyers game the system by selling their land to various LLCs.

http://www.northbaybusinessjournal.com/51698/51698/

But I will also agree with the right-wingers who surely are complaining above about government employee pensions; seeing county mid-level executives retire at age 55 with 80 percent pay, only to go back to work the next day for a government contractor (which happens in my wife's line of work every month) is infuriating.

 

lol @ 'right wingers"

btw, all you anti prop 13 folks would have gotten a kick out of my neighbor. I was walking my dogs last month, and talked to a lady down the street I had never met before. Original owner in our neighborhood (1950's).

I am not sure what the subject was or how we got on it, but she was somehow was really complaining about her property tax bill, which is of course way under $1000 a year.

 

Yeah, once the state comes up with the (trillion dollar? $500 billion dollar? you name the figure) unfunded liability for pensions, things will be smooth sailing. That's all.

 

Interesting item in SF Chronicle this morning: California's top officials have gone through another round of pay cuts, which means Jerry Brown is making $165,000 -- or $14,000 less than the parks-and-rec director for the East Bay city of Brentwood (pop. 51,000).

I'm sure there are a lot of sprinkler deployments and softball games to schedule, yet $179,000 does seem a tad excessive.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/06/03/BATD1ORQ46.DTL&tsp=1

 

Oh, I think that's a pretty tight labor market. Sort of a diamonds-and-water-paradox kind of thing ...

 

California needs Chris Christie.

 

To erase the decades-old fitness craze?

 

Not related to California specifically, but . . .

I have never understood why property taxes were ever tied to the market value of a property. Who came up with that?

Taxes are supposed to represent the bill for the services you receive. How does a wildly volatile real estate market have any relevance to what is needed to pay for a city's or county's services?

If your place happens to appreciate from $100K to $700K in 10 years, are your services increasing seven-fold? Did the city budget increase seven-fold? Why should your tax bill? Just because someone's willing to pay that price for your land? Makes zero sense.

The "unfairness" of the $4,000 vs. $1,000 property tax bill doesn't bother me too much because, frankly, it's always an advantage to buy something at a lower price, before it becomes trendy and everyone wants it. The person who bought Apple stock at $18 should receive more bang for his buck when it goes up $2 than the person who bought it yesterday.

 

Damn, I didn't even know that was a thing -- I am the accidental metaphorist!

 

California needs someone who will come in, make the tough and unpopular decisions that need to be made to fix what's broken.

 

Can't happen -- too many voter-approved propositions that require funding by law, without any mechanism for said funding.