Crossposted on CalWatchDog In Archibald MacLeish’s 1958 play “J.B.,” the devil disguised as a popcorn vendor destroys the property and children of a wealthy banker named “J.B.” to test his faithfulness to God. God, portrayed as a balloon vendor in a circus, offers to restore J.B.’s life if he returns to the religion he rejected. [...]
Crossposted on CalWatchDog When did the California Dream begin? Peter Huck, a refugee journalist from Los Angeles to New Zealand, has an answer. He writes in the July 20 issue of the New Zealand Herald newspaper “Sustainability Reinventing California Dream” that the California Dream began when Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s William Mulholland [...]
Is the era of California’s duped voters over? That is the question that has to be asked now that Proposition 29 – the proposed additional tobacco tax of $1 per pack of cigarettes – has narrowly been defeated at the ballot box. Perhaps this portends the end of stem cell funding and the Institute for [...]
Crossposted in CalWatchdog Nowadays almost no economists back trade protectionism. Free trade is the norm. The example of damaging protectionism most cited is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. According to Wikipedia, it raised to record levels tariffs on 20,000 imported goods. Retaliatory tariffs by U.S. trading partners resulted in both imports and exports being [...]
Co-authored by Charles B. Warren. Cross-posted at CalWatchdog.
Democrats in the California Legislature want to repeal the property tax reassessment protections of Proposition 13 for commercial properties under the dubious notion that there is a pot of California 49er gold at the end of the rainbow. Prop. 13?s existing protections for homeowners would remain the same.
If the commercial protections are removed, this would create what’s called a “split roll”: different tax rates would apply to home and commercial property.
The vehicle being used to create split roll is AB 448. But Democrats, to twist a phrase from Mark Twain when he was in California, may find that “there’s no gold in them thar hills.”
The current system of property taxation in California under Prop. 13 is based on reassessing all properties in the state only when there is a valid sales transaction, just as capital gains taxes are paid only when stock is sold.
Cross-posted at CalWatchdog.
A demogogue is a leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace. And a demographer is someone who studies the characteristics of human populations, such as size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.
Thus, to coin a phrase, a ”demogogue-grapher” is someone who studies human population with his emotions and a political agenda.
Such must be the case of USC Professor of Demography Dowell Myers, interviewed by columnist and Proposition 13 hater Steve Lopez in the May 31 issue of the Los Angeles Times, “Debunking the Myth of Prop. 13”.
According to Myers, the decline in the number of families and children at the bottom of the population pyramid means that, in the future, there will be a surplus of family housing and the price will drop out of the bottom of single family residential housing. Thus Myers asserts that Prop. 13 is “toast” because, according to him, it only works in a constantly rising real estate market.
