Study Warns about Negative Effects of a Split Roll
Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters today raised the question whether a split roll property tax increase will be considered to increase tax revenues. The split roll refers to the fact that all property is taxed the same under Proposition 13 (as it was before Proposition 13, by the way) but the roll could be split between business and residential property by putting different rules and thus a heavier tax burden on business property.
Walters points out that critics of Prop 13 have long claimed that business gets a break under Proposition 13. The theory goes business property changes hands less frequently than residential property, therefore is re-assessed less frequently and pays proportionately less.
A Beautiful Mess
The biggest selling point of tyranny is its efficiency. Punishing dissent with death has a way of cutting back on all those nasty protests and boycotts. Freedom, on the other hand, is a messy business. The aftermath of the November 4th election – and specifically the reaction to the passing of Prop 8 in California (Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage) – highlights the beauty and the challenges of our system.
California is a strange and wonderful place. We are a mixture of a republic and a democracy, a marvelously forward-thinking and liberal state that at the same time repeatedly passes conservative ballot initiatives. We fight hard to elect our representatives in Sacramento and work equally hard to circumvent them with a growing number of ballot initiatives. We are governed by a mixture of often conflicting local, state and federal laws, ballot propositions and initiatives, court rulings, appeals and reversals.
This Bail Out Needs a Bail Out
We are hearing a fair share of reversals of position lately from federal government officials administering the Bail Out program we now so inelegantly call TARP – Troubled Assets Relief Program, like we could simply throw a big tarpaulin over the whole mess and be done with it. Among other things, we now have an Op Ed piece by Treasury Secretary Paulsen in the November 18 NYT (‘Fighting the Financial Crisis, One Challenge at a Time’) and various testimony before Congress about what in the world is going on with all that money Congress appropriated during the hair-on-fire emergency mindset of last September.