All Democratic Budget Plans Lead to the Oil Severance Tax
California politics is feeling the brunt of the tragic Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Besides the issue of offshore drilling becoming a key component in the 15th Senate District special election, Democrats in the legislature see the oil spill opening the door to a major revenue source for funding California governments.
Both the Senate and Assembly Democrats’ budget plans are built on a foundation of taxing oil extracted from within the Golden State. True, efforts to install an oil severance tax have been around long before the Gulf spill, but the oil industry has become a particularly juicy target in the eyes of many legislators since the spill.
Yesterday, the Senate Democrats offered a plan to realign programs as a responsibility of local governments and offered a number of revenue raising proposals to fund the transition. Chief among them were an oil severance tax, removing tax changes offered businesses last year and making permanent an increase in the vehicle license fee.
Do We Need Initiative Rules for Counties?
California counties are crashing on checking and sampling signatures before a Thursday deadline to qualify initiatives for the November ballot. The procrastination, er… late turn-in of a half-dozen measures has created uncertainty.
What’s also created uncertainty is this: there’s no real rule on how counties can count when they face multiple measures and short time limits. Do they count the stuff that comes in first? Or the measures that come with the most possible signatures? Or the initiative that seems more broadly important? It’s not clear. State law sets the deadlines for how quickly counties must count signatures, but not how they do so.
There are two things to be done here. The first is to give counties some clarity, perhaps legislatively. A suggested rule of thumb: the initiative whose backers are first to submit should be counted first.
Government Picking Winners and Losers at Taxpayers’ Expense
It generates few headlines, so many taxpayers are unaware that local
governments continue to pump millions of dollars of tax increments —
property tax revenue usually withheld from schools and other essential
services — to fund pet projects that may not be in the public
interest. This is all done under the guise of "Community
Redevelopment."
One of the most common misuses of redevelopment funds is to bribe
businesses, like auto malls or big box stores, to relocate in a
particular community. The result is often a bidding war between
cities, each trying to outdo the others to provide the most generous
subsidies and tax breaks to land a favored business. Reforms enacted
in 1994 which permit tax sharing designed to address this problem have
only been partially successful.
It is hard to find a taxpayer who thinks that government should be in
the business of using taxpayer dollars to pick winners and losers in
the private sector economy, and this is why local officials try to
operate their redevelopment schemes with as little notice as possible.
However, when the deals go sour, it is hard to keep these expensive
failures under wraps.