Posted on Sunday, 2/15/2009 - 9:59 a.m. PST — by Honesty3
I just wanted to remind everyone to be sure and say thank you to all of those Republicans who initiated and voted in favor of Proposition 13. Without their undying support our current state budget crisis could never have happened. Without their farsighted leadership we would not have the most underfunded school system in the nation. Were it not for these prescient individuals we would not have a decaying infrastructure. Were it not for their dedication to great men like Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann we would all be paying our fair share of taxes to support better schools and sewage systems and water systems and early childhood education projects.
We sure do owe these great leaders a huge debt of gratitude, in fact by some estimates that debt in terms of real money is growing around 500 million dollars per day. Just look at this interesting factoid:
"CALIFORNIA IS AMONG ONLY A FEW STATES THAT HAS BORROWED TO CLOSE A BUDGET GAP.
Most states, including California, require a balanced budget. California became the third state in recent years (after Louisiana in 1988 and Connecticut in 1991) to explicitly use deficit borrowing when it issued $11 billion in “Economic Recovery Bonds” in 2004. The governor’s 2008‐09 budget calls for borrowing an additional $3 billion to cover current budget shortfalls. This additional debt is allowed under a constitutional amendment approved by voters at the time of the 2004 authorization. http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/jtf/JTF_PublicDebtJTF.pdf
And today we can thank the Republicans for sticking to their guns as they drive the state closer to bankruptcy every day. Just think what the Bush administration did not manage to do try as they might for eight years might be accomplished by a small group in the Republican minority as they continue to obstinately refuse to support any kind of reasonable state budget for California.
So don't forget to thank all those Republicans when your local schools fall apart and the state leads the nation into another Great depression. Remember we got here by forgetting the great leadership of the Republican Party when it caused the Great Depression of the 1930s. We have squandered trillions of dollars on Republican Presidents like Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, and Republican governors like Wilson and Deukmejian and Reagan who ran up our State spending faster than any Democrat ever would think of doing. Their irresponsibility got us to where we are today and it looks like their continuing irresponsibility will take us even deeper.
And here is where we stand as of today regarding the state budget that the Republicans refuse to support:
"Failure of the package would prolong a four-month stalemate over how to cover a record $42 billion deficit that drained California of cash, left it with the lowest credit rating among U.S. states, forced officials to delay paying bills totaling $3.7 billion and halted $3.8 billion of bond-financed construction on schools, roads and other public works.
Supermajority Threshold
Democrats lack the votes to obtain the two-thirds supermajority threshold needed to pass tax increases and budgets. To gain approval, three Republican votes are required in the Assembly and another three in the Senate. Republicans have blocked previous attempts to raise taxes to close the deficit.
Combined, the measures would have raised taxes and fees by $14 billion, cut spending $16 billion and borrowed $10 billion in new state debt. Another $2 billion for a reserve would be created from funds moved on balance sheets.
Citing the impasse, Standard & Poor’s cut $46 billion of California’s full-faith-and-credit debt to A from A+ on Feb. 2, making the U.S.’s largest tax-exempt borrower the lowest-rated state. California’s 10-year general-obligation bonds already pay a record 1.23 percentage points in yield above benchmark municipal debt, according to Bloomberg indexes."
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a66dYFMVNTDo
I do hope that we soon learn to relagate all Republican politicians to the dustbin of history where they really belong.
Joined: May 2008
Current Posts: 182
without Prop 13 we'd have foreclosures on senior citizens as well as persons who should never have had a mortgage in the first place. The tax revenue problem in California is that it is too heavily weighted toward capital gains and 6+ figure income citizens. So when "the rich" lose money, so does the state. The unrich benefit the most during better times but bear the brunt during worse economic times. It's hard to tax a negative capital gain, and it's hard to tax an income adjusted for a negative capital gain. The states that don't have a soak the rich system aren't going bankrupt.
Joined: Jul 2008
Current Posts: 82
"Our fair share"
and guess who decides what that "is" ? surely unabashed collectivists.
Joined: Sep 2005
Current Posts: 77
Honesty 3 ignores the irony that Prop. 13 was passed in June, 1978, when Jerry Brown (D) was Governor, by 66% of registered voters. Moreover, in 1978, 56% of registerd voters were Democrats, 34% Republicans, and 10% "other". 56 of 58 California Counties supported Proposition 13 as well, despite the gerrymandering.
And, since 1932 (FDR's first term), registered Democrats in California have outnumbered registerd Republicans in every State and National election, including the Reagan gubernatorial years.
I guess bi-partisanship is anethema to H3? California's fiscal condition today is not the result of the electorate's make-up, but rather of those elected.
Snorkler
Joined: Jul 2008
Current Posts: 775
Proposition 13 was a populist movement initiated by Howard Jarvis, a Mormon/Republican who was also a lobbyest for the Los Angeles area Apartment Owners Association. His motives for initiating this terrible proposition were not altruistic at all since at the time his employers thought that it would benefit them. The other person, Paul Gann, was a conservative political activist who ran for the Republican Party for Senator in 1980. So I guess the fact that two Republican's initiated this terrible law does mean that initially it had a Republican base of support.
Most of the middle income and all of the uppe rmiddle and upper income people in America have always supported initiatives that decreased their taxes. That is understandable but it is not always desirable. The Republicans have based over half of their campaigns on "decreasing taxes" and decreasing the size of government which is appealing to people who do not understand that we have moved from a rural environment to an urban environment.
There was a need to make sure that older people were not forced out of their homes as a result of increasing property taxes. There was also a need to maintain a healthy tax base to ensure that we were adequately funding the public school systems. Proposition 13 was a hatchet when what qwe really needed was a scalpel and it lopped off so much funding for our schools that we fell from one of the top five states in public education to number 48 in recent surveys. We currently rank with Alabama and other "poorer" southern states in our funding of public education and in the results of national testing on our children by grade level versus other states.
The net effects of Proposition 13 are still being felt as we struggle to get a decent state budget and stay out of bankruptcy
Joined: Sep 2008
Current Posts: 130
What planet do you live on? Housing in CA has done nothing but go up and up and up until the bubble burst. Property taxes have been inflated up and up and up as well due the cost of housing in CA and the volume of housing built. A few and I mean "FEW" elderly people that are paying lower property taxes and are able to stay in their homes is a very little price to pay. CA elderly people would not have been able to stay in their houses until they die otherwise, unless they had a lot of money. Many younger people in CA move a lot. Every time they bought another home their property taxes were higher because (in most cases) the cost of the house was higher. Also, many more people would have not been able to get in the housing market if the property taxes were any higher than 1% of assessed value, because the cost of housing in CA was sky high for years and years. CA has been collecting all kinds of property taxes for years and years along with income taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes, use taxes, DMV fees, bridge tolls, etc... What is the CA government doing with all the tax money? Not spending it wisely obviously! And the CA lottery was sold to us to "help the schools as well!" Where is all that money!? 25% of our current CA budget deficit is spent on educating, jailing, social programs, healthcare, etc... for illegal aliens. And you think that we should be paying more taxes!?