(From my comments on a GVWire article about Prop 15.)
Look, I know that taxes get people hot under the collar and short circuit thought, but for a given service HOW do you want to pay for it? My first preference is to write out a check for the specific service, exactly as I do for garbage collection, water, and sewage. If I need an extra trash bin, I pay a little more; if I cut my water use, I pay a little less. Straightforward, 1 check for 1 service bundle.
My second preference is to pay locally for services that I benefit from. I can’t afford a personal fireman, policeman, animal control, etc., and most years I don’t need a fireman AND a policeman, but some years I need both, etc. For that I historically paid a property tax (which, yes, gets rolled into my rent if I was a renter, or included in my CAM if I was a business owner) which paid the city or county who paid the service people who put out fires, corralled feral dogs, etc.
My third preference is to kick into a statewide pool for statewide services. I want to keep citrus blight from decimating California crops, I want for the state to run prisons to keep offenders off the streets, etc. Pretty straightforward, but I’m only 1/40,000,000 of the tax payers, so my personal preferences aren’t well represented.
Very low on my list of funding mechanisms would be to collect statewide taxes to send to cities to “make up for” the property tax rates slashed forty years ago via a ballot initiative. It’s very indirect, gives the state more influence over the local government, and is based on a snapshot in time frozen in amber. Why is that your preferred mechanism?
From the initiative —
Section 3: It is the intent of the People of the State of California to do all of the following in this measure: (a): Preserve in every way Proposition 13’s protections for homeowners and for residential rental properties. This measure only affects the assessment of taxable commercial and industrial property.
So you’re ask telling me that you’re eager to pay a higher sales tax sooner, since the state’s not barred from collecting sales tax? And higher income taxes? If the government is collecting taxes, and there’s a mechanism to ensure that they are more local (so they money doesn’t go to the state, then get divided and sent back to the cities and counties as compensation for prop 13 revenues, as is currently practiced). Or perhaps you’d rather pay more in gas taxes?
There are lots of ways for cities, counties, and the state to collect taxes, and most of you will whine no matter which type is imposed. But there are serious advantages to keeping taxes local, instead of sending them all to the state, losing some to state government, then sending them back to cities and counties. If you want more efficient, less wasteful taxes, you want them local. That’s also true if you want to ensure that your tax dollar goes to your community, not the other end of the state.
From the very short article: “If voters approve the initiative on Nov. 3, protections on the tax hikes on business properties will be removed. Home properties will remain protected. The system is known as “split roll.”Any reason you want to use the very popular Prop 13 protections for homeowners to defend business rates? Particularly since people die and their property gets reassessed, but corporations don’t?