PropertyTaxReform

Vallejo, California, Officials Vote for Bankruptcy

Link: Bloomberg.com: U.S..

Think of it!  A city of 117,000 people in the San Francisco suburbs is filing for bankruptcy!

The city of 117,000 is facing ballooning labor costs and declining housing-related tax revenue that have left it near insolvency.  ...

Police and firefighting salaries, pension and overtime consume almost 80 percent of Vallejo's $89 million general fund budget. Cities in California on average spend about 60 percent of their budgets on firefighter and police salaries, according to the League of California Cities.  ...

Vallejo, on the San Francisco Bay, was home to the West Coast's first shipyard, which was shuttered in 1996. The area has been one of the hardest hit in Northern California by the housing market slump. Home prices in Solano County, where the town resides, dropped 19 percent in January from the year before, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a firm which tracks real-estate markets in the state.

Well, I've got news for them.  The housing slump is not the problem.  The problem is of California's own making, and the problem is celebrating its 30th birthday this year. 

Are Property Tax "Circuit Breakers" a 'Solution' to anything?

A committee convened by former New York Governor Spitzer is looking at the Property Tax in NYS with an eye to capping it or providing so-called circuit breakers, in the form of a rebate from the state for any 70% of the residential (owner-occupied, first home) property tax that exceeds a certain percentage of a household's Adjusted Gross Income.

A Few Inconvenient Truths about the Property Tax

I'm pleased to share (with permission of the author) something that appeared on a mailing list I subscribe to. The conversation was along the lines of "how do we share the idea of land value taxation [a reform of the property tax] with people who are used to hating the property tax?"

Roy Langston wrote,

When I encounter the usual unreasoning hatred of property taxes, I just point out a few inconvenient truths, along these lines:

Florida: How Should We Tax Ourselves?

Educators: tax plan skepticism

link: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080319/NEWS/803190317
The article reports the reactions of teachers' and school administrators' organizations to proposed property tax reductions in Florida. I want to focus on a fairly short section of the article:

The plan is intended to stimulate the economy by making homes more affordable and allowing people to keep more spending money.

Under it, lawmakers would have three choices to recoup the lost funds:

• cut spending,
  
• expand the sales tax to include other items or services, or
  
• raise money through a new source.

So much money would need to be raised that proponents expect lawmakers would be forced to close sales tax exemptions on everything from bottled water to pet food to sky boxes in sports arenas.