EDITOR: Wes Rolley
’s column in the April 16 edition of The Times headlined “How to
fix state tax problems” is totally backward. He says we need to do
three things:
EDITOR:
Wes Rolley’s column in the April 16 edition of The Times headlined “How to fix state tax problems” is totally backward.
He says we need to do three things:
• Increase personal income taxes by making the rich pay more. The rich paid 70 percent of the state income tax in 2003. Wes would make it a Progressive tax. That’s the perfect word because “progressive” is a synonym for Socialist, which takes from the rich and gives to the poor.
• Stop encouraging retail and industrial businesses in California because ”the result is longer commutes – more traffic – and a decline in social capital.” How about business providing payrolls for those commuters to buy the homes they commute from. By the way, how do you measure units of social capital?
• Cancel the Williamson Act because it allows landowners to reserve their property for agricultural use. Didn’t he just say he wanted to stop industrial development? Sorry, you can’t have it both ways.
The only rational way solve the problem is to reduce state spending. When Prop 13 was passed, the state income tax total was $30 billion. In 2003 it was $130 billion. Does anyone believe that state services have become more than four times better?
Does anyone believe that Prop 13 strangled the state? Politicians threw it away $100 billion on staff, perks and pork. When Gov. Gray Davis took office in 1996, there were 60,000 state employees on the payroll. When he was ousted from office in 2003, there were 316,000 state employees. Wes also says “Some cities are relatively well off because of past fiscal restraint.” Gosh! Does that mean that civil servants in some cities were able to live within their budget? What a revolutionary idea!
Another comment was that businesses would flee the state if their property taxes went up. Actually, businesses are fleeing California because of the arbitrary and worthless restrictions piled on them by thousands of state bureaucrats.
State politicians have no incentive to change and the only thing we citizens can do is return control to the cities by voting the existing politicians out or (Heaven forbid!) using the initiative process..
Wes suggests that Prop 13 was the beginning of California’s revenue problem. When Prop 13 was up for a vote, the wailing began about having to fire all the police, firemen, teachers and nurses if it passed. Surprise! Nobody was fired when it passed. What happened was that the bureaucrats were given a 1-1/2 percent increase in property tax revenue every year. Californians property taxes have increased 42 percent since Prop 13. It seems that Wes believes that is not nearly enough to be our fair share.
I don’t hate the rich. I work for a living and most Californians do the same. I do dislike the smug self-serving politicians who provide minimal public services and exorbitant funds for themselves, useless bureaucrats and failed social projects. Most of all I resent their describing themselves as being “In Public Service.” Our state legislators are a national laughing stock and a disgrace. Their conduct in this self-induced fiscal crisis proves it – again.
The new income tax has established a rock of credit from which abundant streams of revenue will flow whenever Congress chooses to smite it. We can be sure that it will be smitten hard and always harder, until the National Conscience, if there is such a thing, revolts against the inequity and injustice of such a plan of taxation.
- New York Times, February 1913.
Don Luke, Morgan Hill
