Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, March 27, 2011 3:51:58 PM
...Is too little, too late. During the six years of the housing boom, assessed home values rose so fast that, in New York (among other places) government spending and property atxes were given breathing room by taxpayers to explode alongside. When the boom ended, taxpayers in New York were left with some of the highest rates in the country (more than four times the national average), with no resources for absorbing increases..
In California, Proposition 13 capped the rate of property tax increases in 1978. They found other ways to fund their dreams in Sacramento, but ran into the same wall as everybody else when the NRRA fed funding dried up this year. The wise Progressive view is that, if such a cap didn't exist, taxes could have kept up with spending, and we wouldn't have a debt problem.
Because, as Roger Moore says, the money is out there. It just has to be pried out of the hands of the greedy rich and passed around to the needy. Now, the same story line is appearing in New York. You can't put a cap on property taxes, you need to fund government. Look at all it does! And then, drag out the specifics of the programs that won't be cut, but decimated. The children will suffer.
Try this for reality. The total government expenditure here- federal, state, local and school- is 42% of GDP. The tax rate is 10% lower. Spending has exploded since 2008, but taxation has not kept up. Hence the crazy debt problems.
The big question for 2012 is, do we want to fund the new spending and become a new Europe? Or do we want to cut spending and become, at worst, what we were in 2007?