Dogfather
Premium
join:2007-12-26
Laguna Hills, CA
 ·Cox HSI
 ·Verizon FIOS
 ·Cox VOIP
·ViaTalk
·RoadRunner Cable
 ·MegaPath
·Verizon west (ex G..
·Time Warner VOIP
4 edits | reply to Samwoo
Re: wow
Of course Medi-Cal doesn't pay the whole bill, hospitals are left paying the rest |
They passed Prop 13 because people were losing their homes to the government.
In your example, a house bought for $200K in 2001 (which there were very few) could pay $2000 in property tax, another $2000 in Mello-Roos fees (like one of mine), plus other small property based taxes.
Now that home is theoretically worth $800K to someone else and if resold would take in $10K a year in combined property taxes. The person who bought it and still owns it is making the same $60K (or close to it) but thanks to Prop 13 he won't lose his house to the government because his taxes didn't go from a few hundred a month which he could afford to a thousand a month which he couldn't.
Meanwhile thanks to the recent appreciation that has also been a LOT of churn so while some homes that were bought in 2001 are still owned by the same people, a lot aren't and pay these insanely high property taxes. Now that $800K house assessed for $10K is worth $500K but the tax assessor doesn't give a crap. Getting it reassessed lower takes an act of God. You want to put in a pool, they're out that day looking for more money.
A perfect example is a cop buddy of mine. Fresh out of the LBPD academy, he bought in the early 90's in Orange County, CA during the last housing depression. He bought a house for $210K, a payment he could barely swing but because he had saved since High School he had enough down to bring the payment down. Anyway thanks to the population boom and limited housing his house would have sold recently for over a million. But he's now a Detective with a local police department not exactly raking in the millions. Prop 13 is the ONLY reason he is able to keep his home.
The system works find so long as you don't have a legislature of drunken sailors increasing spending at rates FAR higher than combined population and inflation increased. They took the money they raked in during the Dot Com boom, created a ton of bloated new programs, now that all the Dot Com companies went bust, they're coming after Joe Taxpayer to fund it.
Also during that time their state union buddies got on the ballot propositions that forced a huge chunk of ANY new revenues to whatever the union brought proposition wanted. So even with new revenue, it couldn't be spent to bring down the deficits or spent on infrastructure. Add to that they want to give away the farm to illegals. According to the LA Times in LA County alone illegals cost the medical system over $300 million a year. The deficits the county system ran were in the $100M-$200M range and that is why they are closing hospitals right and left. It doesn't take a mathematics major to see that the influx of illegals are DIRECTLY responsible for hospital closures (60 hospital closures as of 2006) and everyone here is witnessing the complete decimation of the public school system that started with the first amnesty in the 80's. In some school districts (like Lake Elsinore Unified) they're even coming up with schemes to bus kids 15-20 miles into the schools dominated by illegals to try and artificially inflate the scores so they don't look so bad. Awesome.
This state rakes in over a hundred billion a year in tax revenue, a pheonominal rate of increase year to year. But the whores in Sacramento and their state employee union buddies swipe even more.
There is no revenue problem, it's an spending problem. Auhnold tried to fix it but unions spent millions and millions of their memberships' money on deceitful television ads to defeat the propositions that would have brought the out of control spending under some sort of reasonable control.
So here we are, years after Gray Davis created this latest monster in Sacramento we're still having to borrow to stay solvent with no end in sight. |
