Yet Jerry Brown won’t revisit Prop13 nor do any of those who are supposedly CA’s ‘leaders’ consider opening a ‘Bank of California’ as Ellen Brown has suggested as a way out of the dilemmas these States besides CA face.

Can you say Iceland? CA has over 10 per cent of the entire U.S. population, is a ‘leader’ in foreclosures and unemployment and did have the 8th largest GDP in the world; once again, CA will lead the other States to recognition of reality it appears.

“CA will lead the other States to recognition of reality it appears.”

I hope you are right. My concern is that there is a failure to recognize reality (as evidence, let’s start with the election of Ahhhhhhhnold) and that it’s been with us for years now–which is why we’re in the crap-up-to-our-eyeballs situation that we’re in. I’m a-skeert that CA will become a harbinger all right, the first failed state.

Again, I hope you are right!

if by “lead” you mean “hit it with our faces”, then yeah. we’re the dead canary in the coal mine, but America thinks we’re just napping. so come on in, the methane’s fine.

MA and NY are also having terrible budget problems leading to proposed and actual mid-year cuts to education. They’re not on that list. Another stimulus that boosts jobs and gives immediate aid to states is desperately needed.

A lot of lip service is given to the importance of education, mostly by bashing teachers, but the money to help local school districts is not forthcoming.

Well, the Federal Government could help, you know?

How about moving half of Texas’s military bases to Michigan? (They have eight, Michigan has ZERO)

How about we start having trade policies that benefit companies that create jobs and income here and penalize those who off-shore their investments and production?

Let’s just pass a law raising taxes on the top 2% who are receiving 50% of the income in this country?

And why have investment income treated as “Income” and taxed accordingly?

(I already know the answers, so do you)

And the House health bill will make it worse by off-loading mandatory Medicaid spending on the states.

Government, and Americans, have been living beyond our means.

Let’s pay the piper, attack the crisis head on, and come out better on the other side of the crisis.

Instead, both parties have changed their symbol to the ostrich.

The most amazing thing about this post is learning that someone in this country “literally looked at the federal constitution.” Talk about an endangered specie(s)!

Americans piss and moan about their “high” taxes . Europeans pay a far greater share of their income in taxes than we here in the Us. Tax money that is spent to enhance the lives of the people of those countries ,things like health care, infrastructure and mass transit, safety nets for the unemployed .etc. etc.
We need to get over our obsession with taxes and realize that we are all in this thing together.
If my neighbor loses his job , it affects me, maybe not directly but it does affect me. If my neighbor loses his home it affects me, this time it affects me directly . I could go on and on.
There are too many people out there who don’t want “their” tax dollars to go to ” those ” people.
What these people don’t see is that “those people” could be their neighbors , their friends or even their own family.
E PLURIBUS UNUM

What are the advantages of being a territory rather than a state?

Let me suggest the “start selling shit” plan. States have ownership of property. They can sell it if they need to. Not things like national parks, but under utilized buildings, unused lots, governor’s mansions. Stuff that’s just for show, underutilized, or not used at all. Things that aren’t really useful.

And tax unnecessary items like soda, beer, and cigarettes (yes, *again* with the cigarettes. Make it $15 a pack. Ask me if I care)

When Texas secedes and starts printing its own money, will the U.S. accept it in repayment of the stimulus funds?

Maybe we could look at getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Claw back the commitments made to the “financial services” industry and redirect them to states and municipalities. And how about an actual real loan modification program, complete with cramdowns, etc.?

Oh. That would require thought (and the elimination of corruption) on the part of our elected officials.

Never mind.

That answer is so obvious that those in government can’t see it.

They need to cut services to the GOP and rich residents who don’t want to raise/pay taxes and wake them up. Instead they will cut services to the powerless poor.

what is most concerning to me, as we have seen so many times in the past, “what starts in california spreads across the nation.” california is a state that no longer can govern and legislate what is needed to solve its’ problems and challenges. the legislature is now filled with representatives whose only concern is partisanship and pandering to their next primary.

It requires a change to the state constitution to fix that mess, and that means getting a majority of voters to approve it, and likely a majority of the guys in the legislative sandbox as well. (Unfortunately, the current setup means most of them are in safe districts, where they don’t have to worry about their jobs disappearing.)

There are too many people out there who don’t want “their” tax dollars to go to ” those ” people.
What these people don’t see is that “those people” could be their neighbors , their friends or even their own family

Or, themselves.

Prop 13 is about the only sane thing California politicians ever accomplished. That was a wonderful grassroots effort. Of course that was many years ago. Since then they (mainly the Dems) have run the state into the ground with lavish spending on nutjob ideas such as it’s advocacy of native-language teaching which both cost way too much and did just the opposite of what they hoped to accomplish.
California already suffers the highest income tax and sales tax in the country. Give em a break on property taxes.
The solution is to cut (as one would with a chain saw) many government workers. Keep the firemen but can the assistant direction in charge of diversity in schools.
Know what I’m sayin’?

You are correct. This may spread to many other states and obviously many states are already in a jam. Some states have enough sense to accumulate funds for hard times (rainy day funds) but California politicians were never infected with such a good idea as this. It was always spend every dime as quick as possible on half baked social programs and government give aways.
The real problem states have is they can’t print their own money. Of course the federal government has no such limitation and so the printing presses continue to whirl.

Technically California is supposed to produce a balanced budget (thus cannot constitutionally hold funds for more than two years). But Grey Davis DID have a $24 billion rainy day fund that was frittered away with things like the”temporary” termination of the car registration tax. That disappeared completely when ENRON, Frontier and other energy brokers foisted the massive energy increases on the State during the hottest Summer in years. That surplus disappeared faster than you can say “theft”.

Arnold, Issa, and other Republican politicos have never explained what their meetings with Ken Lay were about back in 2000. But we do know that Issa was the funder of the Recall, and Arnold took advantage of a 350 person election. Ashcroft’s DOJ refused to investigate the energy scam…perpetrated by many of Bush/Cheney “Pioneer” donors. Wonder why?

The other prop on taxes that election was much better. Prop 13 was clearly flawed from the get-go, and at least some voters saw it.

You’re a Reagan Republican at heart, I take it.

No I don’t because commercial property is included in Prop 13 AND property taxes are among the lowest anywhere.
AFAIC, -and Warren Buffet agrees with me-CA’s property taxation is a bad joke. And the income and sales taxes could be decreased with a more realistic property tax structure. With the devaluation of property that is going on, now is the time to change the law. And yes, an initiative will be necessary as there aren’t enough legislators with enough courage to vote to put such on the ballot themselves.

Fatster wrote “I’m a-skeert that CA will become a harbinger all right, the first failed state. ” and that touches on what I meant by ‘leading the nation’; the U.S. IS a ‘failed State’ that is being covered up so that chaos doesn’t reign worldwide.

The state is in a real mess.

Never voted that way.

The temporary rollback on car registration fees was supposed to be ending: that was why the GOoPers ginned up the recall; they’d agreed to a three-year period for it and then wanted to make it permanent. All their arguments seemed to amount to ‘it was going to make it too expensive to buy a car’ – when that fee is, as they damned well ought to know, based on the blue book value, and decreases over time.

I don’t think any Republican politician in the last twenty years has been honest on anything involving taxes and fees: they’ve all been lying about what that money does. I wish, if they’re really concerned about spending and taxation, that they’d work for free and without tax-funded benefits and perks.

Yes indeed, the US is a failed state.

I don’t understand why they ever did the roll back. I was living out there during those years and always thought the fees were cheap.

They need to include business property, at the very least. Right now, businesses can transfer real estate to new legal owners (whether it’s different actual owners is another matter) without it being reappraised.

The other thing is that they need to stop assuming that property values will always rise. Clearly that’s a false assumption.

Old car?

(The first year, the fee is about the same as the monthly payment, in my experience. Those who are really concerned about registration fees should keep their car more than three years, because that’s about how long it takes for it to drop appreciably.)

This shows how bad things really are here in California: the director of the state’s finance department actually researched the federal constitution to determine if we could leave statehood and become a territory!

That’s terrifying.

Why? Some things (such as the high finance Titanics) are too big to fail, some things (such as Bush-Cheney, particularly Cheney) are too big to prosecute, some things (such as our Fourth Amendment which is being eviscerated) are too onerous to enforce, and on and on.

As for us, We the People and our Constitution and Bill of Rights? Pffffffffft.

I keep mine 10 years. Cars are a wasting asset. Does everyone need to drive a BMW? I think not.

It sure is but maybe as a territory they could print their own currency.

PS, drive a Toyota Corolla or similar car.

MacBeth – Act 5 Scene 5

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Ya notice how trolls never seem to base their arguments on facts? It’s all emotion; sound and fury signifying nothing.

There’s hope for state budgets. Along with the unemployment extension, Congress passed a little tidbit that lets big corporations, including home builders, write off their 2008 and 2009 losses against income from as far back as 2004. Pulte Homes alone will get an estimated 450 million back from the Federal government (I wonder if states have to issue refunds, also??). California and other income strapped states can just sell their public land to the home builders! Is this a great country or what?

There is an alternative that will work fiscally although I am loath to suggest it. We could leave the union. This would end the vast annual tax transfer – our huge transfer of business and income tax to shore up lesser developed and inevitably red regions of the US (CA is, even in it’s crisis, a net donor state). Of course this would threaten their fiscal stability, but, to be blunt, I no longer care. We’ll lease back our land if the US still wants their military bases and stuff, on our territory. We’ll have a dynamic, technology-focused economy, we’ll be able to commit to a green and renewable energy transformation, we’ll be able to enact universal healthcare, highly progressive taxation policies, we’ll have ethnic toleration, and, since American lobbyists like the NJ Knights of Columbus and NOW will be foreign entities and thus subject to regulation, we might even be able to enact gay marriage.

I don’t know much about the military stuff (TX v MI), but the other suggestions sound very good.

I think one problem we’re facing is that many of these problems have built up on many decades and the current Congress is moving as fast as it can and it still seems slow. These are huge fundamental problems.

Suggestions for things which can be done by the Executive branch alone or which can zip through congress quickly are the kind to consider (aside from the very big stuff already on the agenda).

I think tax reform is already on people’s minds and the ending of the Iraq occupation is slowly occurring trade policy is in the works (and related to tax reform).

It’s just soooo slow.

How can you say the Dems deserved the ‘ostrich’ label when they’re taking on healthcare reform? It’s a huge part of the economy and it has eluded major reform for 100 years, yet current Dems are tackling it.

Still, the point is taken that there is a lot of work to be done.

If Americans (most of us private individuals) have been living beyond their means it’s because the economy’s wealth has not been distributed to everyone in a way which allows people to pay their bills while price inflation has continued. Remember, most bankruptcies are due to healthcare costs, not personal irresponsibility.

We definitely need a system which can grow AND distribute more wealth to everyone. Such a system would not prevent some individuals from growing very wealthy!

Thus, it isn’t only a matter of taxing the richest and handing it to the poor. That’s only a part of the solution. We need the system to be based on an idea, that a rising tide raises all boats and not only the cold wrong economic idea that all new productivity derives from capital (rather than labor). We can’t afford to hear another Alan Greenspan 30 years from now wheezing out “I was wrong.” We can’t afford another Milton Friedman going on and on about Freedom to Choose while not giving ordinary people the wherewithall to actually make that choice.

In this era of personal responsibility the Territory of California’s Republican governor (and Republican assemblymen) could pass the buck to Democrats in Washington D.C.

And how about an actual real loan modification program, complete with cramdowns, etc.?

Sen. Durbin tried twice to get cramdowns, but Republicans said “No”. But now, there may be an opportunity for some people to go through bankruptcy and get their entire mortgages written down (if it’s one of those [probably rare] cases where the mortgage was part of a CDO and then handed to the MERS mortgage electronic records system).

I donno about turning CA into a territory.
Problem is, CA never did have territorial status to begin with, being admitted directly into the Union as a state and bypassing the territorial phase. So the only alternative to statehood would be to become part of Mexico again.
A better idea would be to let Texas go ahead with secession. All the military bases, Johnson Space Center, etc.. could then be moved out of TX and into more deserving states, all of the state’s House seats could be redistributed among more deserving states (with two US Senators for DC!), and all Federal money that now goes to Texas could go elsewhere as well. Aaaand as a bonus, the taxpayers would actually gain a little because Texas currently gets back in Federal dollars more than it pays in Federal taxes.
Now that’s state failure I can believe in!

If they did a property reappaisal right now their numbers would decrease quite a lot on personal real estate. Wait a year or so and commercial property numbers will be somewhat smaller too. Of course, CA is probably too broke to do such a re-evaluation (it’s expensive). Maybe it should be done automatically as property changes hands. That would spread out the cost over time.

The idea of letting property change hands without reappraisal sounds akin to rent-control in NYC. They all know the cost of rent would skyrocket, so those in power protect themselves while letting costs to everyone else explode. Power and abuse of it is a big problem!

i come from a family where we drive cars until they die, or we die, or the parts are no longer available. (My father was capable of making parts, if he had to; he made a drive shaft for one car, because the one he ordered was coming from the UK by sea, apparently the long way around as it took months to arrive.)

The people who were complaining the loudest about registration fees were the ones who replaced their luxury cars every two or three years, so they never actually either paid them off or saw the fee drop.

And we could deport Ahnold?

It is supposed to be done every time property changes hands. Prop13 only applies that to residential, though, and businesses have found (mostly legal) ways to make transfers without triggering reappraisals.

Right. Maybe it’s time we considered a national value added tax, as they have in most Western European countries. Use it to pay for a single payer system. Once people had it, there’d be no going back. Peace of mind.

The counties do the property appraisals and this year the taxes in the county where I live have gone down for residential. Don’t know about commercial.

Informative article about Prop 13 and how we need to reform it. LINK.

heh. the only reason California was made a state was when it had gold to finance the civil war…now we don’t have any gold and there’s a possibility we could secede?