Comments on: The California Territory

By: dosido

dosido — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:51:28 +0000

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?

By: fatster

fatster — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:51:41 +0000

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

By: fatster

fatster — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:40:13 +0000

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.

By: marcopolo

marcopolo — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:11:00 +0000

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.

By: PJEvans

PJEvans — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:38:16 +0000

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.

By: PJEvans

PJEvans — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:33:39 +0000

And we could deport Ahnold?

By: PJEvans

PJEvans — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:32:42 +0000

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.

By: MarkH

MarkH — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:07:57 +0000

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!

By: jrclio

jrclio — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:05:51 +0000

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!

By: MarkH

MarkH — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:59:47 +0000

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).