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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (5005)	3/25/2006 5:11:20 AM
From: Crabbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217678

You seem to forget one very simple fact. The tax can only be raised at a rate of 2% whether that base is yesterday, or 1975. Even a raise in the valuation of your residence by normal inflation will soon lead to your home being "under taxed". As California has had recent home appreciations of 10, 20, 50 percent per year you will need to wait a long long time before a plurality of home owners will be ready to give up the financial advantage. Taxes are seldom invited, usually they are imposed. The exception might be San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, all inhabited by leftist idiots. I don't think that LA and San Diego will vote like San Francisco. r

To: TobagoJack who wrote (5005)	3/26/2006 6:47:18 AM
From: energyplay	Respond to of 217678

I did a quick check of Santa Clara counties budget, and property tax revenue is rising about 5% per year - so there is some revaluation based on real estate sales. Now Santa Clara is a more prosperous county, but I expect this tren d to hold up across California, except for the 12 out of 50+ that have very small populations (under 30,000) and get stuck with various mandated spending schemes from Sacramento and the Federal govenment. Outside of those ~dozen very small counties - (Alpine 1300, Shasta 3500, Sierra 3600, Modoc 9600, Mono 13400, Trinity 13600, Mariposa 17800, Inyo 18500 (huge land area) Del Norte 20700, Plumas 21000) the counties should be able to fund police, fire and essential services - if they spend the money well. For the large places, and most of the cities, the requirement is even easier - 1) Don't P*ss too much money away on EGO projects and 2) Don't get locked into overpaying employees 3) Don't invest your money with some clown in Orange County who thinks he is smarter than Wall Stret and 4) Don't start a war. (See US Federal gov't for example) Since none of these entities has war making powers, the biggest threat is 2) and pushy unions making big political donations. Gray Davis is out, so this is less of a threat for the next few years. Sales tax is pretty small at the county level, much larger at the city level, and it is trending up. I expect point a) to be at least 15 years off in the future - for California. Oregon, Minnesota, Kentucky may be different. Remember, California is Rich We have gold in the streams and the hills. We have oil in the ground - even Beverly Hills produced almost 1 million barrells last year -(that's about 2700 a day, which is not much. We have dot coms comming back, and we invented biotech. There's also a bunch of money left from the dot com boom, when companies with no profits were bought for 10 times revenue. Too bad we didn't sell some dot coms to Gordon Brown - we could have traded some server farms and C code for that useless yellow metal that was taking up too much space. All this shows up in sales tax, income tax, and indirectly in commercial property tax. d) is occuring a a slow roll over as properties are inherited or sold to pay for retirement. >>>Property taxes are tracking UP, so there isn't a long term problem. The short term pain ended years ago. The effects and cost of Prop 13 can still be debated - but repeal is not needed or very useful today. I don't think many of those recent buyers would expect their property taxes to come DOWN if Prop 13 was repealed. Lots of air heads in Califonrnia, but few will believe politicians who say they will raise taxes on the other guy then cut taxes for me.... So I really don't see any electorate supporting the end of Prop 13 for residential - short of an absolute guarantee that school kids SAT scores will go up 100 points and the boys stop wearing those giant pants that show their ass.