A blog about Marinwood-Lucas Valley and the Marin Housing Element, politics, economics and social policy. The MOST DANGEROUS BLOG in Marinwood-Lucas Valley.
January 24, 2017. Novato Councilperson Pam Drew challenges TAM director Diane Steinhauser and TAM chairperson Stephanie Moulton Peters of Mill Valley with their confusing language of the sales tax measure and rush for approval. Ever defiant, Moulton Peters rudely interrupts Drew to stop her inquiry.
Although this effort failed in 2016, progressive Democrats in Sacramento have a veto proof majority and are committed to changing the 2/3 vote requirement for taxes to a simple majority. This would have a massive impact on California's economy.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 | Sacramento, CA | Permalink
California voters could be asked this fall to touch what’s been an untouchable law: the property tax initiative known as Proposition 13. A potential November ballot proposal would raise taxes on the state’s highest-value properties and spend the money on anti-poverty programs.
After nearly 40 years, Proposition 13 is known as the third rail of California politics: you touch it, you die.
But don’t tell that to the Daughters of Charity. The order of Catholic nuns is one of several major donors to an effort to raise taxes on properties valued at more than $3 million.
“It’s a multi-faceted approach to try to get people out of poverty,“ says veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who's running the campaign. “That’s the point of it. We’re trying to keep in place — I think we do keep in place — the fundamental protections of Proposition 13,” which caps property taxes at 1 percent of the property's value and limits increases to 2 percent a year.
New revenues could reach $7 billion a year and would fund anti-poverty initiatives — including early childhood education, job training and welfare programs.
Carrick says few homeowners would be affected. But Allan Zaremberg with the California Chamber of Commerce says the measure would reach beyond the rich.
“In California, if you have a small restaurant, you’re probably renting from somebody who has a property of $3 million or more,“ Zaremberg says. “So you’re gonna pay more in rent. And you just can’t afford that.”
Democrats despise Proposition 13. But the party establishment doesn’t like this measure. It took a hard look at Proposition 13 — but decided to focus instead on extending the Proposition 30 income tax increases.
Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio says there’s no doubt California needs major tax reform, “but what a lot of people want to do is put everything on the ballot this year, instead of being more surgical about how to get there. We know what can win, which is a Proposition 30 extension. Anything you touch on Proposition 13, which has always been and always will be the third rail of California politics, becomes more problematic.”
That problem isn’t going away. Carrick says his campaign has collected roughly half the voter signatures it will need to reach the November ballot.
Jan 24, 2017 Novato council person Pat Eklund calls out TAM for the confusing language concerning increasing the Sale Tax. It reads,
"CONSIDERATION OF SUPPORT FOR THE TRANSPORTATION
AUTHORITY OF MARIN IN THEIR EFFORT TO REMOVE A STATE
PROCEDURAL OBSTACLE TO ALLOW A COMMUNITY
CONVERSATION AND MAXIMUM FLEXIBILITY FOR LOCAL
JURISDICTIONS" .
The language is clearly meant to confuse the public. The city manager placed it on the agenda as instructed. TAM director Diane Steinhauser and TAM chairperson Stephanie Moulton Peters use the same language everywhere in Marin . It is a Brown Act violation to obscure language on agendas.
Lifting the sales tax will most certainly be the first step to a permanent sales tax increase.
A new report shows that low-income Americans are taxed at twice the rate as the richest one percent. TANVI MISRA @Tanvim Jan 20, 2015 22 Comments
State sales tax on food and other necessities place a higher burden on poor families. In his State of the Union speech, President Obama will outline a plan to overhaul the federal tax code. His objective will be to reduce inequality in the tax structure, but even if these reforms are enacted, they might only help marginally, says Matthew Gardner, executive director of the Institute of Tax and Economic Policy. That's because they wouldn't address unfair tax systems at the state and local levels. "At the state level, we're redistributing income away from poor people and giving it to rich people," says Gardner. A new report released by ITEP illustrates just how bad the problem has become. The chart below, from the report, shows that the poorest Americans pay nearly 11 percent of their income in taxes. By comparison, the wealthiest only pay a 5.4-percent tax share. The poorest 20 percent of the population end up paying double state tax rate as the top 1 percent. (Institute of Tax and Economic Policy) Of the three main forms of state taxes—sales, property, and income—the sales tax hurts the poor most, says Gardner. State sales taxes are highly "regressive," he says. That is, they end up taking a bigger chunk of change from people that have smaller sums of money and slower income growth. Let's say that a rich person and a poor person each spend $100 on taxable grocery items. This $100 expenditure—and the sales tax on that $100—both deal heavier blows on the poor person's income because it's smaller. The report backs up this hypothetical example: as a share of their income, the poor pay a 7 percent rate on sales and excise taxes, while middle-income families pay 4.7 percent rate, and the wealthy pay less than one percent, on average. Low- and middle-income taxpayers pay a disproportionately large shares of their income as sales and excise tax. (Institute of Tax and Economic Policy) Understandably, then, low-income Americans living in states that rely more on sales tax are worse off. In Washington State, for example, the poor pay nearly 17 percent of their income in state taxes, while the rich only pay 2.4 percent. On the other hand, in D.C. and California, more reliance on personal income taxes and better Earned Income Tax Credit policies make the tax system more equitable. (Though even there, low- and middle-income groups pay higher proportions of their comparatively smaller incomes). Washington state has the most regressive tax policy, with the poorest paying 16.8 percent share of their income. (Institute of Tax and Economic Policy) Giving too much weight to sales taxes isn't just bad for those living below the poverty line, it's bad for local economies. "You simply aren't going to be able to raise revenue from folks who have the least income," says Gardner. "That's a recipe for fiscal disaster." Still, local governments have lacked the political will to lean more on income taxes, which are considered more fair and progressive, Gardner says. He thinks it's partly because sales taxes seem innocuous compared to income taxes. "There's a bit of sticker shock with the personal income tax that makes it more visible than sales tax," he says. By comparison, taxpayers look at the small amounts at the bottom of their grocery receipt and think that sales taxes are a good deal. But they're not.
Novato Mayor Pro-Tem Josh Fryday scoffs at Al Dugan for suggesting that a higher sales tax hurts low income people. Dugan, a retiree points out that the TAM Tax is regressive, hurting the people that Josh Fryday says that we all need to support. The politician Fryday is caught defending a sales tax for the poor. Josh Fryday a relatively new resident was backed from billionaire investor, Tom Steyer in 2014 to run for Novato City council. Fryday was also a political aide for disgraced presidential candidate Jon Edwards in 2008.
Transportation expert and Cato scholar Randal O'Toole joins host Jon Caldara to discuss a grab bag of topics: Transportation, mixed-use projects, RTD, FasTracks, corporate welfare schemes, and more.
Terrence Jennings/Polaris/NewscomFor proof that the snowflake tendency runs as deeply among Trumpites as it does among campus censors, look no further than the Madonna controversy.
Yes, the dowager duchess of pop, the 58-year-old who sings about being a "girl gone wild," has let her mouth land her in hot water again. Her speechcrime this time? To admit in public that she fantasized about blowing up the White House after Trump won it.
In an otherwise typically Madonna speech at the Women's March in Washington, D.C. — all "fuck you"s and "look-at-me"s — she said she had "thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House." She thought better of it, though, and decided it would be more effective to challenge Trump with a "revolution of love" and through her music. Ick. Maybe the blowing-up wouldn't have been so bad after all.
The outrage was instant and predictable. The right-wing bits of Twitter went into meltdown. This was incitement to violence, they said. Breitbart got stuck in, whipping its readers into a Twitter-frenzy with reports on Madonna's "profanity-laced speech" and claims that her violent remarks are going to be investigated by the Secret Service (it's not clear whether this is true.)
Then came the talking heads. Brit blowhard Piers Morgan charged Madonna with going beyond mere "rudeness" and instead saying something "incredibly offensive"—to which we might wonder what's wrong with being incredibly offensive. He accused her of "fueling an idea" to "assassinate" Trump. "Publicly threatening to blow up the White House is a serious criminal offence", he said, and "Madonna should be arrested."
Newt Gingrich was up next. He told Fox & Friends that Madonna is part of "an emerging left-wing fascism"—get a grip, Newt—and "she ought to be arrested." The inevitable petition wasn't far behind. There's always someone who wants to Change.org out of existence an idea or image they find offensive. So far 6,500 people have signed the petition calling on the Department of Justice to "Arrest Madonna for Making Threats Against the White House."
Here's the thing that these pearl-clutching wailers and tweeters, these right-leaning Safe Spacers don't seem to understand: Madonna made no threat to blow up the White House. Nor did she incite anyone else to. She merely talked about a fantasy she had had.
She "thought an awful lot" about blowing up the White House. She thought it. To arrest her for this would be to arrest her for committing a thoughtcrime, for imagining something. It would be as mad as arresting her for her murder of that bloke in the movie Body of Evidence, which she also didn't really do—that, too, was a fantasy, an image.
What next? Arrest film directors who have used CGI to depict the White House being destroyed? Feel the collar of anyone who's written fiction about the killing of a president? After all, those fantasies might also trigger some hothead to do something he shouldn't. Maybe all stories and dreams and thoughts of doing harm to politicians should be outlawed.
We shouldn't only defend Madonna because she didn't actually "threaten to blow up the White House," as the possibly illiterate Morgan put it. We should also defend her because heated speech, hyperbolic speech, even violence-tinged speech, is a legitimate part of political discourse and should remain absolutely free.
There was a Supreme Court ruling that put this very well. In Watts vs the United States in 1969, the justices said that political talk often includes "vehement" and "unpleasantly sharp" attacks on public officials and even forms of criticism that sound violent but which are really just crude or super angry.
They were ruling on the 1966 case of a young man who was convicted of knowingly threatening an individual's life—the President's—during a rally in D.C. against police violence, when he said: "They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification... and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." The Court threw the conviction out, ruling that it was not a realistic threat to kill President Johnson but was merely a "crude" way of expressing "political opposition to the President."
And so it is with Madonna. She was crudely stating political anger. She was expressing political exasperation in an unfiltered way. We must have space in the political realm for crudeness and nastiness and stupidity and all the rest.
Of course genuine incitement to violence, where you use words knowing that they could imminently and directly contribute to the physical harming of an individual, is not a free-speech issue. But violent fantasies are. Violent thoughts are. Violent-inducing speech is not a free-speech issue, but violent-sounding speech—"I could kill that son of a bitch," "I thought about blowing up the White House"—is. Feminists should bear this in mind. Some of them are defending Madonna today, which is cool, but in the past they've sometimes been too quick to depict porn or misogynistic music as forms of violence.
The Madonna controversy is striking for what it tells us about the Trump era. Which is that its promised war on P.C. might be a bit of a sham, and these right-wing railers against Safe Spaces and triggered youths might not be as big on free speech as they'd like us to believe. Their freakout over some throwaway comments by Madonna is as mad as when campus snowflakes lose the plot over scenes of sexual assault in Shakespeare. All of you, listen: these are fantasies; they won't harm you.
Increasingly, police officers are simply becoming agents of the state, unconcerned with individual liberty. Know your rights, don't be bullied! The liberty you protect may be your own. From Reason.tv, FlexYourRights.org and CopBlock.org http://www.LibertyPen.com Even the innocent can get swept up by aggressive police tactics designed to surrender your rights as a citizen. Excellent video about protecting your rights.
From the Tom Woods Show (June 3, 2016), Former Deputy Sheriff Ernie Craig has devised a script that should be learned for any driver seeking to protect his rights from the pry of state agents. It is a comprehensive guide as to what you should say and do if you are pulled over for a traffic stop.
Terrence Jennings/Polaris/NewscomFor proof that the snowflake tendency runs as deeply among Trumpites as it does among campus censors, look no further than the Madonna controversy.
