Basic problem of for-profit medical care

[curlcoat]

@Voyager

Well, if the people who are moving use more resources than they pay in taxes, we win, right? And if the people who are staying are the ones making lots of money, then they can’t be driven out by high taxes, right?

Except it’s the opposite - people who could get jobs in other states, who could afford to move, particularly those who had a house they could sell here for more money than houses are worth elsewhere, those where the ones that were and are leaving. I think now it’s mostly retirees but before the housing crash it was anyone who wanted to get away from the traffic, population, high costs.

If you keep cutting them, you can hardly expect them to get better, can you?

I would like to see reforms before we throw more money at them. In the case of schools, it would be interesting to see what the states your kids are going to school in pay into their colleges as compared to here. Also what they pay into other social services and how the taxes compare to here. I don’t know if it’s corruption or mismanagement, but it’s hard to believe that our schools can be so bad when they are getting as much money as they are.

Here is the way it worked in NJ, at least. Every five or ten years they reassess all the properties, and rebalance property tax bills accordingly. It is usually done to keep the tax revenue more or less constant, so if the houses of all your neighbors also went up five-fold you wouldn’t actually be paying more. A little bit more to make up for the people who just bought and are paying at a higher rate. The value of my house in NJ went up significantly while we were there, but the taxes did not.
If values go down, so do taxes. That’s fair. Of course it is no good if your much reduced home value is still way above your Prop 13 value. But this should have been done before the crash. The unfairness is still there. After all, the ones hit the worst are those who suffered real, not paper losses, and they are the ones paying taxes on the inflated value.

They shouldn’t be - they can request a reassessment if they are paying taxes on more than what the house is worth now. Re: your NJ example, I don’t think it would work here if for no other reason than I don’t think we can afford to pay enough assessors to do all the houses we have here every five years, and prices change so fast they wouldn’t wait 10. Also, because our house prices can climb so high, even a few years of paying property taxes without Prop 13 would be a killer. For example, our house was valued at about $800K at the height of the boom, and it went up about 100K a year for a while there. No way our salaries matched that increase!

I’ve heard this and finally decided to look it up. Prop 50 covers this inside a county and Prop 90 covers it outside a county. However most counties don’t give the break to inter-county transfers. Here is a list. So if I wanted to sell my house and move to Sonoma county, I’m still screwed.

Ah! I guess since I wouldn’t consider living anywhere but Orange County this hasn’t come up. Kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it?

Some states have specific tax breaks for the retired which don’t involve them leaving their homes. The retired, with a reduced income and the same tax burden, do deserve a break. Let’s pay for it by raising taxes on business property. Businesses who are over 65 are not retired.

Well, “they” say that raising property taxes on businesses is what drive them out of the state to places where it costs less to do business. My husband lost two jobs due to the company moving out of state, once to St Louis and once to someplace in Texas. I lost my last job when the company I worked for was sold and almost everything was moved to Michigan and Texas.

I honestly don’t think we need to figure out more things to tax, I think we need to work on making sure that a majority of the adults living here are putting more into the system than they are taking out.

[Hbns]

@curlcoat

I honestly don’t think we need to figure out more things to tax, I think we need to work on making sure that a majority of the adults living here are putting more into the system than they are taking out.

And that the Government isn’t putting out more than is needed.

Just learned that in my state a special tax to pay the bonding of a large “public good” project was not eliminated when the bonds were retired. Instead new bonds were issued for a different project, the tax shifted to those bonds and that project’s original budget reallocated to several “pet” projects. :mad: