SiliconBeat

In case you missed it, Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of the passage of Prop 13, the measure that capped California property tax increases and ignited a taxpayer revolt across the country that blah, blah, blah…If you don’t know much about it, the folks at Cal Tax Research will be happy to give you the history here.

The real debate going on today is what we have gained and what have we lost. Two Sac Bee columnists lay out the debate here and here. The Bee’s Dan Walters gets to the heart of it:

“Then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who was running for re-election, had strongly opposed Proposition 13 along with virtually every other political figure, but immediately declared himself a “born-again tax cutter” and later ran for president while chanting that mantra.

Brown is back in state politics as attorney general and a likely candidate for governor again in 2010. If the state’s fiscal crisis continues, as it likely will, he may once again have to confront the never-answered question that Proposition 13 posed: What do Californians want from government, and what are they willing to pay for it?“

My personal take: It’s been a disaster for the state and remains grossly unfair. There’s simply no justifiable reason that I pay 10 times the property tax as my neighbor (which I do). But more on my thoughts later. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a fan of the lottery, and for many of the reasons you’d expect. But the latest word out of Sacramento is particularly distressing. It’s not bad enough that California has one, but now apparently the governor is going to milk it to paper over structural problems with the state’s budget.

The details emerged earlier this week when Gov. Schwarzenegger revealed his new budget plan. Part of the plan called for essentially selling future revenues from the lottery to create a rainy day fund. The administration went to great pains to insist that this wasn’t a loan, but rather that it was trying to optimize an “under-performing asset.” To hear the full depth of this double talk, listen to this episode of Michael Krazny’s Forum on KQED as Krazny talks to Mike Genest, director of the California Department of Finance.

Read the rest of this entry »