SiliconBeat

Give the accounting firm Deloitte an A for promptness. We received an e-mail from the company with “President-elect Obama and Tax Policy” in the subject field that included a link to its paper titled “Tax Policy Decisions Ahead: President-elect Obama’s Call for Change”.

Noting that most serious observers of Washington “had long since concluded that the tax and spending commitments of the United States are unsustainable beyond the end of the next decade” when the presidential campaign began in earnest in the Spring of 2007, Deloitte reminds us that a few things have happened since, particularly in the last several weeks. Namely, ”a significant economic downturn and extraordinary government spending associated with efforts to promote recovery may have accelerated the potential day of reckoning.” Oh, right. (Wall Street, which seemed to have forgotten about that yesterday, remembered today.)

Deloitte says that the campaign “seems to have given structure to the debate over spending and taxes in four important respects:” Read the rest of this entry »

Time for a bit of perspective on just how heavily taxed we citizens of California are. Based on total state and local revenues as a percentage of all personal income, California ranked 17th (out of 50, for the very remedial among us,) according to the California Budget Project using figures from 2005-2006, the most recent period available for comprehensive state revenue data comparisons.

But how can this be? Aren’t our personal and corporate income tax rates among the highest in the nation? Read the rest of this entry »

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 »