California's Proposed $50/Parcel Tax

Friends of Dave.org:

Put your hand on your wallet! Check out this North County Times article. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell and EdVoice are working to get a measure on the ballot called the "Classroom Learning and Accountability Act". This measure would add a $50/parcel tax on every piece of property in California. The only parcels exempted would be those owned by the disabled or senior citizens.

The measure would create about a pot of over $500M for a variety of uses. The money would allocated as follows:

• $225M for additional class size reduction
• $100M for textbook purchases
• $100M for school safety
• $90M for school modernization
• $20M for the CALPADS student longitudinal data system

I'm quite surprised that liberals like O'Connell would even support this regressive tax which would have a greater impact on low-income homeowners who would pay a larger portion of their income than wealthy homeowners. That seems to go against their usual "tax the wealthy" strategy. I guess he feels that $50 is such as small amount that even the low-income families would be OK with paying it. Of course, the real problem is that this $50 wouldn't be the end of it. In the article, it even says that O'Connell plans to add another $50 every 4 years, so this tax would just keep increasing. Also, if this tactic works, rest assured that other special interests will be running to the ballot with their own $50 parcel tax measures.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 9, 2006 5:53 AM
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