Published
4 years agoon
It’s the good news that California’s political establishment — Democratic politicians and their allies in public-employee labor unions — prefer not to acknowledge.
Last week, the state Department of Finance closed the books on 2018-19 revenue and reported that the state collected $144.8 billion, $1 billion more than it had anticipated just weeks earlier, and $2 billion-plus more than the 2018-19 budget had originally forecast.
It’s also a whopping 71.5% more than the state was collecting a decade ago, far outpacing both population growth and inflation.
The state has enough money to max out its reserve funds and provide several billion dollars in extra cash to offset schools’ rising pension costs.
Per-pupil spending on K-12 schools has risen by at least 50% in recent years as they collected their constitutionally mandated share of that rising revenue and benefited from ever-rising property-tax revenue.
Speaking of which, the official line goes something like this: When voters passed Proposition 13, the historic property-tax limit law, in 1978, they hammered schools and local governments unmercifully.
Once again, the reality is at odds with the propaganda.
By imposing a 1% cap on taxing real property values (plus voter-approved bonds), rolling back taxable values to 1976 levels and limiting future increases to 2% per year, Proposition 13 did immediately and sharply reduce revenue. In fact, the measure cut it from $10.3 billion a year to $5 billion.
Since then, however, property-tax revenue has steadily climbed, thanks to that automatic 2% annual raise, new construction and the reassessment of homes and commercial properties when they change hands.
California’s county tax assessors have just closed out their rolls of taxable property for the 2019-20 fiscal year, and once again they are sharply higher, led by soaring property values in the booming San Francisco Bay Area.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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