Posts Tagged → taxes
Increasing Smart Growth opportunities in Harrisburg, but for crazy high school taxes…
Harrisburg City is broke, but it presents many opportunities for in-fill development, where existing infrastructure is already long-since paid for. The challenge to attracting development is getting past the regressive school tax, which is based on property ownership. The more property you own, the higher the school taxes you pay. Harrisburg spends somewhere around $18,000 per student to get a sub-par education.
Setting aside the broken educational program here, more than anything an end to property taxes is needed. Once that punitive tax ends, then investors are enticed to take advantage of even weak markets, and make investments, taking risks and sacrifices.
Investment brings jobs, creates economic and financial “churn,” and is how America runs.
Right now, the churn in Harrisburg is below incrementally slow. It is almost nil, with a few exceptions led by brave pioneers committed to the city’s success.
Calling General Lynch to Attention
General William Lynch, Harrisburg’s new receiver tasked with overseeing the further disembowelment of the Pennsylvania Capital, says that his office has no role to play in a criminal investigation.
He says it’s neither his job to conduct one, nor should he be calling for one.
Let me try to piece this together….Lynch is a Republican, like me, but he is trying to actually raise taxes on the handful of remaining Harrisburg City residents who still pay taxes. Despite already having a phenomenally high tax rate, Harrisburg is now supposed to raise them even further. That is according to a Republican leader. Hmmmmm…. I am not happy about that, either from the unsustainability of such a move, nor from the perspective that Republicans traditionally have sought to keep taxes low.
Another oddity is, here sits a law-and-order military man, a general. He’s not a corporal, but a general, the highest rank possible. And he doesn’t want to say that he supports a criminal inquiry into the $350 million debt debacle fueled by insider greed?
Generals are supposed to epitomize (and thereby advocate for) the highest reaches and standards of ethical behavior and conduct. So why is a general now saying that a criminal probe is of no interest to him? Sure, he doesn’t have to pursue it himself, but his predecessor David Unkovic called for one after just a few months on the job. If a crime occurred, as it surely appears to most observers, then why isn’t this leader seeking punishment?
Lynch was recently quoted saying that “There is no money putting people in jail,” which sounds like crime DOES pay in his book. Something is fishy here, folks. A decade of political cover-ups and bipartisan feeding at the piggy trough known as Harrisburg has created a bipartisan web of mutual crime and shared interest in keeping the crime uninvestigated. From what we see, Lynch is playing to that, not bringing the fresh light we needed and expected from the Receiver.
California Pulls a High Tech ‘Yosemite Sam’ Move
Yosemite Sam is, or was, a colorful rootin’ tootin’ California cowboy created by Warner Brothers Cartoons. Based on the ’49er image of a rough ‘n ready gunslinger, Yosemite Sam occasionally shot himself in the foot while Bugs Bunny casually outwitted him. Testing brains versus brawn, these classic cartoons lampooned trigger happy meat heads and, as always, elevated the higher valued brain power of the waskilly rabbit (rascally rabbit, as pronounced by another trigger happy meat head, Elmer Fudd). Using that proven Hollywood method of powerful if subliminal suggestion, the cartoons’ message was clear to impressionable little kids and meat heads alike: Use your head, you’ll do better.
Fast forward 70 years to the home of Yosemite, the supposedly golden state of California. Yesterday, that Liberal-laden welfare state signed into law a new tax on Internet sales. Because interstate commerce is constitutionally protected above individual states’ financial interests, taxes on Internet sales aren’t really legal or legit. Most consumers take some risk when they purchase online, and the absence of state taxes (a huge 8.75% in California), is an overall small but relatively large reward for taking that risk. Returning items by mail costs buyers money, and not paying sales tax offsets those costs.
Well, here we are, many decades after California became one of America’s premier economies, and the elected officials of that once-great state have decided to return to the 1700s way of doing business rather than embrace technology, mobile consumers, and the blurring of boundaries everywhere (like they enjoy the blurred boundary between California and Mexico, a blur long sought and much enjoyed by Liberals everywhere). Rather than leveraging technology to work for California, in this instance, California Democrats choose to take the one-dimensional approach to gathering revenue. Taxing Internet sales was projected to gather about $200 million annually, but with amazon.com and other big Internet sellers immediately ending their high-tech advertising relationships there, the state is now projected to lose about $135 million in taxes paid by the owners of those advertising businesses. And because many of those owners have said that they will now relocate to a nearby state without Internet sales tax, California loses those tax payers as well as the creative brain power that those entrepreneurs brought to the state.
Like all mis-named “progressives,” Liberals are ultimately interested in just one thing, and that is power. Like Yosemite Sam of old, the California Democrats behind this foolish move understand power alone, and by golly, they will exercise power simply because they can. For the simple sake of having it and demonstrating to all around that they have it. But like Yosemite Sam, California has shot itself in the foot. The net result of their Internet tax appears to be just about a complete wash, with the added loss of yet more smart working people from the state.
Like their ideological counterparts in North Korea and China and Russia, California’s Democrats are most satisfied to exercise power for power’s sake, regardless of the collateral damage. Shooting themselves in the foot never felt so good, except for the entrepreneurs and remaining taxpayer left behind in the growing exodus of brain power leaving that Statist state.
Hopefully, my own home state of Pennsylvania, also long a haven for high taxes and unfavorable business conditions, will find a way to take advantage of the Yosemite Sams now running California government, and funnel their loss into Pennsylvania and make it our gain.