The San Bruno Beacon

The San Bruno Park School District Board of Trustees and Superintendent want to put a ridiculous, regressive property tax measure on the November 2008 Election Ballot.

If the problems with K-12 education in California could be solved with money, they would have already been solved. According to the California Department of Education, for fiscal year 2007/2008, the total funding (Federal, State, local, lottery, etc.) for grades K-12 in the State of California was approximately $68.554 billion ($68,554,800,000). Let's put this huge number in perspective. The total Budget for the US Department of Defense for 2007 was approximately $461.7 billion. On a per capita basis, the amount of money spent on California's K-12 public school system dwarfs the total U.S. military budget.

In return for the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that have been poured into California's K-12 public education system during the past 10 years, we now have one of the most problematic, lower ranking K-12 public education systems in the industrialized world. Only 65% of California's high school students graduate on time (if at all) with a regular high school diploma. That's dismal.

Punishing San Bruno's residents with higher taxes is not economically feasible. In 2000 the price of oil was less than $40 per barrel. Today, oil sells for about $126 per barrel. This has resulted in retail gas prices approaching the $4.30 per gallon mark. Today, 1 out of every 204 households in California is in some stage of foreclosure. Food prices are skyrocketing. PG&E bills are soaring.

Families with household incomes of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year are relatively immune to these higher prices. Families with household incomes of less than $150,000 per year are being hit hard by these escalating prices. Families with household incomes of less than $70,000 per year are teetering on the edge of financial ruin as prices for food, clothing, transportation, and other necessities of life soar.

With this in mind you have to ask yourself what type of delusional, mean spirited people would propose and support a parcel tax that will directly increase taxes on homeowners, and indirectly increase rents on renters, who are already being punished with escalating prices and buried in debt? The San Bruno Park School District Board of Trustees and Superintendent pushing this ill fated parcel tax are acting like tax fanatics because they don't care how many tens of thousands of your taxpayer dollars they have to squander to put this parcel tax measure on the November 2008 ballot or how many families they destroy with their taxes. They want you to pay for what I think is their incompetence, mismanagement, and outright stupidity with as many of your tax dollars as they can suck out of you no matter how much it costs you and your family and regardless of the damaging consequences these taxes have on you and your family.

The SBPSD Board of Trustees and the SBPSD Superintendent don't care that thousands of San Bruno's homeowners and renters are suffering extreme financial hardship. Many San Bruno renters and homeowners are teetering on the edge of personal financial tragedy. Adding yet another parcel tax to the massive tax burden that San Bruno's homeowners and renters are already bearing is like pouring water on a sinking passenger ship so it will sink faster and kill more people.

That being said, let's talk about regressive taxes such as the parcel tax that the San Bruno Park School District (SBPSD) Board of Trustees and their Superintendent want to ram down voters throats in the November 2008 election.

Whether you own or rent your residence in San Bruno, your cost of living will go up if this unfair parcel tax scheme being planned is approved by voters in November 2008. In other words, you will have less money to spend on your family and your children. Yes, even if you rent your residence you will pay more rent because the costs of the parcel tax will be passed on to you, by your landlord, in the form of higher rent.

In a nutshell:

Regressive taxes reduce the tax incidence of people with higher ability-to-pay, as they shift the incidence disproportionately to those with lower ability-to-pay. In other words, people earning more money pay a lower percentage of their income for a fixed tax. Regressive taxes are "Robin Hood in Reverse" taxes; a form of taking from lower income groups to benefit upper income groups.

The median family income in San Bruno is somewhere around $70,000+ per year. Therefore, there are a significant number of families living in San Bruno with annual incomes that are much less than $70,000 per year. For these families, higher property taxes or rents resulting from increasing property taxes represent a significant financial burden. When you factor in the higher costs of living, mentioned in the previous paragraphs, San Bruno residents living below the median income level will suffer a lot of financial pain when these parcel taxes strip away what little money they have to support their families.

The cumulative effect of these cancerous parcel taxes is that they destroy the financial resources of middle and lower income families. These parcel taxes are like a growing parasite or cancer that kills families by draining their financial resources to the point where they die a financial death. When these taxes destroy families, the people most impacted are the children who have to learn to live without adequate medical care, food, clothing, and shelter as they relocate to a new and often poorer school district that does not have tens of millions of dollars in its bank account like the San Bruno Park School District. With all of the property taxes being piled on homeowners and passed on to renters, in the form of higher rent, it is no surprise that fewer than half of families in California can afford the basics of housing, child care, food, health insurance and transportation.

As the political campaign for this parcel tax develops, the San Bruno Park School District Board of Trustees and their supporters will engage in non-substantive, deceptive rhetoric, that distracts from the real issues, by saying that this parcel tax is for the children, the children are our future, the children need this, etc. This deceptive blather is like an oil company saying they are environmentalists after one of their tankers spills a few hundred thousand gallons of oil into the ocean.

The fact of the matter is that if the SBPSD Board of Trustees and Superintendent really cared about our children they wouldn't allow the SBPSD to become distracted by numerous scandals that have made this Board the laughing-stock of school boards in the SF Bay Area; they would not mismanage the taxpayer money that has already been entrusted to them; they would subject the SBPSD to an independent forensic audit to ferret out the root of the District's financial control problems; and the Board would hire a Superintendent who could bring substantive change to the SBPSD that would improve the lives of the children in the SBPSD.

Finally, you do not improve the lives of children by burying their families with tax after tax after tax to the point where they cannot afford to survive. Severe financial problems are more often than not the root of domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as other dysfunctional behavior that leads to many of the horrific family tragedies that we read about in the newspapers.