Thursday Open Thread

17 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. Good morning, Alva.

   Did I miss your take on Proposition HH? This initiative, and the growing effort to stop it, has some of my friends asking me to explain it to them, and I am still a little unsure if my understanding is correct.

   Maybe one of our learned Polsters has an understandable breakdown of the situation. Thanks…

   Log in to Reply

   1. Duke, here is the Bell Policy Center explainer.  It’s complicated. 

      Bottomline:  Due to the extreme increase in property tax valuations, legislation to mitigate that increase will proportionally benefit lower and middle income homeowners, and offset loss of property tax revenue by tapping TABOR money (raising the amount that can be retained, and reducing TABOR refunds, but with proportionally more going to lower and middle income families).

      This all became necessary due to the repeal of the Gallagher Amendment which had its own problems.  Primarily distorting property taxes which penalized rural school and fire districts dependent on that revenue source.  It also was placing an increasing tax burden on non-residential properties.  But when it was repealed, it necessarily shifted the balance back to residential property.  The double-whammy of higher tax rates and assessed values hitting at the same time put us in an untenable situation.  Prop HH is a temporary 10-year measure.  It’s not perfect but no one has put forth a better solution that I’m aware of.

      Log in to Reply

      1. Too complicated?
         I will probably vote NO.

         Log in to Reply

         1. The result of a successful NO vote is your property taxes will likely go up 38%, and your TABOR refund will be based on your household income.  The less you make, the lower your refund.

            Log in to Reply

            1. So, if you make a lot of money and own a home where your property taxes will go up 38%, you’ll get a bigger TABOR refund which will then go to the county government to pay your property taxes.

               If you don’t make that much money and you rent your home, then your smaller TABOR refund will not be needed to pay your local property tax bill.

               Log in to Reply

               1. I think it's possible for property taxes to go up a lot while the TABOR refund could still be anywhere from zero to minimal, depending on the year. The possibility of a TABOR refund is primarily based upon if relevant state revenue is above the existing TABOR cap.

                  Log in to Reply

               2. With a NO vote, that is my understanding, as well.  With a Yes vote, the property tax increase should be about 50% less, and the TABOR refund will be equal regardless of income, thus favoring the lower and middle income families. The retained tax revenue from the higher TABOR caps will be used by the state to backfill the lower property tax revenues to the local tax districts.

                  Property taxes of course far outstrip any likely TABOR refunds regardless of the vote’s outcome. I’ll take a 50% discount off a several thousand dollar tax increase any day. TABOR refunds are in the hundreds of dollars per person, if I recall.

                  Log in to Reply

   2. I'm only going to try a portion of HH here, Duke. Mainly, I'm uncertain about what happens a few years down the road, but as our buddy Jim M. said in a stupor before passing "the future's uncertain."

      Right now, we're getting pretty sizeable TABOR refunds, because we have a big TABOR surplus. HH would increase the TABOR cap, like CC did back in 2005, meaning the state could retain more revenue before needing to do refunds or tax adjustments under TABOR.

      If HH passes, revenue collected between the CC cap and the HH cap would first be used to reimburse local governments for the revenue they lost to property tax decreases (also possibly some direct money for housing and schools). HH would also devote $128 million as a lump sum into a fund used to reimburse local governments into the future. Part of my concern is what happens if there is a bad recession where maybe revenue is well below the HH cap, and money in this fund isn’t enough to cover payments to local governments.

      A lot of the opposition to HH is because it would reduce money available for TABOR refunds. But it’s possible that the bigger refunds might only be in the next couple of years, and a lot of years since 1992 haven’t had TABOR refunds at all. With the higher HH cap, it seems possible there might be years where there won’t be refunds, while there might be under the CC cap. As I understand it today, some people might benefit more from the property tax decreases than they’d lose in TABOR refunds, but some wouldn’t.

      Also lurking for 2024 is an initiative filed by the ex-deputy SOS Suzanne Taheri (if it reaches the ballot) that would cap property tax revenue increases at 3%, but would commit the state to an amount of money to pay back local governments.

      So, if there’s a recession and both HH and Taheri’s initiative pass, could the state be left holding a bag in the future under which it needs to do something else to keep local governments whole? Since HH is statutory and the Gallagher Amendment is out of the Constitution, could the state increase property tax rates above what’s in HH through a bill or ballot measure if need be? Check me on all of this, but the election’s not until November so we all have some learnin’ to do!

       

      Log in to Reply

      1. Thanks for that enlightening explanation, 2J2D. As we consider this situation, a few things become more clear.

         Lower-income property owners seem to be the target group here. They are the people who struggle to find a way to pay their property taxes because they are now on fixed incomes but live in a paid-for home. 

         The winners here are wealthy property owners and local governments. Can someone tell me that assessment is wrong?

         Log in to Reply

         1. I think you’re generally right, but I would add a couple points.

            Lower-income property owners whose property isn’t worth millions will benefit from the valuation reductions in HH. Example, if the property’s worth $300,000 a $50,000 reduction should be helpful. The lower-income folk will also get a tax rate “reduction,” and I’m putting “reduction” in air quotes because rates probably would’ve been lower if we had just kept Gallagher.

            Also, if there are TABOR refunds, the legislature has passed bills the last couple years to make sure lower income folks get equal or closer to equal amounts in raw dollars as higher income folks. Refunds have been big enough lately to make at least one decent purchase, like new tires-level, or to pay a decent bill. But if the legislature flips or there’s only small or no TABOR surpluses, this might go away.

            Log in to Reply

            1. There are two immutable universal laws in play here that most folks would do well to remember:

               1.  You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.

               2.  Nothing is certain, except death and taxes (. . . unless you’re among the modern day gilded age 1%ers and have things rigged so as to avoid the latter.)

               Pretending or portraying otherwise is just for politicians playing their shell-game semantics.

               Me personally, I’ll take the reduced property taxes, because the third immutable universal law in Colorado is that, Tabor shouldn’t even exist and those “refunds” will always be fucked with in any given year.

                

               Log in to Reply

2. Why Brad DeLong is an interesting writer of "history of economics."

   Apologies for the long quote.

   The post-agriculture post-metalworking pre-industrialization pre-globalization human economy is a good place to start our narrative of the history of economic growth. So let us ask: What was human life like in the early days of civilization, in the long Agrarian Age of bronze and iron and writing, after the discovery of metals and writing but before reliable trans-oceanic travel, in the years from, say, -3000 to 1500?

   Our standard of living back then? If we had to slot it into emerging-markets standards of living in the world today, then for typical people—not the élite—we might call it $2.50 a day. Back then technological progress was so slow and resource scarcity so great that if the average human population grew at 8% per century—which it did from -3000 to 1500—potential benefits from technology enabling better use of resources and thus higher productivity would be offset by scarcer resources per capita and thus lower productivity. From -3000 to 1500, I cannot see any significant difference in the materialstandard of living of the typical person. (Of course, the élite of 1500 had lives far outstripping in wealth those of -3000, and the typical person in 1500 had much greater cultural wealth accessible to them, if they could grasp it, than their predecessors in -3000.)

   Now civilized human populations growing at an average pace of 8% per century for 4.5 millennia should make us sit up and take notice. We know a preindustrial pre-artificial birth-control population that is nutritionally unstressed will triple in numbers every 50 years or so. That was the experience of the conquistadores and their descendants in Latin America. That was the experience of the English and French settlers coming in behind the waves of plague and genocide that had decimated the indigenous Amerindian population in North America. That was the experience of the Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian settlers on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, after the armies of the gunpowder empires, most notably of Yekaterina II Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov (neé Sophie), Tsarina of All the Russias, drove out the horse nomads and opened the black-earth regions to the plow.

   And yet it took not 50 but 1500 years for human populations to double in the long Agrarian Age of civilization from -3000 to 1500.

   Thomas Robert Malthus taught us that there are two ways that a human population can be kept from exploding—from doubling every fifty years, and multiplying by a thousand-fold every 5000. There is the positive check: people so poor and malnourished that children’s immune systems are compromised so that they get carried off by the common cold, and women so poor and hungry that ovulation becomes hit-or-miss. And there is the preventative check: late marriage for women, social shunning of those who engage in extra-marital intercourse, and conscious fertility limitation by couples so that you can live relatively well without the population exploding.

   Back in the Agrarian Age, the check for the typical family was overwhelmingly the positive one: poverty, malnourishment, hunger, and their consequences.

   Why? I blame, among other things, patriarchy

   Log in to Reply

   1. There is nothing in the link that gives more info. I chose not to provide an email to get his stuff. I already get too many emails.

      I would say that his account quoted here is incomplete. Back in 2000, US News & World Report did a special double summer issue on what life was like in 1000. I still have this and maybe a reference is available on line.

      Historians like Mr. DeLong always talk about Europe being in the Dark Ages. Yet, the two most powerful and prosperous countries in Europe were the Emirate of Cordova and the Roman Empire. No Dark Ages in either. Life was better in both countries for average citizens than what Mr. DeLong portrays. 

      Couple Empire references for you to consider. Then it’s back to current politics.

      “Lost to the West; the Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization” (Lars Brownworth) Also: “Byzantium; The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire” (Judith Herrin) 

       

      Log in to Reply

3. And from the You-Grab-Them-By-the-Pussy Department …..

   Donald Trump’s adviser groped 2 women at Arizona club in 2021, one tells police (aol.com)

   Remember, a fish rots from the head down.

   BTW, although it is spelled “Epshteyn”, is it actually pronounced “Epstein”?

   Log in to Reply

   1. Epshteyn should be pronounced “shitstain”. Here are Joy Reid and Malcolm Nance calling Trump out as a traitor in 2016, while Shitstain tries to spin Trump’s Putin appeasement as normal. 

      Log in to Reply

4. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out ….

   Manchin ‘thinking seriously’ about leaving Democratic Party (msn.com)

   Log in to Reply

5. It's such a shit hole state that even Tubbs doesn't want to live in Alabama …

   Tommy Tuberville no longer owns property in Alabama; senator may be a Florida man, report suggests – al.com

   Does this mean that he will try to bring Space Command to Florida?

   Log in to Reply