HB 1050 - Ad Valorem Tax Reform

[The Annoyed Man]

I think the problem is that this state, for all of its being more conservative and financially sound than a lot of other states, is still trying to provide too much service to its people, instead of them providing things for themselves. I do get it that there is going to be some kind of cost/benefit tradeoff if we switched our taxation schema, but I also can't help but think that our state gov't (like MOST gov'ts and gov't agencies) feels WAY too free to spend OPM, and gives not NEARLY enough consideration to ways to save The People's money, so that they don't have to be taxed into oblivion.

If we can't do that in Texas, what's the chance Trump can do that in Washington? Is America past the tipping point?

Maybe, maybe not. There is no logical reason why the country can't change, other than sheer inertia and lack of political will.

But the fact is that, no matter who is president, there are huge and entrenched bureaucracies in DC, populated primarily by people who vote democrat, who will fight tooth and nail to keep their jobs. Examples? How about even mid-level IRS employees willingly taking part in trampling on the political rights of conservative organizations? Even a despotic president like Obama can only order top level department employees - who are appointees, and therefore more or less compelled to obedience - to violate the Constitution. But it is much harder to compel mid-level and down employees to violate the law unless they are personally committed to those violations. Lois Lerner joined the IRS in 2001. She was a longtime gov't employee before then, having worked in the Justice Dept ever since she graduated from law school. In other words, she has never had a real job. She has been a willing accomplice in the belly of Leviathan from day one. Lerner is not the exception, but rather the rule when it comes to people who have worked their entire lives inside of fedgov't who are not presidential appointments. They have a vested interest in maintaining Leviathan, because it is their bread and butter, and they WAAAAAAY outnumber federal employees who think that it would be good for the nation if their own jobs were done away with.

That's why it is my personal opinion that some day it has to all come tumbling down. It can only continue as long as The People are willing to sustain it. If politicians lack the will and heft to force the changes, then eventually either The People rise up and refuse to go along with it anymore, OR, they give up hope, and the situation continues to slide into statist oppression. The reason I think it has to come tumbling down is that I can't imagine The People putting up with this stuff indefinitely, submitting indefinitely, as their lives become more and more miserable directly due to gov't. It has to change. In fact, change is the one thing we can count on in life. The only question is whether the change will consist of an ever worsening burden of oppression from the statist state, or a taking back of their gov't by The People. I'm betting on the latter simply because everybody has a limit to how much they're willing to put up with. I just hope that it is peaceful rather than violent.

Politicians are the only ones who have the power to make it peaceful. They can change gov't for the better peacefully, or they can fail to act, and then The People will change it with violence. Let us hope that under Trump, some of that trend toward statism will be reversed.

[der Teufel]

I know in my county, if you server two full terms as a commissioner, that's just 8 years, you get a pension for life. Where else can you get a pension after 8 years?

Well, there may be more to the story …

I worked for an employer who had a pension plan. You were vested in the pension after five years. That is, after five years of service you qualified for a pension.

But, you couldn't collect until you were at least 55 years old, and with only five years of service the pension was pretty small. Still, you got a pension after only five years! Sounds sweet, but between the wait to collect and the tiny amount of the pension it wasn't really much to talk about.

[apostate]

A decent 5 color printing press with a UV coating station can easily cost $2,000,000. That's $165,000 in sales tax, plus another $165,000 in use tax at the end of the year. If the depreciation schedule allows, say a $250,000 depreciation after a year, then the business "gets" to pay another $144,375 for the 2nd year......and so on and so on.

What you describe is an ad valorem tax, not a use tax. Texas also has ad valorem tax on business property, although I suspect the rate is rather less than in California. http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/D ... m/CN.8.htm

It may well be called that in Texas, but in California, it is actually is called a "use tax". I've seen the documents that the company had to sign off on .....or at least that is what it was called back before April of 2006 when we moved the business to Dallas.

That must be it.

https://www.boe.ca.gov/info/use_tax_table.html

[K.Mooneyham]

I can understand the utility of having an educated citizenry, and that requires funding. However, these days schools are more worried about indoctrinating kids into becoming anti-capitalist social justice warriors than in turning out young folks with useful skills. The idea of basic public education, as it currently stands, has become a waste of taxpayer money in large regard. If they are going to take our money, then we should at least be given value for that money. The property tax isn't going away, but we need some SERIOUS reform in our public school systems.

I have to disagree with a couple sentences here. The schools are teaching what they're told they have to teach by a government that will cut funding if they stray, and a majority of those threatening to cut funding are also manipulating the data to make it look bad enough to justify it. When private-school lobbyists are financially encouraging legislators to move towards a complete dismantling of publicly provided education to minors, it is in their best interest to set the system up for failure. We can all see that this has been quite successful.

My kids went to school in California (when I was stationed out there in the USAF), and then in Texas (after my final term of service ended). While Texas was not as bad as California, there were still things that need not have been taught to kids in school. People can turn a blind eye to it, but then our nation ends up with the kinds of kids that were setting things on fire, breaking out windows, and assaulting people in D.C. yesterday. What are our schools really preparing our kids to go out into life and do? Get degrees in "gender studies"? Give me a break already. I applaud programs like STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), but if our nation is bringing in H1B visa folks to work in those career fields, then all it means is that our colleges aren't turning out enough kids with degrees in those areas. And the foundations for college are laid down in our school system. The schools need to give value for our dollars. To top that off, we don't have enough kids going into the blue-collar technical fields, either. Why is that? Because the high schools don't value that kind of work, even though it is critical to day-to-day life in our nation. Obfuscation of the problems inherent in our education system, and the waste that goes along with it, will not make things better. This nation needs a turn-around in our youth, or things will only get worse, and a large part of that turn-around includes our school systems.

[apvonkanel]

I can understand the utility of having an educated citizenry, and that requires funding. However, these days schools are more worried about indoctrinating kids into becoming anti-capitalist social justice warriors than in turning out young folks with useful skills. The idea of basic public education, as it currently stands, has become a waste of taxpayer money in large regard. If they are going to take our money, then we should at least be given value for that money. The property tax isn't going away, but we need some SERIOUS reform in our public school systems.

I have to disagree with a couple sentences here. The schools are teaching what they're told they have to teach by a government that will cut funding if they stray, and a majority of those threatening to cut funding are also manipulating the data to make it look bad enough to justify it. When private-school lobbyists are financially encouraging legislators to move towards a complete dismantling of publicly provided education to minors, it is in their best interest to set the system up for failure. We can all see that this has been quite successful.

My kids went to school in California (when I was stationed out there in the USAF), and then in Texas (after my final term of service ended). While Texas was not as bad as California, there were still things that need not have been taught to kids in school. People can turn a blind eye to it, but then our nation ends up with the kinds of kids that were setting things on fire, breaking out windows, and assaulting people in D.C. yesterday. What are our schools really preparing our kids to go out into life and do? Get degrees in "gender studies"? Give me a break already. I applaud programs like STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), but if our nation is bringing in H1B visa folks to work in those career fields, then all it means is that our colleges aren't turning out enough kids with degrees in those areas. And the foundations for college are laid down in our school system. The schools need to give value for our dollars. To top that off, we don't have enough kids going into the blue-collar technical fields, either. Why is that? Because the high schools don't value that kind of work, even though it is critical to day-to-day life in our nation. Obfuscation of the problems inherent in our education system, and the waste that goes along with it, will not make things better. This nation needs a turn-around in our youth, or things will only get worse, and a large part of that turn-around includes our school systems.

I agree with he second post in its entirety. Important programs get cut (especially the technical/trade programs) to make way for a "college readiness" based curriculum. Teachers have 6-7 months to teach 9-10 months of material in the core subjects, because if their students don't pass a test made by people with little to zero experience teaching children (and therefore little to zero understanding of how to assess whether or not a child has learned something), the district loses funding. If the district is small enough, it will be folded into the closest large district. This has been seen multiple times with Houston ISD. By defunding the districts and forcing them focus on a standardized test (in an effort to discredit them, towards the goal of privatizing the entire educational system), in the interim what is being accomplished a much larger government in the realm of education. Then you have Austin dictating the entire curriculum. Having grown up in the Texas school system, I recall a time when the local school boards had some say over what was taught to the community. Those days are long gone, because the extreme left and the extreme right are having some ridiculous turf-war over whether teaching our kids how to use a drill press or change a tire can be squeezed in to the day without losing the opportunity to teach them 7 different ways to do long division.