Continuing the discussion from Thoughts on tax payer fraud in WA?:
This community here has been a pain in the ass ever since the sixties when we started electing university profs onto the city council and the county board. We turned into a soft money town long ago, you can build a house here and sell it for $150K or you can build the exact same house one county away and sell it for less than $140K. The discrepancy ain’t all due to taxation; some of it is because this town won’t let you develop a subdivision without Class A infrastructure even though half of the city’s “footprint” was developed and built in the fifties and sixties when the university made it a boom town and all of that building was on a class C infrastructure which the city has subsequently gone back and beefed up at taxpayer expense.
But the taxes are killers. We have a Park District, a Mosquito Abatement District, and one or two others that are not city entities but rather independent entities with the power to levy, and just add it to your property taxes just as your school districts and your local JUCO do. You get to voat for board members of each of those entities, of course.
…AAAAND, now come the sales taxes. Here’s a micro example:
I stopped this morning at a convenience store and picked up a convection donut (99 cents) and a blueberry fritter ($1.79) …subtotal was $2.78.
State sales tax “retailers’ occupation tax” 0.17, six per cent.
County tax 0.03
City tax 0.07
City tax (special) 0.06 (this is on restaurants and fast food)
Total taxes on $2.78 $0.33 so it was $3.11 out the door. That’s an aggregate sales tax of 12 per cent, and highly regressive taxation considering that I already paid income tax on every cent of it.