Romney compares California's economy to Greece
Source: AP
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a potshot at California's bedraggled economy, comparing it to the crisis in Greece, as he warned voters on Wednesday that Barack Obama is leading the nation down a similar path of huge debt.
"Entrepreneurs and business people around the world and here at home think that at some point America is going to become like Greece or like Spain or Italy, or like California — just kidding about that one, in some ways," he added, to laughter from his audience in Iowa.
The remark seemed likely to bruise egos in a state wrestling with the prospect of tax increases and painful budget cuts. But Romney may have little to lose there — polls show Obama with a comfortable lead in California, where Democrats control the governorship and the Statehouse.
A spokesman for California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, disputed Romney's assessment. Gil Duran said the state's credit rating has improved under Brown and that borrowing costs, a major issue facing Italy and other financially struggling European nations, have dropped by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j9des1d9z4NERTGo5t706KhpQB-Q?docId=35ad278b42c14502b7e0bff5c4392712
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cstanleytech
(28,471 posts)
progressivebydesign
(19,458 posts)we'd be okay.
Response to progressivebydesign (Reply #14)
cyclezealot This message was self-deleted by its author.
xxqqqzme
(14,887 posts)my blood pressure. Rmoney has only been out here to collect money behind the gates of communities. He certainly won't be planning any 'rally' events.
Cleita
(75,480 posts)The problem is with the minority right wing nuts controlling our legislature with nonsense legislation and obstructionist tactics for those policies we need to get back to being number three, like we once were before the Republican Governors and minority in the legislature messed things up.
still_one
(98,883 posts)AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)Don't forget that thing about your state
NEVER RAISING TAXES
still_one
(98,883 posts)Financial issues
goclark
(30,404 posts)Why does he think that he is an authority on all the States and all the countries?
How much did his dad have to pay to get him out of Elementary School?
yellowcanine
(36,792 posts)What a wimp Romney is. Takes a cheap shot at California, a state he can't win, and then walks it back before he even completes the thought.
DionDem
(77 posts)He's the cheap shot, walk it back, passive-aggressive, truth-challenged candidate from hell. I just love him.
orwell
(8,003 posts)...I'd like to offer Willard a resounding 
Maybe he should take a look at one of the main reasons we are in this mess - Proposition 13 - offered by RW ideologues in 1978, which hamstrings the Legislature's ability to raise property taxes.
Add to that the effects of the economic downturn, largely caused by Con Banksters, in the 8th largest economy in the world and you get a perfect storm.
Would you rather have us follow right to work utopias like Arkansas or South Carolina?
BTW - The Republicon party in CA is quickly relegating itself to 3rd party status.
Hey Mitt, strap yourself to the roof of a Tesla and drive yourself down to Mexico.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)...that the Legislature has ever had any control over property taxes.
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)it doesn't matter WHO controls property taxes. It was and is a right wing time bomb that continues to hurt us.
I hope Jarvis AND Gann are in the hottest parts of hell ! 
And, now back to your regularly scheduled program.
LoisB
(13,028 posts)repeal it have been defeated. Everyone wants what taxes pay for but no one wants to pay taxes. It's ridiculous.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)...increases in the property tax they owed on our family home several years in a row.
Their San Diego County property tax assessment for 1977-78 was more than 10 times what it had been just 10 years earlier.
The house had about quintupled in assessed value since 1966, and the county had doubled the property tax rate.
The increase in value was due to market conditions totally beyond my parents' control, and there was no available avenue of appeal for unconscionable increases in property tax bills. The county was systematically soaking neighborhoods that happened to be popular with home buyers - Our home happened to be less than a mile from the rapidly expanding UC San Diego campus where my mom worked for many years after my father died unexpectedly. My stepfather, whom she married two years after buying the house on her own, had his income severely reduced by a nasty divorce from his first wife, with huge alimony and child support payments which he paid faithfully.
The property tax bills plus rapid inflation of basic commodities like food had made it impossible for my parents to run the family budget. At one point after my stepfather was laid off of his job, they were in real danger of losing the house. Fortunately my stepfather got his job back, but it was a very close call.
My mom was an Eisenhower Republican, dad was a New Deal Democrat. They often found themselves cancelling out each others' votes, but not on Proposition 13. I was 20 years old at the time, and I voted for it as well.
The hidden "gotcha" that few people saw was that the tax rate and increase caps that were quite reasonable for residential property also apply to commercial parcels, which through some sleight-of-hand moves that are perfectly legal can appear to be owned by the same party as they are transferred through an unlimited number of business entities.
Everyone wants what taxes pay for but no one wants to pay taxes.
I'm sick of the arrogance of people who say things like this in regard to the valuable protection Proposition 13's limits on residential property assessments provide to homeowners. If you weren't being taxed out of house and home by your county assessor because you weren't a homeowner, you were either a dependent of someone who was, or you were a renter and the outrageous property tax bills were being passed down to you anyway.
The out-of-control assessments of the mid- to late-1970s hurt a lot of people. Proposition 13 fixed that. Property taxes have always been collected by counties and have NEVER appeared on the income side of the state's budget as a specific line item. Even before Proposition 13 more than half of the state's revenue came from personal income taxes, followed by sales taxes and corporate taxes.
The ignorance about this issue is not surprising considering the constant barrage of simplistic anti-homeowner propaganda that gets spewed on the Internet. Proposition 13 is NOT the main cause of the state's financial problems. Not even close.
CountAllVotes
(22,215 posts)I agree, Prop. 13 is NOT the problem. If anything, it is keeping and has kept people in their homes, homes that people must live in for many years to realize what your family and my family have had to deal with.
As a 5th generation Californian, I for one am glad for Prop. 13. If it weren't for Prop. 13, I don't know where I could afford to live in this state of ours.
for explaining this is a manner that is substantive and quite correct!
I pay enough already IMO and my property taxes DO GO UP every year.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)I can count on a 2% increase every year for the rest of my life. As an empty-nester I will be helping to pay for the education of millions of other peoples' children, and I have no problem with that. I'd rather pay for schools than for prisons.
With specific knowledge of what my future tax payments will be, I can BUDGET for it with confidence. In fact, I have a savings account to which I have a certain amount of money transferred automatically each month to cover my PREDICTABLE property tax and homeowner's insurance payments. (I've never liked impound accounts, and with Bank of America servicing my mortgage I have good reason to be cautious.)
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)both cities and counties. They have been prohibited from levying local income taxes (as NYC and Detroit do) since Jerry Brown's dad was governor. That leaves the (regressive) sales tax, which, in many places, is teetering dangerously close to 10 percent.
Where the state comes in is that, for years, it was "backfilling" these cash-starved local governments from its surplus. That's right, surplus. Now that that's gone, local governments are in a world of hurt. This is especially true in places like San Jose that are mainly residential (most Silicon Valley jobs are in neighboring cities such as Sunnyvale and Palo Alto). The response here (and in San Diego) has been to scapegoat public employee unions and circumvent the collective bargaining process through ballot initiatives of dubious legality.
This is even helping to drive the housing shortage: California urban planners tend to view housing as a dog, because under Prop 13, you can't raise much revenue from it. So everyone's trying to build office parks, shopping centers, etc., and no one wants to build homes for all those workers and shoppers to live in. Result: You have people commuting in to the Bay Area from Stockton and Modesto, about 60 miles away.
Just reassessing commercial properties when they change hands, even through shell companies, would be a good start.
IndyJones
(1,068 posts)that often pay reduced or NO property taxes.
shanti
(21,799 posts)third generation at that, and i also say screw off to douchebag rmoney!
alp227
(33,282 posts)
fleur-de-lisa
(14,704 posts)Women - check
Minorities - check
The poor - check
Young voters - check
And now add CALIFORNIA - CHECK !!!
Missycim
(950 posts)he had any chance of winning CA? I dont lol
IndyJones
(1,068 posts)yardwork
(69,364 posts)The more Romney talks the better the Democrats' chances of winning Congress.
kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)Tickles down bullshit thats all we got. Arnie is one of the worst governors in Cali. At least Gov Brown is trying to pull us out without the help from the Cali goppers, sound familiar?
bayareaboy
(793 posts)of course remember Gray Davis, he got no help, then we got Arnold shit-for-brains.
Fuck you Mitten-head!
progressivebydesign
(19,458 posts)Fuck you Romney. Stay in.. whatever State you're actually FROM.
dynasaw
(999 posts)when you bought a home in La Jolla, California, so in effect you've help rob our economy.
otohara
(24,135 posts)quite rooms only
PatrynXX
(5,668 posts)and even a Democrat can't fix it. So if you want to know what Republican economic problems will look like. ask arnie and greece. then you got your answer.
Kingofalldems
(40,278 posts)The epitome of republicanism and one of the poorest states in the country.
nineteen50
(1,187 posts)according to the latest employment report, California added 45,900 jobs, and then in June it added another 38,300 jobs. In those two months, California was responsible for half the job growth in the entire country. And most of those jobs were in the information and professional, scientific and technical-services sectors, which tend to pay well.
SoapBox
(18,791 posts)Hey Mittens...S...T...F...U!
Gawd, I hate you...you are a vulture, liar, crook, creep, weasel and on and on.
SELL your fancy pants property and get the "F" out of our state!!!!
Did I tell you I hate you?!?!
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)yes, Mittwitt, you're right on track. Moron.
Big_Mike
(509 posts)We have had problems, but when you base most of your tax revenue on the highest wage earners paying consistently, you will lose on years when the economy tanks. If there are no capital gains, or very small ones, the projected tax revenue (such as after the dot com period or the property value bubble), you do not get the planned for receipts. A secondary problem is "rich flight" where the wealthy depart the state because they can afford to and we no longer get their money.
Then, given that our elected representatives waste money like nobody's business and that we have the voters decide to mandate certain amounts of funds for special uses, it becomes almost impossible to have a sound fiscal policy.
itsrobert
(14,157 posts)She lost the election right there.
DallasNE
(8,008 posts)Especially coming on the heels of a report that Romney has saved $109,000 on property taxes by appealing his property valuation, not once, but twice.
Also odd that he attacks Obama for "leading the nation down a .. path of huge debt". Why? Because House Republicans have blocked an Obama bill to extend tax cuts for the first $200,000/$250,000 of income but allow the old tax rates for income above that to revert to the rates they were under President Clinton and that would put a very sizable dent in the budget deficit. Romney, on the other hand, would raise taxes on 95% of Americans and explode the already huge deficit.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)Many people in the country share a view of California as financially dysfunctional. The comparison to Greece is way over the top, of course, but I doubt that anyone who has already decided to vote for Romney is going to turn away from him because of it.
The strategy for both sides in this election is to go after undecided voters in a handful of swing states.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)Tax dodgers are largely to blame for the fiscal crises in both places.
The difference is that in Greece, it's actual, flesh-and-blood people who dodge their taxes, while in California, it's corporations. Apple, for instance, launders its profits through a shell company (named Braeburn Capital, after a variety of apple, just like Macintosh. Kewl! 
) in Reno, because Nevada has no state income tax. Meanwhile, Intel's SEC filings show that they paid no state tax to any state.
Hydra
(14,459 posts)They pay little or no taxes, yet benefit from all of the public benefits like property protection(intellectual and otherwise) and transportation routes. It's like we pay them to exist and hire people at as low a wage as they can manage....and now they want to pay people even less.
Sounds like a utopia in the making...for them.
IndyJones
(1,068 posts)Liberal_in_LA
(44,397 posts)
Codeine
(25,586 posts)to the rest of the Eurozone his stupid little comment might make a smidgeon of sense. As it is he just sounds like every other hick making a "fruits and nuts" joke.