America’s Retirement Crisis Grows as Cities Raid Pension and Health Plans

[KamaAina]

48. "even wealthy San Jose"

Under Prop 13, that wealth does not necessarily wind up in city coffers. Most of the companies you associate with Silicon Valley (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) are located outside city limits. It's a Bizarro World where San Jose serves as a bedroom community for its own suburbs. California cities make most of their money from businesses and sales tax, not residential property tax. Again, most of the high-dollar shopping areas are outside the city (in one case, directly across the street!)

Even so, Mayor Reed (D-Also Opposes Marriage Equality) had no business going over his own city council's heads and bringing Measure B to a compliant subset of voters on a low-turnout primary ballot. Worse still, now that he's termed out, he's planning to take his act statewide, instead of crawling back under his rock as I had hoped.