I’ve got no soft spot for Utah’s Republican machine but the piling on of Mark Walker seems way too petty to me.
There is some talk that pursuing Walker will bring other legislative unethical behavior into the light but it really seems to me that Utah’s Democrats and their allies are in danger of serious overreach in their pursuit/persecution of Walker.
Major Kudos to Obi Won Liberali for his excellent post on property tax issues in Utah. In his comments section he wrote that he’s “taking a swim in Jeremy’s pond” by posting on the issue. Wrong. His post is a far better analysis than I’d be able to come up with.
It will be interesting to see how things go when assessment notices are sent out in Davis County this year. The southern part of the county was re-appraised last year and homeowners cried bloody murder at the tax increases they received. The assessor’s office has re-visited values in most of the rest of the county this year and tax levies are being decreased across the board. It will be interesting to see how the decreased levies and increased assessments effect the newly re-appraised cities and neighborhoods mostly located in the northern portion of the county. I’ll post again when more information is available.
More and more often I find myself agreeing with the The Sutherland Institute and their policy positions. This new essay takes me even further down that road.
Kudos to these authentic conservatives for a stance on immigration that actually makes sense. It is so refreshing to see self proclaimed conservatives move beyond the standard “I oppose illegal immigration because it is illegal” argument. Nearly all of the ills presented in this standard anti immigrant argument would be alleviated if the immigrants were made legal and permitted to work within our system as natural citizens do.
I haven’t read the whole essay yet but am curious how far down the immigration road Sutherland is willing to go. Are they also arguing for open borders? It is hard to justify support for making illegal immigrants legal while also arguing in favor of closing the border to others who would come here to make better lives for themselves if they could immigrate legally. I’ll report further after I’ve read the whole essay.
H/T KVNU’s For The People
It isn’t often that I can say Bob Lonsberry is exactly correct about something. This article is one of those few cases.
UPDATE 04/18/2008 11:03AM: Guy Murray at Messenger and Advocate has an even better rundown on the weakness of Texas’ case after the first day of hearings.
H/T Alienated Wannabe
Glen Warchol has a description of our heroic immigration system in action.
We need real immigration reform and I’m not talking about a bigger fence at the borders. We need a system that allows non-criminals into our country to work or recreate as they wish. If they want to be citizens make the process strict but streamlined. If they just want to work here we should make sure they meet a limited number of qualifications and then tax their earnings appropriately. Legalize immigration and the vast majority of its ills will disappear.
Or we could adopt the typical conservative immigration plan which is to demand that our government keep doing things the moronic way we do now…only more.
Because there apparently aren’t enough real criminals to pursue in Utah, Attorney General Shurtleff wants everyone to remember that he’s looking to fine people who bet on March Madness brackets this year.
Utah: The state where it will always be illegal to be an adult.
UPDATE 03/11/2008 11:07: I like VOU’s proposed solution to the silliness that is Utah’s extreme gambling prohibition.
Tom made an interesting comment on this post about SB2 (the education omnibus bill) that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of days. I think he’s probably right.
This omnibus bill may be unconstitutional under the Utah Constitution. (See Article VI, Section 22)
One argument in favor of calling it constitutional would be to consider it an “appropriations” bill, which is partially true. However, the constitution requires it to be a “general appropriations bill”, which I would argue it is not. (See SB1 for an example of a general appropriations bill.) Further, there are stand-alone sections of the bill (e.g. lines 469-491, which come directly from HB 419, a bill that had no appropriation), which give further evidence to the notion that this bill has a) more than one subject, and b) the title (”Minimum School Program Budget Amendments”) does not accurately reflect the body of the bill, both of which are constitutional requirements of bills.
It’s clear in my mind that at the very least, the intent of Art VI Section 22 was violated by the omnibus approach.
I’m no lawyer but it does seem that Tom has a point. I was pretty disappointed that the legislature was able to throw all this stuff into an Omnibus and get it passed as one bill. Commonsense dictates that the people aren’t well served when legislators can avoid voting on substantial changes to Utah law and new programs by sticking them together with essential appropriations in an omnibus bill. It seems that Utah’s constitution is on the side of commonsense in this case.
Thank you Tom!
Bob is right again (no surprise). This wasn’t a tax shift…it was a tax increase used to give subsidies to Utah’s business interests.
I’ve been self employed and may do it again in the near future. I’d love to get help with health insurance costs but not on the backs of my fellow Utah taxpayers.
Again…where is the vaunted Utah Taxpayer Association? This is very clearly a new tax on everyone meant to benefit Delta Airlines and a few small business owners. Is Barbara right in her comment on this post? Is UTA really just another business lobby willing to throw citizen taxpayers under the bus if it benefits their donors?
UtahTeacher has done a great job breaking down the political hack job our legislature is doing to public education through use of an omnibus bill containing many pieces of legislation that likely couldn’t pass if voted on individually. Republicans stuck these ugly measures together with all the positive legislation the public education system needs so they could avoid having to debate the wrongheaded bills.
I understand that politics can be ugly but this is ridiculous. Several of the items stuck in this bill have already been voted down in committee or on the floors of the house and senate this year.
Have we really gotten to the point where the legislature can’t get business done in a way that allows the people to know what is actually being voted on? Cramming all education legislation into an omnibus bill at the last minute does a diservice to Utah’s taxpayers and voters. Legislators should have the courage to give each measure an up or down vote.
It is ironic that Sen. Stephenson, president of the Utah Taxpayers Association, is one of those evangelizing about how great an idea this is. You’d think someone interested in what taxpayers think would want each measure that will cost taxpayers to be considered individually on its merits.
Full Personal Disclosure: I am currently employed by the Davis County Assessor Office as a Certified Residential Appraiser. This blog post represents my own opinion only.
KVNU’s For The People blog posted the entirety of an article by the Utah Foundation explaining Utah’s property tax system and how it works.
Utah’s “Truth in Taxation” property tax law has proven to be an excellent restriction on the growth of this tax for Utahns. Every home or business owner should read the Utah Foundation’s brief on how it works.
Are there steps that could be taken to ensure Utah’s property tax burden is distributed more fairly? Definitely.
1. Counties should be required to re-assess every parcel within their borders every year to ensure problems like those in the 2007 assessment of southern Davis County don’t happen again. Obviously this would require that assessor offices in each of the counties be adequately funded and staffed.
2. Utah’s status as a non-disclosure state for real estate transactions needs to be changed. All property sales should be public record as is the standard in nearly every other state in our country. The current system ensures an unfair tax break for high-end properties and a higher tax burden for owners of average or smaller homes.
3. Better enforcement or revamping of greenbelt exemptions should be examined. Many large property owners and developers are bearing far less than their fair share of the tax burden because they take advantage of greenbelt status.
4. The availability of circuit breaker property tax exemptions for destitute home owners should be expanded. We shouldn’t hear of people being taxed out of their homes in our state because of increasing property taxes.
Thanks for KVNU/FTP and the Utah Foundation for some excellent and useful information!
Mayor Becker thinks Sen. Buttar’s bill to make police misconduct confidential is a great idea. Apparantly Salt Lake County already has this policy for their police officers and Becker’s SL City officers want the same deal.
Becker is every bit as wrong to support this as Sen. Buttars.
Police who don’t answer for misconduct are a bigger risk to Utah’s citizens than the criminals they are charged to detain.
UPDATE: 2/14/08 2:25 PM: Glen Warchol just posted his take on this development. He’s exactly right.
I just started reading the comments on this KSL story about the House voting down driving privilege cards for illegal immigrants. I was a little shocked at how many people think taking these permits away is a good idea.
None of the first dozen or so comments that I’ve read so far mentioned the rationale Donnelson claimed motivated him to draft his bill:
Rep. Glenn Donnelson, R-North Ogden, said the cards are a threat to national security and encourage illegal immigrants to settle in Utah.
“With the driver privilege card, we do not know who they are,” Donnelson said. “Are they terrorists? Are they just people who want to come here to work? We don’t know.”
Who does Donnelson think he’s kidding? “Are they terrorists?” What? Has there been a rash of car bombings in North Ogden I haven’t heard about? Of course they aren’t terrorists. All I can take from his statement is that Rep. Donnelson thinks we are all either stupid enough to think there really is a national security concern or that we are just racist enough that we won’t call him on his idiotic assertion.
I’d like to hear a good argument for why penalizing these people is worth increasing our auto insurance premiums and making our roads less safe. I don’t think there is one.
UPDATE 02/12/2008 10:09 PM: Sen. Buttars, you’re not helping.
Why would Sen. Buttars propose a bill that would make police officer misconduct confidential? I’d love to give the guy the benefit of the doubt every once in a while but when he pulls moves as obviously stupid and bad for Utah as this…its hard.
Here is the text of SB260
Our police are given a near monopoly on the use of force in our society. Their use of that monopoly keeps us safe and it is a great arrangement. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need safeguards in place to protect the people from misuse of police power. This misuse happens all over our country on a regular basis. We don’t need to make it easier to hide. Its all pretty simple really. Anyone who would want to make police misconduct easy to hide is either very confused or working some agenda. Either way Utahns will suffer if Sen. Buttars has his way.
I’d recommend that Sen. Buttars and everyone else read The Agitator on a regular basis. Radley Balko has done a great job cataloguing police misconduct across the country. It happens all the time and Americans are more powerless than ever in fighting it. We don’t need people making things even worse in our state.
UPDATE 2/11/08 10:53: I just saw that Ethan is already covering Sen. Buttars poor legislating this session. Props.
I’m usually pretty open to admitting I’m wrong about things I’ve written on this site. I was a big booster of the Iraq invasion when it started and eventually, after being smacked down by Ed and a couple others who left comments, I came to see what a huge mistake that was. It is time again for me to use this blog to publicly correct my position on an issue and change my course.
I’ve made several posts on this site critical of UTOPIA and other public efforts to create new communications networks. I was wrong. Jesse has a great post summarizing the history of telecommunications and the terrible mess our government has made of things. I highly recommend that anyone interested in this issue check out the linked post above and FreeUTOPIA.Org. A lot of political forces are aligned against UTOPIA and that is unfortunate because it seems to be the only possible chance for Utah to break out of the current mess.
UTOPIA is not just a cool gadget that local governments are promising residents or an effort on the part of those governments to get involved in providing phone/cable/internet services. It is an effort to create an environment where real competition exists between providers of communications services on a completely new and neutral network not controlled by the regional telephone companies that for decades have bribed, threatened and sued anyone threatening their dominance. The current communications market is anything but free. Qwest and its counterparts in other areas of the country own congressmen, senators and whole state legislatures that they’ve paid dearly for in an effort to defend their government granted monopoly. It is time for an end to the status quo.
UTOPIA and other local municipal broadband efforts should be applauded and supported by those who claim to believe in the efficacy of free markets.
