CORPORATIONS MUST PAY FAIR SHARE

By Ian Fregosi, Turlock | 5/30/2015

Re “Thanks to Chiesa, governor, end of ‘negative bailout’ near” (Opinions, May 17): I applaud Supervisor Vito Chiesa for working to fix the “negative bailout” in Stanislaus County resulting from Proposition 13. Chiesa points out that after Proposition 13, the state had to “bail out all counties in California for the property tax they would no longer receive.” We still face this problem today. Counties would not need this bailout if we could adequately generate revenue. The fairest way to do that is by closing the corporate tax loophole in Proposition 13 while keeping protections for homeowners and small businesses.

Although voters passed Proposition 13 to help homeowners, it has allowed corporations to shortchange counties out of $9 billion a year. Consequently, local governments have been forced to create new taxes and fees to make ends meet. We now pay the highest sales and income taxes in the nation to compensate for the billions we lose every year from this corporate tax giveaway. We don’t need a bailout; we need property tax reform.

In every other place in the country, commercial property is taxed at fair market value. Rather than continuing to increase the already high tax burden on working people, let’s finally have corporations pay their fair share of property taxes.