The short answer is no. As George Harrison sang, “If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat. If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat. If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.” Or, as Pink Floyd put it, “All that you touch, and all that you see, all that you taste, all you feel, and all that you loved, and all that you hate, all you distrust, all you save, and all that you give, and all that you deal, and all that you buy…” We’ll tax it all, and more.
Even as you read this, there are people in Oakland—bureaucrats, vampires, extreme progressives of the left, the scion of Carroll Fife and Barbara Lee—addressing the hard question, or actually two questions: “What do we already tax that we can increase the rate on?” and “What don’t we tax that we could?”
Sound implausible? It’s not, as a memo from Oakland Deputy City Administrator Monica Davis proves. (I’m indebted to Oakland Report for providing it) She wrote it to her boss, City Administrator Jestin Johnson, in response to his order that she provide “an informational report with a list of options to raise an ongoing $40 million in general purpose fund revenues” in order to pay for everything the City Council wants to do.
Davis did her work all too well. She and her staff scrutinized the Oakland landscape to find every additional item they could tax, no matter how obscure, and came up with a bucket list for the ages. It’s true they didn’t suggest taxing our feet. But here’s what they did recommend:
• increasing the business license tax by 33%
• increasing the parking tax by 25.8%
• increasing the transient occupancy tax by 16.4%
• increasing the utility consumption tax by 4.3%
• new parcel taxes
• increasing the real estate transfer tax
Davis added that it would be desirable if Oakland could raise property taxes and sales taxes but unfortunately it is “not legally permissible to do so under current [state] law” since only the State Legislature can do so. Clearly, our Deputy City Administrator, anxious to curry favor with her bosses, is nickle-and-diming us to find every penny she can. Citizens don’t deserve to keep their paychecks, she argues; the government has prior claim.
And it will never stop. Under discussion, I’m told, are proposals to tax water services, tax healthcare benefits, impose a “window tax” and, if Trump should be compelled to return his illegal tariffs to businesses that had to pay them, to tax that money as well. You can bet that there are trolls at work in the dank basement of City Hall who are poring over every conceivable other thing to tax. These monsters are voracious, and every one of them is in thrall to the public employee unions.
Steve Heimoff