California Conservative

The Sacramento Bee reports: “Though he was coy about his own political intentions, actor, director and producer Warren Beatty used a commencement speech Saturday to offer pointed criticisms of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Beatty, speaking before five dozen graduates of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, called on Schwarzenegger to avoid a special election this fall and to use his public pulpit for something other than name-calling.”

“Now that he’s a politician,” Beatty said of the governor, “I say why not rise to the higher level (of) that calling rather than denigrate your fellow politicians, calling them stooges and girlie men and losers?”

“He suggested that California’s budget woes could be resolved if Schwarzenegger endorsed both an alteration to 1978’s Proposition 13, so that business property is reassessed more often, and a hike in taxes on the wealthy.”

A perfect example of limousine liberal mentality: Hollywood elites like Beatty purchase multi-million dollar properties without a care for price tag or mortgage, let alone taxes. They even have “personal assistants” to pay the bills. Nothing wrong with that. More power to ‘em.

However, contrary to the liberal view, it’s not only “the rich” that are benefitting from real estate’s hot run, especially in California. Anyone who’s bought property in or near the major metropolitan areas has seen a significant rise in value. It’s been an opportunity for working-class wealth creation. “Reassessments” (read: increasing taxes) are inherently unfair and a burden to those whose only “wealth” is in the property they own.

The better question to ask regarding California’s “budget woes” is: What’s the state doing with the surplus of property tax revenues? After all, for every house that gets sold, the property tax is automatically reassessed. In the last few years of frothy real estate, city and state coffers have been lucky beneficiaries — for, absolutely, no added value on their part.

For example, a person who has owned a home they purchased 25 years ago for $50K (and has been paying taxes accordingly) and now selles it for $600K or more, the new owner will be paying taxes based on the new sales price (a multiple of 12x). Just because. This scenario has been playing out in San Francisco for the past few years, and similarly across the state.

The rub: If government’s budget was able to function when every property was taxed on the lower values, then it stands to reason they should be swimming with the volume of sales of highly-appreciated real estate. But no one talks about that.

“What is the sense,” he continued, “of running to Wall Street and borrowing $15 billion, raising the debt to over $30 billion, and then coming back here and trying to cut programs and obligations to nurses and to firemen and to teachers and to cops … and then denigrating these good people as special interests?“

Ho hum. Same old, same old.

Beatty’s best quote of the day: “[I]nside most Democrats are people who feel they might some day get as rich as Republicans…”

A very interesting and revealing observation. Could it be envy that drives Democrats?

That would be irrational.

RELATED: CalPatriot has a detailed review of Beatty’s remarks during his visit to the UC Berkeley campus.

Beatty is just another Hollywood blow-hard. Fortunately, he won’t have the last word.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Activism, Arnold, California, Elections, Hollywood, Liberals, Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.