patrick.net

It's just a union power grab. They can raise local taxes on food, gas, anything, even income taxes. It isn't hard to pass these on low voter turn out days. I don't see this affecting housing much since union folks tend to have multiple houses. Our neighbor (teacher) owns 3 (1 is a vacation home).

Unions have ability to take time off in their contracts to protest, etc... make this vote happen on like tuesday when private sector employees do not have time and all unions can go and vote and taxes pass.

Thats how they passed the last additional school tax (was it 2 years ago).

Personally I rather not have to pay 3 layers of taxes, one to the fed, one to the state, and a bunch of different taxes to localities.

Here are the am radio hosts protesting this tax hike:
http://www.kfiam640.com/pages/jk2010.html

http://www.chlorinatedliberty.com/2011/04/californias-sb-653-tax-tsunami-cometh.html - even more about it.

"Allowing counties to impose sales and use taxes beyond what is currently permissible would lead to different items being taxable in different counties as well as competition between counties with negative impacts on some businesses,” Casazza said. “Trying to cope with higher and different types of taxes in 58 different counties would only serve to further drive business and economic activity out of California at a time we need to increase jobs, not kill them."

Of course knowing how good our unions are, this system will never be abused, businesses will not be killed in order to support higher salaries for the union leadership and bribes.