I understand John is putting together a mega-post on this subject, but Larry Lange in the P-I has really written a tour de force here, that carefully explains all the assumptions that go into the conflicting cost numbers for Prop 1. Every citizen in the district would be smarter for having read it. In particular, I applaud his emphasis on per-adult and per-household numbers rather than raw totals, as that’s a number that means something to real people in the real world.
I would have liked to see a remark that some of the program costs are covered not by local taxes but federal dollars, but that’s a minor quibble.
While the Mass Transit Now campaign is holding its own on this argument, this is not favorable terrain for them. The campaign really has to grab the narrative and focus more on benefits, rather than costs. No one votes for a program because it costs less than other people say it does; they vote for it because they like the benefits it’s going to bring to them and people they know.
Larry Lange got it wrong, which is typical, since Lange never fact checks paid liars like Jim MacIsaac. MacIsaac comes up with his own proprietary methods to achieve the biggest total possible. ST did not come up with their number by dividing the tax bill by more households. Unlike MacIsaac’s method, and contrary to Lange’s article, ST’s calculations did NOT involve doing any division by the total number of households. They used industry standards – something the anti-rail folks always ignore.
The only determinant of how much someone will pay in taxes is how much they spend in taxable purchases over the course of the year. Why is this not addressed at all, by either side? The entire debate, as presented in this article, is framed as if the tax were levied on incomes rather than on consumer spending.