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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 6/12/12

North Dakota considers eliminating property tax

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North Dakota tries to bankrupt itself, once the oil & gas runs out.  This is even worse than California-destroying proposition 13.  From the NY Times:
"BISMARCK, N.D. -- Since Californians shrank their property taxes more than three decades ago by passing Proposition 13, people around the nation have echoed their dismay over such levies, putting forth plans to even them, simplify them, cap them, slash them. In an election here on Tuesday, residents of North Dakota will consider a measure that reaches far beyond any of that -- one that abolishes the property tax entirely. "

Read the rest here:

North Dakota Considers Eliminating Property Tax.
 
Not even their terrific Public State Bank will save them from this blunder.  They are already in a housing bubble, with apartment prices in northwest ND as high as Manhattan, due to the inflow of oil&gas workers with no place to live.  The price of oil is plunging and natural gas has already reached an historic low.  Already, NG wells are being capped.  Will ND kill its best source of revenue, just when the NG bubble has peaked?  This would work out well for the NG corporations, who then would not have to pay property tax on their idle properties, while they wait for years for the NG price to go back up (their thinking now is to export liquified NG).  Great - a resource bubble AND a housing bubble at the same time.  Of course, both are really Land bubbles.  North Dakota's coffers are full now, enabling their politicians to allow stupid things like this.  There is no way to make up the revenue - $812 million - none is even seriously proposed.  The poor widow strikes again!  While we can defer the poor widow's property taxes, we can't defer natural law or the law of supply and demand.  Both will bankrupt the state if this goes through.  It's just a matter of when.

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Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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