Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota
OpEdNews.Com
Western South Dakota property owners have received their assessment
notices for 2004 in the mail and, for many, the news is not good. Under
South Dakota's property tax system, a property's assessment and its
resulting taxes are adjusted every year and they are a function of the
recent selling price of nearby properties in the same class.
If your greedy neighbor manages to sell his outpriced real estate to a
naive buyer, you and your real estate are in trouble. Property assessments
and taxes in South Dakota typically increase in leaps and bounds and
"unpredictable spurts" (Rapid City Journal, March 19, 2004).
This is in sharp contrast to the California model ( based on the 1978
Proposition 13) which establishes a property's value at its selling price,
with taxes limited at 2 percent growth per year regardless of the market
value changes in the surrounding neighborhood. Unfortunately, everything
Californian is seen in South Dakota as being "too liberal."
The problems with South Dakota's property tax system are based largely in
undefined and unrecognized human greed. Local real estate owners,
exploiting the tourist popularity of the Mount Rushmore Black Hills,
typically feel that their property is worth a good deal more than it could
possibly be worth to anyone. Real estate values have tripled over the past
decade, fueled by dealers who work on a percentage and urge extravagant
prices because they enlarge the dealer's take.
Given the greed inherent in competitive, religious (anti-Christian,
anti-Democratic) socioeconomic systems, real estate is grossly outpriced
and local residents (enjoying one of the lowest per capita incomes in
America) are simply out of the local market, looking forward to life in a
trailer park. Two thirds of new construction in the Black Hills is being
driven by well-healed retirees from distant cities, people who want to
escape the city environs and live in the midst of natural mountain beauty
(which they proceed to destroy with their riswing numbers). It is a
national problem, of course, and it is an old problem, happening all over
in America's natural and precious places.
When a new house sells at inflated prices in the Black Hills, a new
precedent is established and the taxes on surrounding homes increases
accordingly. The results are :
1) elderly local residents on fixed incomes become unable to pay their
property taxes and oftentimes are driven from the homes they worked their
lives away to own,
2) locally-born residents on low incomes from low-income families are
literally excluded from the prevailing real estate market (great way to
nourish new families),
3) the success of new business startups, typically with minimal
contingency funds, are oftentimes compromised by increasing property
taxes, and
4) the Mount Rushmore Black Hills continue to fall prey to blind
development (in a semi-arid region on the verge of similarly overtaxing
available water supplies).
The Black Hills' cannibalistic property tax system is designed explicitly
to maximize revenue for local land owners with an itch to sell big, real
estate dealers and the State of South Dakota. South Dakota has no state
income tax and it is valiantly trying to keep it's government up to
current "specs" by raising property taxes, typically at the
expense of local residents and the natural beauty of the Black Hills.
There are now a dozen millennial steel billboard towers, holding 8
standard bill boards each, in the mile of Buckeye Gulch between Keystone
and the Mount Rushmore turn off on U.S. Hwy 16 (all "owned" by
an out-of-state advertising firm).
This is all we currently seem to know in the desperate world of seasonal
Black Hills tourism, where retailers strive to make a living (and a good
living at that) on a 6 month tourist season. All we seem to know is that
money is the bottom line and that there is never enough of it. We are the
products of religious cultural delusion.
It is no secret and certainly no accident that South Dakota is a region
dense in millionaires (6th in the U.S.) and even more dense in Old
Testament religious fundamentalists. The Black Hills are bound up in the
millennial western religious quest for the land of "milk and
honey."
Black Hills believers walk around on granite turf nearly two billion years
old and they swear to God that God created the place 6,000 years ago, as
they were instructed by the King James Version of western scriptures (you
know, the version that the British used to exploit the American Colonies
and, for that matter, the version that the Bush administration shepards
use to exploit the American flock).
Justified by the British version of western religion, we have (as
Jefferson feared would happen if we emulated the British of his day),
"gone to eating one another" and our own communities in the name
of individual, corporate and State greed (the flipside of individual,
corporate and State desperation). The renouned British economist, Pink
Floyd, in his discussions of "Money," put it this way,
"Desperation IS the English way."
The upside is that greed-driven western socioeconomic systems (e.g.,
imperialism, colonialism and capitalism) are always affiliated with
religion and religious law and are always dependent on perpetual growth
and expansion, typically accompanied by something approaching perpetual
war. .
In a finite world running out of resources and places to conquer,
self-righteous religious approaches are inherently designed to eat
themselves up as well. This was recognized at the beginning in the
vengeful, apocalyptic writings of Daniel and John of Patmos, both of whom
called for an "end of time," not for the actual world, but for
the desperate, despotic, war-mongering religious worlds in which they
lived. To see that religious self-righteousness is at the roots of western
despotism and inequality, we need only consider how our vast U.S. oil
revenues are distributed among the people in the devoutly religious
kingdoms of the Middle East.
The doors to human rights, honesty, fairness and equality (opened by the
dialectic human values of Science, Democracy and nascent Christianity)
will remain closed until the ancient western programs driving right wing
Judaism, JudeoRomanism ("Christianity") and Islamism play
themselves out on the global stage, taking all notions of greed-driven
imperialism, colonialism and capitalism right out with them.
We simply have not yet learned that the minute we cast human knowledge and
human values and human choice aside, we cast God right out of our lives,
individually and collectively. Jefferson and Franklin were fully aware of
that fact. The "compassionate" conservative Bush administration
exemplifies the leadership of a Godless nation.
Dr. Gerry Lower lives in the shadow of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Feel free to explore his book, "Jefferson's Eyes" (a Deist view of Bush World), at www.jeffersonseyes.com. He can be reached at tisland@blackhills.com.
