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She still has my vote going on a year now.
Medina gets ambushed by BecKKK's 9/11 Truther silliness, speaks more to her seriousness than it does to her being ready to counter all the paranoid fantasies and "connections" that BecKKK and his ilk dream up.
She's probably more able to talk about real problems than BecKKK is, or would ever want to be.
Silly her for being an adult and not ready to "play" BecKKK's games.
She still has my vote going on a year now.
Meh. Beck is an ass and, quite arguably, a tad crazy.
But he asked her a rather pointed question, and she revealed more of what is going on in her brain than is healthy for her political career.
His motives or credentials matter for nothing here.
Her answer does.
She has placed herself squarely in the "controlled demolition" school of thought, with all that implies.
Let the figurative beatings begin. She will win the votes of the twoofers who will, laughably, have to register for the party of George Bush to be able to vote for her in the primary.
She will also lose badly, although, speaking as a Democrat, I would LOVE for her to win the nomination, just as I would love for Sarah Palin to be the national party pick in 2012.
mmmmm tasty schadenfreude.
No property taxes in Texas? That sounds GREAT! What's the catch?
It's not a new idea, but it's guaranteed to get attention: The government is taxing us out of our homes, so let's abolish property taxes!
Just think of the thousands of dollars a typical homeowner has to pay in property taxes. It would be great not to have to do that.
Debra Medina, the independent-minded candidate in the Republican primary race for governor, has made this idea one of the staples of her third-place-but-gaining campaign.
It was one of the suggestions put on the table in 2003-2006 when legislators were struggling to find a way to revamp public school funding.
Rep. Phil King of Weatherford has pushed it. He introduced a bill in last year's legislative session that would have ended property taxes by Jan. 1, 2014. The bill was assigned to a committee and died there.
The problem is that local governments depend heavily on property tax revenue. It brings in more than half of the money used to build and run public schools. Same thing for city and county government.
So, unless you want to do without schools and the services that local governments provide, you have to come up with a new -- and you would hope better -- way to bring in money.
Medina and others say they have the perfect option: a higher and perhaps broader sales tax. It's better, they say, because it's more fair; people can control how much they spend on taxable items and thus how much tax they have to pay.
Lots of well-intentioned people -- many from the world of politics -- swear it will work. They may be right, but don't let them get you to believe it will be painless.
First you have to figure out how much money you're talking about. The state comptroller's office says property taxes brought in $35.1 billion for local governments and school districts in 2007, the last year for which complete figures are available. There is no state property tax.
Next comes deciding how to raise that much money with a sales tax and how to do it fairly across the state.
One way is to broaden the tax, making it apply to more purchases than it does today.
Some purchases -- motor vehicles, for example -- are taxed in other ways, so they're exempt from the sales tax. Food purchased for home consumption and prescription and over-the-counter medications are not taxed, and few people believe they should be.
The biggest of all exemptions is for equipment and materials used in manufacturing. To tax that, people argue, would just drive up the cost of finished goods bought by consumers. Newspapers also are exempt for fear of driving up the cost of advertising and thus the cost of finished goods.
Professional services aren't taxed. Doctors and lawyers want to keep that exemption.
See where we're going? The low-hanging sales tax fruit already has been picked.
OK, so move on to increasing the sales tax rate in search of enough money. Talmadge Heflin, former House budget chief and now an analyst on fiscal issues for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, says it could be done by raising the rate to 12.5 percent from its current 8.25 percent maximum -- but we would have to tax the sale of property. (Good luck getting that one past the home builders and Realtors.)
I'm no expert, but I compared sales tax revenue in Fort Worth with property tax revenue for the city and Tarrant County's largest school districts. My guess is that a sales tax rate of at least 15.75 percent would be needed to balance the books if property taxes were eliminated.
Would that work across the state? Would it pay the bills in Fort Worth and Fort Stockton? Would it raise enough money or too much?
Good questions. No easy answers.
Mike Norman is editorial director of the Star-Telegram/ Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County.
http://www.star-telegram.com/242/story/1963742.html
Back on topic, I don't think it was a bushwhack...Beck asked a straight question and she blew it.
She just had her Clayton Williams moment. She is done for the 2010 election cycle.
She was on a roll before this up but three weeks to the primary is too little time and she has too little money to counter the new perception that she is just a little nutty.
I never expected her to beat Perry under the best of cir stances but really thought she could push Hutchison out of the runoff.
She can forget that now.
Medina interview Mike Church Show 2/12
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=231237
True.
The weird/sad thing is that she'd be mainstream in this forum.
That forum is hilarious. "It's just a bump in the road", "onward to victory"...good stuff. Delusional people can be funny.
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