The Wrong Tax at the Wrong Time
Friday, March 21st, 2008 |Opinion
The Wrong Tax at the Wrong Time
By Mark Zimmerman
Orange County has always prided itself on being a progressive community that strives for fairness. When the Orange County Commissioners chose to add a referendum to the May 6 primary election ballot imposing a new sales tax on property, known as the transfer tax, it abandoned those principles.
The transfer tax is a regressive tax that will disproportionately impact lower-income homeowners, place an unnecessary burden on affordable housing and nonprofit organizations and unfairly concentrate our taxes on a minority of our fellow citizens. The way it works is that when you sell your home or some land, Orange County will take 0.4 percent of your selling price before giving you the rest of your proceeds.
