Since moving to a new town three years ago, I have become aware of how municipal bonds are a SUPREME ripoff of taxpayers! I have tried searching internet for this phenomena, and there are only vague references to it; almost all links that show up are about investing in them, not about what a ripoff to the taxpayers they are! Where I live in NY, I found that at least one multi-million dollar bond was passed more than 20 years ago (still trying to find out if it was even voted on; I suspect it was just passed through a backroom deal between a private utility company and the county government officials) to pay for connection of a new group of customers to a municipal water supply. The original bond resulted in 402 property owners paying for this bond, which increases annual property taxes by about $600 per property owner! (the water isn't even fit to drink, so we have to supplement it with bottled water. All together, we are paying equivalent to about $140/month for water!) Cities all over the country use these bonds to pay for things, while passing on the cost to the taxpayers, who are essentially just paying the interest on the bonds, for decades (just like a home mortgage, for the first half or more of a loan, payments almost go exclusively to interest, rather than principal). In my local case, the private company that runs water supply systems all over our county, pretends they are a government entity. The project they passed at least one bond to cover appears to have actually cost about half of what they claimed, meaning the bond was just a cover to pad their budget. I urge everyone here to look at your tax records to see if you are also being ripped of by one or more bond issues of the past.
Rip off of taxpayers by municipal bonds
🗣️ DISCUSSION 💬
Govt from top to bottom stinketh.
This. As everybody is focused on national politics, our local ones are just as bad if not worse and have a far bigger impact on our lives. The local "republicans" are just as corrupt as national demonrats.
Want to fix the nation? Start with the county you live in. Then your state gets fixed. Local action has national impact.
Yes; window dressing for a pure wealth transfer mechanism. Those who invest in the bonds get tax-free income, while the population only gets the tax debt.
And a bond is usually the worst way to pay for it. Often bond measures are for popular items that voters actually want (new bridges, school upgrades, etc), but what they don't say is that the legislators already blew the cash budget on things that voters never wanted at all, making it easier to trick the voters into voting for debt. No different than spending your paycheck for vacation and drinks, then putting your house payment on a credit card.
State bonds are the same thing. Truly we don't hate them enough. As the saying goes, "Debt is civilized man's substitute for whips and chains."
Yes! What is really infuriating in our case is that the bond (or possibly bonds; I just found evidence that a second bond seems to have been issued. The one I originally became aware of was issued in 2001 for $4,268,000, a 40-yr bond!, and a second one for almost $2,000,000 was issued in 2011!). This is all being paid by 402 property owners! My outrage is at the max!
Who are the usurers?
This is true👆. Living in a California small city, every election cycle the lib idiots pass bonds that sound good… “this will help get homeless off the streets, or this will help improve our water,” etc. and every year, things get worse. Don’t see one penny improving infrastructure, water bills, electric bills sky high and rising.
I had a neighbor come by one year encouraging me to vote for a bond measure to help the mentally ill. I told her the last mentally ill bond measure money was redirected to some other California government scam program, so what makes her think this one will be different? She gave me a sour look and never returned.
When Dominion first started filing multi-Billion dollar lawsuits against media companies, and Mike Lindell, etc., my first thought was, wow Dominion sure thinks they are worth a lot of money for their "voting services."
Maybe it costs that much. I don't know. They aren't the only voting machines company.
But then I started thinking about ways Dominion could make money from their services.
This is purely a hypothetical idea with no sauce. Do your own research and analysis.
What if representatives of Dominion, the people who Sell the computers to municipalities, demonstrate how, by using Dominion, school referendums pass, infrastructure referendums pass, etc. Wink, wink, nod, nod.
In just one precinct in this country, we may see a $100 million dollar school referendum on a ballot. Multiply this by thousands of precincts across the country. See how the influence over money adds up?
To the OP's point, once bonds and referendums pass, the burden shifts to the American tax payer. Taxes go up, up, up.
How many referendums nationwide passed due to fraud?
If they can steal elections with voting machines, they sure as hell can swing referendum approvals with the same machines.
Maybe that is why Dominion sued everyone for billions.
Yes, as a political activist I found out about "Munis." They will pass a blanket approval for X dollars. When it turns out it costs more than X plus however much it takes, they spend it. It never goes back to the voters, they just keep spending more and more money. It can add up over the years. Munis are terrible.
There is a guy in California who has dedicated his life for many years now to fighting unlawfully imposed bonds: http://www.bigbadbonds.com/CALBONDS/
Last year, the state of california made a law eliminating the limits on how much people have to pay in property taxes, as long as the extra money went to "greater good" causes, such as infrastructure or subsidized housing or downpayment assistance. This means they can pass bonds like crazy now. Its one of the laws I am trying to have voided since at least 5 of the legislators were working unlawfully without oaths and once those votes are voided, the bill no longer has enough votes to pass (scroll down to the part that says "page 30": https://gwsandiego.net/blog/?p=2931
property taxes are a bigger rip off
This "water tax" is added to our total property tax bill. A lot of people aren't even aware of it being on their tax bills! We didn't even think to look at the details of property taxes before we move here; it would have been a factor in our decision to buy (but probably wouldn't have been a deal breaker). However, I will certainly be including this as one more thing to check before buying another house!
I think you're conflating 2 things. One is the existence of the bond, and the other is the mismanagement of it.
The way this is supposed to work is that your municipality wants some expensive things, like new utility infrastructure, roads, bridges, whatever. If they have the funds in their Treasury, they can pay for it that way, or they can issue a bond and saddle future residents with the debt. It's actually preferable, and more fair, to issue the bond, because the Treasury is made up of the tax money people paid in the past whereas the bond is tax money people pay in the future. People in the past may move away and never get a chance to use the thing that was built, but future residents will use the thing AND as you've pointed out, they can see the bond before moving there, so there is a form of consent.
Now mismanagement is awful, but a separate issue. If the municipality got too much bond money and then used it for something else, that's bad and likely criminal.
You are correct, OP is conflating the two issues. But he's not wrong to do it, the way the bonds are conceived and used. My experience indicates the mismanagement ability is intentionally built into the bond as written; it's simply a trick to get taxpayer funds into private hands.
I mean, the theory of a public bond is fine, under an honest and fiscally conservative government.
But in practice, the opportunity for abuse is nearly infinite. Often the text of a bond measure can be summarized as "we establish a $50 million slush fund for whatever the fund managers want" while the title presented to voters reads something like "Safe Schools Crosswalk Act." They've become incredibly brazen over time.
That is what appears to have happened in this case, if it was voted on (or presented to the county as justification to issue the bond). The total amount of the work stated in the bond appears to have cost about half of what the total cost stated in the bond was. And this second bond I found is now beyond the already ridiculousness/outrageousness of the initial bond. I can't wait to see how they justified a second bond for the same, small, group of customers!
In my situation, they told people they would have to pay ~$750 to get connected to the new "municipal" water supply, so most people agreed. However, the bonds appear to have been issued at the same time, and I don't think these people knew they would then be saddled with the additional $600/year for four decades! And I found out that utility type bonds can be issued without people voting on them, which must have happened in this case because I'm pretty sure people wouldn't vote themselves an additional $600/yr in taxes. What is really funny, actually sick, in this case is, even if a property owner didn't agree to pay the $750 to get the water service to their property, they still get about $300/yr added to their property taxes, because they "might" get connected in the future!
This is why local elections are really important. The leaders who approved this bond were elected by the people.
You might want to look into this
https://greatawakening.win/p/17rlrMTkE3/bond-proposal-a-research-needed/
In 2022 I started seeing a bunch of bonds being issued all around my area for things that put individual taxpayers on the hook for thousands of dollars for each citizen in the county.
OVER 1 BILLION DOLLARS for infrastructure improvements in a town of under 50,000, for example. ($20,000 per resident) that passed on something like 1,500 VOTES in an off-off-off cycle election with almost no candidates that was barely publicized (I.e. you’d know about it if you drove past the building that day)
They’re laundering money for something, in ways they either weren’t able or didn’t have to do before.
Nobody joined in the digging, so I stopped, but I was seeing it in states all over the country.
We should really have a stickied thread that points us all to longer term digs or projects on this site.
u/phdinny u/christine_grab u/merf u/maga_patriot_1776 u/CHIEFW00DY
It’s difficult to get interest going on things that require a prolonged effort when everything falls off the radar daily.
I reviewed a second bond from 2011 for an additional $1,935,000. This one was totally nebulas in terms of what it was for; essentially a slush fund. They were gracious enough to spread this one out beyond the 402 parcels currently paying for the 2001 bond.
Any where else in the country have these new town manager local governments. Where a town manager is elected by a town council and they rule like a mayor but seems like you can't get rid them without a vote from the council. Weird because the town voted against a mayor yet we have one we can't get rid of.
This issue, and sooooo many others we know about, especially through websites like this one, really does make "ignorance is bliss" seem to be true! We all now have the burden of knowing all the corrupt and evil things going on!
Here's a perfect example of what you're talking about regarding the abuse of municipal bonds for money laundering.
"A lack of transparency is a symptom of dishonesty – or worse." https://granitegrok.com/national/2024/10/disinformation-isnt-the-problem-government-coverups-and-censorship-are-the-problem
I checked that article out, but it doesn't seem to relate to the bond situation, other than bonds being something hidden from the public. (the word "bond" doesn't even appear in the article)