Starkly Different Responses to Defeat of Proposed Los Angeles Sales Tax Hike

A follow-up to my post from yesterday, "South-Central Voters Went 60-100 Percent in Favor of Failed Los Angeles Sales Tax Hike on Tuesday's Ballot."

And remember, the local sales tax would have surged to 9.5 percent. An Angelino would be paying nearly an additional 10 percent to taxes for each taxable consumer purchase in Los Angeles.

At the Los Angeles Times, "L.A. tax-hike vote patterns tell a tale of two realities":

Those in higher-crime areas, who vote in lower numbers, supported the proposal almost to the same extent that more affluent voters rejected it. The hike was defeated.

Nearly every week, 70-year-old Barb Johnson hears word of a nearby robbery or car break-in in Vermont Knolls, her neighborhood of modest bungalows just west of the Harbor Freeway in South Los Angeles.

So it was alarming, she says, to learn this week that voters had rejected a proposed city sales tax increase that the mayor, the police chief and other civic leaders said was vital to shoring up the Los Angeles Police Department and improving emergency services.

"How are we supposed to keep our streets safe if there's no money?" the retired office manager asked.

Over the mountains, in the distant northwest San Fernando Valley suburb of West Hills, Orly Salem, 59, was unmoved by City Hall's plea. A construction company bookkeeper, Salem dismissed the proposed half-cent increase in the sales tax with a weary assessment: Enough is enough.

"Every time it's more, more, more," Salem said. "When I don't have money, I cut my expenses. Why can't they do the same?

A detailed Times analysis and interviews with those and other voters found starkly contrasting vote patterns and perceptions of the proposed sales tax hike across the nearly 469-square-mile expanse of the sprawling city.

In many South Los Angeles precincts, support for the tax increase was overwhelming, as high as 86%. The opposite was true across large swaths of the northwest San Fernando Valley, the Westside and San Pedro, where "no" totals ran as high as 83%. Overall, the measure was defeated with 55% of voters opposed, according to unofficial results.

The contours of the results — and the overall outcome — show the well-established voting dynamics in Los Angeles that will play a significant role in the current campaign to replace Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. More fiscally conservative, independent and Republican voters are concentrated in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods on northern, western and southern fringes of the city. And Tuesday they followed a historic pattern of going to the polls in larger numbers.

Yeah, that's pretty predictable.

The haves vs. the have nots, right? Or the big-government dependents vs. the anti-tax hike independents. Either way, this local divide says a lot about American politics. Mitt Romney's 47 percent comments were crude and politically incorrect. But they really captured the essence of the debate on the role of government in society today.