“Pacific Grove’s Tax Dollar at Work. The city council hires a consulting firm to help it figure out how to raise my taxes”
December 7, 2025 – Wall Street Journal (Opinion Commentary)
I live in this city of around 15,000. Locals call it “America’s Last Hometown,” and there’s something to that term. People are neighborly and our crime rate is very low. It isn’t quite Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, but it isn’t far off.
Last month, though, Pacific Grove’s City Council passed a shocking measure that undercuts the warm-and-fuzzy hometown feeling. The majority approved an expenditure of up to $141,530 for a political consulting firm to help it figure out how to raise taxes.
The firm is called Props & Measures, and its proposal isn’t exactly subtle: “We work with our clients to identify shared community priorities and values to identify the elements of a successful revenue proposal. We have built community consensus for revenue measures in hundreds of communities throughout our home state of California and many communities across the country.”
It continues: “The partners and consultants at Props & Measures have experience with numerous successful public finance ballot measures that have raised billions of dollars in voter-approved revenue for public programs, services and facilities.”
In short, Pacific Grove’s City Council voted to use our taxes to come up with a strategy to increase our taxes.
In its proposal, Props & Measures asks, “What are the general parameters (in dollars) of the tax tolerance among residents right now?” In short, how likely are we taxpayers to resist further tax increases?
The council is clearly looking for ways to tax us further. There are some legitimate ways to do that. One is for the members to spend their own funds on a campaign and get others who agree with them to spend their Council is making us pay for their effort to figure out how to make us pay more. That isn’t only unfair, it’s corrupt.
In a 1968 article in the Journal of Law and Economics, James R. Schlesinger—later defense secretary under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and energy secretary under President Jimmy Carter—wrote: “The tool of politics (which frequently becomes its objective) is to extract resources from the general taxpayer with minimum offense and to distribute the proceeds among innumerable claimants in such a way as to maximize support at the polls. Politics, so far as mobilizing support is concerned, represents the art of calculated cheating—or more precisely how to cheat without being really caught.”
The good news is that the Pacific Grove residents who alerted me to this have caught the cheaters. Is it too late? Time will tellDavid Henderson, Pacific Grove
Mr. Henderson is an emeritus professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School, a research fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.