patrick.net

Prop 13 is a Ponzi scheme.

Get in early and you are all good. Everyone else pays taxes for public services while you sit around high on your prop 13 welfare. It even drives up property values for a while as other people want to get in on the action. Eventually, the suckers (new buyers) can't foot the bill anymore & the prop 13 bubble pops.

If granny can't afford taxes, let her reverse mortgage or move out. It's sad when someone doesn't save enough for retirement, but it does happen. California can't afford much of anything right now. It definitely can't afford to subsidize a bunch of oldsters living in beach houses.

FrmerAptBrker is right on.

Cant compare countries - it is intellectual fraud due to mix of ethnicity being so different.

The 'test scores' in schools is a fraud the unions pull out to extort money. They claim US falls way below all these northern european countries and japan. AHhhhh but I read if you only compare test scores by RACE then students in the US are equal or HIGHER than those in germany/ sweden, etc.

See the fraud? They compare illegal aliens dominated SoCal test scores to sweden!!! haha.

While the idea of keeping the elderly in their homes seems sympathetic on the surface, I can't help but wonder why they should still be in the same property that they were in when they raised their children. Why are those kids' bedrooms left empty?

Ideally one of the grandparents' children would live with them along with their spouse and maybe their child or children. If a home is build to house five residents, it should be lived in by five people. Less than that and local stores go out of business (not having enough people to sell to), local schools close, train and bus stops are taken away, etc., etc.

I would propose a property tax system for non-agricultural land where a population density that can support businesses, jobs, transportation, and schools is calculated, and then homeowners are taxed in proportion to how many square feet per person they're consuming (or in inverse proportion to how many people there are per square foot of land). If Granny wants to stay by herself in her three-story mansion with its massive back yard even though her husband has died and her kids have all moved away and can't come to live with her, she should pay out the nose for that privilege.

Taking care of Granny is easy. You create tax exemptions for people of a certain age. There are all kinds of local exemptions already, depending on where you located. That would have made sense.

Prop 13 did something completely different - it did little else but create inequity.

HelloKitty says

How about this….. We pass the SAME VERSION of p13 AGAIN. So….if you bought your house before 2009 then your taxes are reset to the 1978 level. Anyone buying after 2009 is screwed! haha. think about it….it will pass. The only hope is to enslave the future generations and ‘get yours now’.

That's brilliant. There would of course be less total property tax being collected, so also add a capital gains tax to capture the "discount" people got from having lower assessed values for so many years when they do sell. Also, change prop13 to allow for house prices decreasing, so that your base value can go down if house prices go down and your base price is currently more than the appraised value for that year (currently, your base price goes up every year, even if your base is higher than the appraised value for that year - which is just plain wrong and indicative of how warped prop13 is).

OP Said

"We all know the problems caused by the Jarvis-Gann ‘Prop 13’ tax revolt CA constitutional amendment. It was sold to the voters as a measure to “keep granny in her family home”, but in reality the prime beneficiaries have been major corporations, whose campuses pay inordinately low property taxes, and those boomers who never seem to move.

Let’s say that the US Supreme Court strikes down Prop 13 as being an infringement of the 14th Amendment “equal protection” clause.
"

Per wiki...

Proposition 13 drew its impetus from 1971 and 1976 California Supreme Court rulings in Serrano v. Priest,Serrano[›] that a property-tax based finance system for public schools was unconstitutional. The California Constitution required the legislature to provide a free public school system for each district, and the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution (which includes the Equal Protection Clause) required that all states provide to all citizens equal protection of the law. The court ruled that the amount of funding going to different districts was disproportionately favoring the wealthy. Previously, local property taxes went directly to the local school system, which minimized state government's involvement in the distribution of revenue. This system also allowed a wealthier district to fund its schools with a lesser tax rate than the rate a less affluent district would have to set to yield the same funding per pupil. The Court ruled that the state had to make the distribution of revenue more equitable. The state legislature responded by capping the rate of local revenue that a school district could receive and distributing excess amounts among the poorer districts. As a result property owners in affluent districts perceived that the benefits of the taxes they paid were no longer enjoyed exclusively by the local schools.

"During the early 1960s, there were several scandals in California involving county assessors. These assessors, who had traditionally enjoyed great latitude in setting the taxable value of properties, were found rewarding friends and allies with artificially low assessments, with tax bills to match. These scandals resulted in the passage of law AB 80 during 1966, which imposed standards for assessments to represent market value. However, assessors, who are elected officials, had traditionally used their flexibility to aid elderly homeowners on fixed incomes, and more generally to systematically undervalue vote-rich residential properties and compensate by inflating commercial assessments. The use of market value as a result of AB 80 could easily represent a mid-double-digit percentage increase of assessment for many homeowners"

bert says

Also, change prop13 to allow for house prices decreasing, so that your base value can go down if house prices go down and your base price is currently more than the appraised value for that year (currently, your base price goes up every year, even if your base is higher than the appraised value for that year

Why not just slip an extra $100 every year to the appraisor to lower your "assessed value"?

Why reassess values up or down if its just a bubble anyway ? How many people would have been screwed over by this irrational bubble thinking.

I was surprised when I learned that Propostion 13 has a heriditary tax basis.

Another point to consider is that many people who pay very little tax under Propostion 13 still demand a lot of services from the state of California. This services cost money.

Another thing that could be done to prevent assessors from over-valuing houses would be to make the assessment into an offer on the part of the government, which could be exercised by the homeowner, to buy the property at that price. If the government over-values people's homes, the people can make the government buy the homes at the inflated prices and move to another municipality.

American in Japan says

I was surprised when I learned that Propostion 13 has a heriditary tax basis.
Another point to consider is that many people who pay very little tax under Propostion 13 still demand a lot of services from the state of California. This services cost money.

Yeah they should repeal it to add money to the state budget to pay those pensions to already retired or soon to be retiring state workers.