It seems silly and potentially dangerous to limit when a city can legislate democratically (even with the Fiscal Emergency exception.) Is there any good argument for this, other than people not liking taxes?
Also, isn't that exactly the point of Prop 13? If I bought a house for $500k, and it's worth $5 million tomorrow, I'm liable for the tax increase whether or not the increase is affordable. I thought the point was to allow homeowners the luxury of limiting the insane tax increases to the points of sale, when value was realized.
Taxes arent meerly defered until sale, they are allowed to rise to market value after the sale is complete, but the government never gets those years of back taxes they would have gotten otherwise.
You fail to make an argument for this.
> Teachers and other vital services should come from consumption taxes or other means.
In practice on CA, they are. This doesn't make things better than when they were done by property taxes.
> Owning a home and having it become more unattractive over time while you have paper gains is crazy.
It's a strong incentive for transactions which promote efficiency in the sense of property being in the hands of those who will derive most utility from it. I'm not sure that's crazy, though, especially in the case of non-residential property.
> Esp. when paper losses don't go the other way.
Without Prop 13, paper gains and losses are symmetric with regard to tax effect; with Prop 13 they become asymmetric, as declines in fair market value are immediately and fully reflected while increases are limited.
Strongly disagree here. In CA many people built their houses themselves after the war and don't want to move as an example. You can't argue who would get more utility out of it as a blanket statement. Maybe willing to pay more to live there but not utility.
Property taxes almost never go down. They are not symmetric in practice. It's pulling teeth to get a reassessment in your favor.
Regarding the core issue of property taxes for vital services - one of the flaws is that areas with lower home values have worse services. Nothing will ever change if property taxes is the primary fundraiser for local services.
The other flaw is in practice - budgets don't need to change drastically from year to year but they do. And that's pushed onto homeowners. And what if it needs to change for a valid reason but home values have plummeted? Well that's why they give you problems trying to reassess on a downturn.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/state-and-local-t...
Nope! State and local taxes averaged around 10.08% of personal income in 2015 across the US, and California was sitting at 10.72%, comfortably above the average and at the 15th highest, comfortably above the median.
And if we adjust for cost of living versus wages, California is only midrange: http://time.com/money/5177566/average-income-every-state-rea...
So yes, it costs more to live in California, but wages are higher, and then the state takes an unusually high slice of those wages.
> You can't pay the 1978 cost of living to a new teacher in 2018.
Good thing that the California state and local governments are flush with cash then. (Or would be, absent mismanagement...)
1) If it's not being distributed between the levels in an efficient or fair manner, that seems like a pretty simple fix. There are already mechanisms for intergovernmental transfers from state to city governments; does California need to increase their transfers a bit?
2) California is already a pretty high-tax state. Shifting the burden from income taxes (that flow largely to the state) to property taxes (that flow to cities) might be good, but will simply uncapping the ability of cities to raise money do this?
In short, I think it's a mistake to conflate concerns about "how much tax can California raise" with "is the money flowing to the right level".
Keep in mind, for the US as a whole, the largest source of revenue for local governments (over 1/3) is intergovernmental transfers, overwhelmingly (88%) from state government (https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sourc...). There is no expectation that cities can fund their operations purely from property taxes, and this isn't how cities work in the US in any state. All cities rely on transfers from the state government, and the California state government is raising a lot of cash. If it's failing to transfer it to cities the way it should (which remains to be demonstrated!), this has nothing to do with Prop 13.
Anything that has a non-remote labor component, since the people doing work in a region have to pay the local cost of living, including housing costs.
> Also, isn't that exactly the point of Prop 13?
Yes, crippling local government this way is exactly the point of Prop 13.
I dont trust the govt to assess accurately value, thats not their job. The IRS has never done that, they use fair market value determined by actual sales.
To answer your question, one could argue that it’s not the idea of constitutional limits that sounds dangerous, but what this exact law is limiting that feels silly and dangerous.
As a Californian, all of our crazy constitutional limits on taxes are less awesome. After many years of unequal taxation, similar buildings in the same city pay wildly different amounts of tax, and the difference will only grow over time. People are less likely to move for a new job, businesses get less for selling commercial buildings because a tax benefit is lost when a building is sold. It's one of the worst aspects of California's direct democracy system.
If there were an equal number of ballots on lowering as well as raising taxes, sure. But this is a ratchet that goes only one way.
I don’t think most normal adults in a functioning democracy oppose taxes per se. But it is the right and the duty even of every taxpayer-voter to ensure that the common purse is managed efficiently and for the good of the community, and that’s the heart of all of this. The question is “if you can’t spend what we’ve given you already responsibly, why should we give you more?”
All bad laws were started with good intentions. That should never be what defines a law's value, only cause & effect to the best of our current understanding (and hopefully backed by data).
Note: I'm not saying this is a bad law as I'm not familiar with the local political environment which motivated this nor the particular negative consequences it objectively has.
Last time I was there (California DMV) it was to pick up a custom license plate. I made an appointment and was in and out in less than 5 minutes. I spent more time in the parking lot removing my old plates and installing the new ones.
>Social Security Administration?
Had to get my Social Security replaced a few years ago. Was in an out in a reasonable time (comparable to a doctor appointment)
>The Post Office
USPS works fine for me.
Also had no problems getting a business license from either the City of Mountain View, or San Francisco. The staff at Mountain View City Hall were also very helpful in verifying that local zoning permitted me to run my software consultancy out of my home (it does).
The thing is, there are actual parts of government that are terrible. Caltrans (aka California Department of Transportation) is quite incompetent. Apparently, if there's a big transportation project in California, often the first goal is to try to figure out how to get someone other than Caltrans to run it. When that fails, you get messes like the new Bay Bridge.
The VTA (who runs public transportation in Santa Clara County), also seems quite inept, with light rail lines that are little used and obviously dumb ideas like a BRT lane on El Camino Real.
It would be nice if people who are skeptical of government would direct their skepticism at the parts that are the most broken, rather than just pulling out Stereotypical Examples of Government Incompetence (DMV, Post Office) that actually work fairly well most of the time.
And I've used all of them with little or no issues. The DMV being the biggest pain point in one state, but it works quite well in my current state.
It seems to me the onus should be on the government, since they're the ones taking our money. Once they've (1) proven they spend our money wisely, and (2) shown they have real need of more, they should be given more.
The constitutional limits definitely have their drawbacks, but they prevent the frogs (us) from being boiled alive.
BART drivers. Coming in from New York, another high-tax state, the paucity of services in California is surprising.