Posted on 01/10/2014 6:56:53 AM PST by topher
Often described as the opening shot in the Reagan-era tax revolt, Prop 13 limited California’s property tax rates, but has it yielded greater fiscal discipline? What about tax and expenditure limits in other states?
Today is the 35th anniversary of the passage of Proposition 13. The California ballot initiative limited the state’s property tax rates and transferred responsibility for allocating local property tax revenues to the state legislature — but did it yield an increase in fiscal discipline?
(Excerpt) Read more at american.com ...
So the current governor of California has this in common with Christie of New Jersey: punish and take punitive action against those who do not do their [evil] bidding.
At the same time, Jerry Brown established a $1 million art fund that was chaired by Hanoi Jane Fonda
Your typical politician-punishes-the-citizens attitude...
No, but then again, that's not what it was meant to do. It was put in place to prevent WILD fluctuations of your property taxes that was causing peeps to lose their homes.
Wouldn’t that be 35 years after Prop 13 went into effect? I never heard of CA having a Proposition election in January.
Let us not ask whether prop 13 protected homeowners from being taxed out of their homes by capricious and greedy politicians and bureaucrats who raised their property taxes to ridiculous levels on a whim & spent their tax dollars like drunken syphilitic sailors.
Let us instead decide the success or failure of prop 13 on whether the capricious and greedy politicians and bureaucrats managed to curtail their wild spending habits over the past 35 years.
NO SALE, A-HOLES.
You’re right. It was a June ballot.
I was too young to vote, but remember it.
Look at the date — this article is from June.
Posted today since:
(1) Jerry Brown is governor again in California (as was true in 1978)
(2) Chris Christie political payback being in the news...
There was much talk about Jerry Brown establishing an art committee with $1 million at a time when Police and Fire services were cut drastically (to punish the voters).
My parents live in CA. What’s misleading about this article is that once you sell your house, the Prop 13 reforms go out the window.
My parents still enjoy the low property taxes that 13 brought to them, but only because they never sold their place. They’ve been in the same house for 40 years.
I doubt Prop 13 even effects 10 percent of property at this point.
Another feature of Prop 13 is the ability of owners being able to transfer that property tax rate to another property at equal or lesser value (sometimes across county lines as well). We are looking to do that with our property that we have owned for 25 years.
So what!
The property tax should be related to what you paid for the property, not what your neighbor paid for theirs.
It would be like accessing your 1973 car the same as a 2014 Cadillac.
We lived in our home for over 30 years, it is paid for, and our property tax is reasonable. Of course people have moved in and out of the neighborhood over the years and so it is reasonable to assume that they pay more in property tax then I do since they paid more for their home than I did.
The house has no more value if I don’t sell it until I do in fact sell it. So I have no income or money in the bank because the selling price today is more than I paid for it.
When someone buys a home today they too are protected by Prop 13.
The main goal of Prop 13 was to keep the politicians from taxing people out of their homes. In that regard it is a success.
Just read an article out of the LA Times, I believe, that stated that due to natural turnover the number of residential property still benefiting from Prop 13 was well under 20%. The number of commercial properties benefiting was around 16%. The estimate is that by 2020 nearly all CA properties will no longer enjoy the full effects of Prop 13. The article was written to point out the waste of time and energy to disallow commercial property to benefit from Prop 13 via a constitutional amendment vote.
My aunt has lived in the same house for 50 years. She pays taxes on a $15,000 house. The market value is over $600K. I saw it myself on Zillow.
Property tax rates in our county were 8.5%. Think about what that would mean to the value of California real estate. To re-institute property tax rates that high in California has the potential to crash the banking system worldwide.
The property is reassessed, that is true, yet the rate at which the assessed value can climb is still capped.
It affects EVERYTHING.
Prop 13 is the only sensible thing this state has done in 35 years from all appearances.
Our property taxes have remained stable, (outside of a plethora of BS assesments continuously passed by “votes” that include the elderly as voters but exempt them from paying) since we purchased in 1996.
I would have paid something on the line of $100,000 more in property taxes since then were it not for Prop 13. Without it, the condo we purchased in the 90’s would have blown out in property taxes during the criminally facilitated real estate run-up and then when it crashed we would have spent gobs of time every year trying to get it re-assessed down to the revised level.
The fact that it’s structured to roll over on an exchange is implicit within it, it’s not “misleading”. Prop 13 effects every single residential property (and to a lesser extent commercial I believe) in the state, how much depends on how long you stay in it...
It warms my heart to know your Aunt is safely ensconsed in her home with a low tax rate, secure from the ravages of rapacious politicians!
While Prop 13 was a good idea, the politicians have managed to get around the 2% limit. Our property “taxes” have gone up much more than 2% a year. The reason, many of the items that were subject to the property tax, were removed from that designation and listed separately at “fees”, “special assessments” and a few other designations. So while it was a good idea and still helps, the politicians have bastardized the system so they can still increase the amount of money they take from you without calling it a “property tax”, even though it is included on your tax form.
It’s what my parents did as well. What we will end up doing is, for whoever moves in, which will likely be my youngest brother, we’ll assess him rent and tax equal to 2/3 of the value of the property, and all of the tax due on it.
He’ll essentially pay the trust until he ‘owns’ it, though it will remain in the trust. I’ll have to look closely at how proceeds get distributed and taxed out of the trust.
Thanks for the tip.
Nothing like planning for your parents to die while they’re still alive. Pretty macabre, actually.
Looking at a similar situation with my 2 siblings. Our elderly mom lives 2 blocks from beach in a CA home that Zillow says is worth $1.4 million, but the CA tax assessor has on the books for only $130,000. Losing Prop 13 coverage would require the family to sell, as none of us is prepared to pay 14k+ yearly in prop taxes.
I would like to live there with my small family when the time comes, so we’ll also need to also engineer a fair way to do that doesn’t trigger a reassessment.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.