It desperately needs to be changed, since Prop 13 was a gross overreaction to the (admittedly awful) existing property tax scheme, and has wreaked untold damage in its wake. I remember attending public school both before and after Prop 13’s passage, and the difference was like Day and Cold, Bleak, Deadly, Never-ending Night. The simple fact is that lots of people with long, long histories of paying very low property taxes are going to have to pay more (not as much as the pre-13 structure would have had it, but still) and very, very few of those homeowners are going to relish the prospect. @gellfex and @Brainspore have the right of this argument; there’s always a way to formulate a more just, equitable, and sustainable scheme that is properly progressive and isn’t gonna toss Great Aunt Mildred Fixed-Income out of her ancestral cottage on her ass.
Getting the votes to pass it will require a fairly simple (though as nearly impossible as I can imagine) trick of convincing the electorate that a properly- and fairly-funded state benefits us all, even the plutocrats. But that convincing is the sticky part. It’s somewhat akin to raising gasoline taxes. Fuel prices went through the roof a while back, and one solution offered by simpleminded politicians was to lower (or eliminate) taxes on gasoline, which simply left more room for fuel cartels to jack up the wholesale price even further, right up to the point beyond which drivers couldn’t afford it at all and actually started driving less by necessity. Since that brinkmanship gave all the power to the cartels (and zero tax revenue to the state), it was a profoundly stupid idea. The smarter thing would have been to jack the taxes up while the price was still reasonable, eliminating room for the cartels to raise wholesale prices further without sales volume diminishing to a trickle. That way at least some of the revenue goes to us, rather than to the oil producers.
Of course, then there’s nothing stopping them from holding the price at an artificially (and unaffordably) high price until we cry Uncle and give in, but I don’t know if the entire oil market could collude quite that much. Hell, I dunno. Probably they could.
Anyway, it’s entirely too easy to paint any issue like this as a simple Evil Tax Hike with Uncle Sam’s groping fist deep in our pockets, and since the vast majority of citizens are all looking out for number one and asking suspiciously “What’s in it for me?” we just keep going around and around while the merry-go-round runs out of grease.
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