While it is easy to argue about the homeowner that holds onto their home for 40 years and pays little in taxes, the average amount of time a home is held before being sold is 13 years. So we are really talking about a reassment every decade which doesn’t sound all that excessively long.
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Income taxes are nice, because they derive from people who are actually earning money, and can afford it.
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Only true if we’re restricting the discussion to CA. Like I said it’s been 28 years since a citywide reval here and there’s no reassess on sale. A new owner gets the 28 year old taxes (times a citywide fudge factor, it’s REALLY complicated here) Also as said upthread, Prop 13 encourages people to stay in their homes far longer than national average.
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Yep Californias stay in their homes longer on average, by a whole extra year.
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Reverse mortgages are instruments of exploitation targeting cash-strapped seniors, like payday loans target the working poor, but are a godsend for the banks who lost some of their avenues of profiteering after the crash but now have a whole new vulnerable group they can confuse with complicated balloon schedules and inflated interest rates.
Anyone who thinks it is OK to increase taxes on fixed-income people beyond their means, and force them to go to moneylenders to hold onto their homes, has a mindset very different from mine.
What is the current annual tax on an engagement ring?
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I’m guessing that most people here who are arguing against Prop 13 don’t actually pay property tax.
Assessed value is rarely the same as actual vale on “assets” that aren’t traded. I own “thousands of dollars worth” of vinyl records. Even if I were able to sell them the actual income would be far less than the “assessed value”.
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Coincidentally, the same is true of rent control.
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The worst part of Prop 13 was that commercial and industrial property was included. Most commercial and industrial property is owned by corporations. Hilton may have a hotel in Hollywood that they have owned since 1978 and the assessed value has only gone up by 2% max per year meanwhile the property has increased in value a thousand fold. Now if they sell the property for its present day value the tax assessment would go up also to reflect the new value, but Hilton doesn’t actually sell the property they sell a holding company that changes hands but the property does not. Large corporations have benefitted to a huge degree while California has fallen further behind in investing in the future.
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Y’know, in my more-than-usual curmudgeonly days, I shake my fist in the direction of California, shouting: “F**k! Just because an idea is popular in California doesn’t mean it’s a good idea!”
“We” tend to adopt these sorts of solutions because it’s easy to run the numbers in a transparent way. Don’t forget that property tax assessments and payments are open public records just about everywhere in the USA.
Any sort of case by case solution would probably require more personal financial information to be made public. And it would be subject to negotiation and perceptions of unfairness. (Joe across the street is making money in the cash economy, so his taxes are lower than mine…)
On the other hand, the local pols would like it as it could open up some new avenues for graft and bribery.
So why shouldn’t they just bake into the system that, starting the date that the law passes, or ten years from the date of purchase (whichever comes first), the tax rate is reassessed?
If the average date that people are staying in their houses isn’t much longer than that, it shouldn’t make a big difference to most families, but it’ll significantly increase the tax revenue for people who have been holding onto their property for decades with no change in the tax rate.
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Why the hell is commercial included in this? Ok, I know why, but really. It’s not perfect but homestead exemptions can help with not throwing grandma out of her home while making sure her three income properties are taxed at the market rate. You still can get the locked-in to a too big home effect, but more properties, especially commercial, are taxed. I pay ten times (literally) as much in property taxes as the old lady two doors down, but it doesn’t bother me as she’s been there 66 years.
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I don’t think it’s paying taxes that cause bubbles. That is more likely caused by rampant speculation and deregulations on markets.
Taxes pay for the collective interest. There is no society without a means to fund that. Do you have a better idea to fund things like roads, schools, police, EMS, the military, national parks/museums, etc, that doesn’t involve only rich people getting those things and the rest of the population getting screwed?
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Not all of us are anti-tax, even those of us who pay property taxes.
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I pay property tax, and I think that Prop 13 is a bad idea.
Now to see if the goal posts get moved and it becomes “don’t actually pay property tax in California.”
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Most other states don’t have CA’s crazy property tax laws that seem to work okay. Not perfect, but okay. There’s lots of middle ground here, but on all of the middle ground people will end up paying both more, and more than they’d like.
Yeah you got me there. Voters love to dig themselves into some holes they’re unwilling to dig out of. People as a group have a lot of difficulty embracing good, long-term solutions, when they can compromise to maximize their individual benefit and kick the problems down the road. To the extent that the benefit of the majority of individuals is the goal of democracy, it’s a great success. To the extent of being maximally utilitarian (greatest good to the greatest number), it’s a great failure.
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Are you a native Californian and a homeowner?
