And how are California’s students doing these days?

And tell me about housing affordability in California, and the homeownership rates.

Property taxes are very much tied in with housing affordability, but not in the way you might think.

And part of the property tax — the portion that falls on land values — is probably the best tax ever devised.

Leave it to California to put a ceiling on it, and force its residents to tax things like work, and sales, and buildings. Dumb, dumber and dumbest!

Get rid of Prop 13, treat all Californians as if you really believed they were created equal, and watch California blossom.

Or keep doing what you’re doing, and complain about poverty, long commutes, unaffordable housing, children who are struggling to learn in underfunded schools … all of which could be fixed, if you turned off the 3rd rail. Or stop complaining and enjoy the PRIVILEGE of being subsidized by your less fortunate neighbors.

Prop 13 seems absolutely insane to me, and I’m about as free-market, low-tax oriented as you can get. It just seems insane that new homeowners are taxed so much more than old homeowners. It doesn’t seem to have made overall taxes in California lower; instead, it’s just shifted them to income tax, etc. It’s unfair because identical condo units are taxes massively differently based on how long people have lived there. It can’t do much to impose fiscal discipline. Here in CT, if we elect a town council that decides our town needs a new rec center or pool or new high school, our property taxes go up. But if our property taxes were fixed, or could only go up 2%, would we really care?

If you are interested in having a smaller government, it would seem it would be a better idea to cap spending instead of taxes. Or better still, elect mayors, town councilmen, etc who won’t spend so much money.

CT is often at the top of the list of tax burdens because we have high incomes and thus pay lots of federal taxes. But there are some other quirks here. First, we have no county governments. We have 169 separate towns, and they all do their own schools, snow plowing, road repair, etc. In a few cases, really small towns pool resources. Towns raise almost all their money through property taxes. Income (5%) and sales (6%) taxes are paid to the state government, none stays local. So towns that spend a lot have high property taxes, as do towns that severely restrict commercial development. Reassessments are done every few years, so while they might be slightly off, it’s nothing like in the land of California and Prop 13.

CT and NJ have a weird aspect regarding income tax. We both send lots of workers into New York City every day. Those people — many highly paid — pay taxes to NY state, so they don’t pay taxes in CT and NJ on their incomes. NY raises well over 10% of its state budget from commuting workers. So it wants no reciprocity with neighboring states. So NJ and CT can’t really rely on income tax to save the day: raising the income tax rate has no effect on many of the highest wage earners.

NH is in a similar boat with MA: while it doesn’t levy an income tax, if it did, it would find that many people wouldn’t pay anything to NH because they were paying it to MA. States with big commuting populations have to rely on property taxes. (DC is prevented by law from levying tax on MD and VA residents; DE has a reciprocal agreement with MD and PA. Not sure about NJ and PA or IN and IL or WI and MN. However, CT and NJ send a huge percentage of people out of state each day compared so WI or IN).

Just about every part of state is within an hour of a state line, so high sales taxes will result in a fairly significant people purchasing in neighboring states when possible.

The real “negative” about prop 13 is that once you’re in your place for, say, 10 or more years, it creates a real negative incentive to move to somewhere else in california.

Your alternative is like in Chicago, where I was socked with a >$1,000 annual tax hike one year.

My inlaws live in New Jersey and they pay a truckload more money in property tax, close to double what I pay. The funny thing is that they gripe about how “screwy” it is in California that we have to pay for garbage service, how I occasionally take a load to the dump, etc. They can’t seem to make the connection between their better garbage service and their extremely high prop taxes.

Examples:
Milwaukee. $200,000 house, $4,000 property tax bill (from 10+ years ago, need to adjust for inflation now)
Madison. $180,000 house, $4,000 property tax bill (less than 10 years ago)
Chicago. $590,000 house, $6,400 tax bill.
San Leandro. $435,000 house, $5,400 tax bill.

All about the same amounts, especially adjusted for inflation. Interesting.