Why It Is Hard to Fix California [ Cites the initiative process as main reason ]

With the initiative process, both liberal and conservative causes could be realized. Liberal public employee unions, most notably the California Teachers Association, could lock in high levels of education spending with Proposition 98. Fed-up taxpayers could place limits on property taxes with Prop 13. Californians concerned with illegal immigration could pass Prop 187 (if only later to see it fail in court). And those Californians who saw the injustice of state-sponsored racial preferences could ban them with the California Civil Rights Initiative.

But the initiative process, however satisfying it sometimes seems, has also made electoral politics seemingly less important. Whereas other states fight hard to build political majorities, Californians have been happy to elect Democratic legislatures with the occasional Republican governor, leaving anything of import to a vote of the people every two years with a ballot initiative ginned up by a group of concerned or affected citizens. As a practical matter, winning a Republican majority appears to be just not that important, so far, to California’s political and business elites.

I beg to differ. I used to be a staunch supporter of Prop. 13, but I have come to realize that it has been more a curse than a blessing.

Before Prop. 13 each city could set its own property tax rates like in almost every other state. This allowed some cities to be more or less attractive than others. Republicans could run efficient governments and have low property taxes. Democrats would run inefficient overly "compassionate" governments with high property taxes.

People could then vote with their feet and move out of the high tax cities to the low tax cities. If the people who moved to the Republican run cities wanted to continue to have low taxes they would have to register and vote Republican. The mayors of these cities would become natural candidates for statewide office.

With Prop. 13 all this went away. We could all have our cake and eat it too. Every city was "Republican" taxwise, and so the only things of importance that people could vote on were more goodies from the inexhaustible government trough. One-by-one the cities and counties turned Democrat. One-by-one potential sources of statewide Republican officeholders went Democrat.

Now the state is run by Democrats. Now they have voted to take some local money for themselves and have voted to send some state money to cities they like. Now if you are a citizen of a particular city or county and want your roads fixed you pretty much have to vote for the Democrat to get any chance of having it done.

It would have been better in the long run if most decisions were made locally. With Prop 13 the decisions and the money moved to the state where the Democrats reign supreme.

Even the 2/3rd majority for raising taxes clause in Prop 13 turned out bad. For years Democrats could allow just enough Republicans to win office to prevent taxes from going up and getting blamed for it. Meanwhile they could vote for more and more goodies knowing that eventually they could get the funding they needed through the initiative process without getting the blame.

It's become a complete racket that we now have less ability to control because all important decision are now made at the state level.

I've lived in California all my life. I was young when it was passed so I didn't have any experience paying taxes before Prop 13.

Some other points:

1. Prop. 13 was partly sold as a way to allow people to stay in their homes as they aged and went onto fixed incomes. However, today most of the tax benefits of Prop. 13 go to corporations rather than individuals. Corporations have found loopholes which allow them to transfer properties without triggering a reassessment. This is something that private citizens can't do.

2. In Colorado, where I lived for over ten years, they allow seniors to pay a lower property tax while they are still occupying the home. Then when the property is transferred to their children, the children have to make up the difference between the tax paid and the tax owed. This allows the cities to set their own tax rates, and allows seniors to stay in their homes. It's a good compromise to my mind. Of course, in California we now feel like we have a right to pay relatively low property taxes all our lives and ALSO pass on the entire equity of the house to our children. But that is a dream we need to let go of.

3. Probably the only reason that some companies still do business in California is the relatively low property taxes. If we were to eliminate Prop. 13 overnight, or just the tax break for corporations, then that would most likely lead to economic Armageddon. Still, some cities could offer tax breaks or local versions of Prop. 13 to businesses to lure them from one city to the other. There is no reason that Prop. 13 couldn't be enacted at the local level, at least the part dealing with property taxes.

4. The 2/3rds provision in Prop. 13 only referred to taxes. For a long time there were just enough Republicans to keep taxes from going up. Meanwhile there were more than enough Democrats to take away our gun rights, give more goodies to the public employees unions, more legislation to give our tax dollars to illegal aliens, etc. I believe that it would have been better if this 2/3rds provision hadn't been included in Prop. 13. If it hadn't, I believe that long ago the Democrats would have been emboldened to raise the state income tax to ridiculous levels. That would have triggered a Republican revolt which would have led to Republican majorities that would not just have lowered taxes, but eliminated a lot of the leftist legislation the Democrats have drowned us in as well. That's just a guess on my part, but I think it is a reasonable one.

Come on, if you lived here then you know that Prop 13 was what kept homes affordable for a generation. Eventually the tax benefits were lost as homes were sold, which is why you had a wholesale emigration of the Republican middle class to states like Colorado and Arizona and Idaho and Texas in the 1990s and early 2000s.

And if Prop 13 is at fault for California going deep blue, what explains other states such as New York and Illinois going into the toilet. You can't blame Prop 13 for the problems in those states.

On the hand, the tactic of leftists moving to successful places (such as the formerly successful states of New York and Illinois and California) and turning them into havens for parasites and no-go zones for the productive explains exactly what has happened in all 3 of those states.

To my mind, blaming Prop 13 (which first and foremost was a tax cut and which passed in 1978) for what the left has done to California after Pete Wilson left office in 1999 is bizarre. It is equivalent to blaming the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s for leading to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

I do not know that California's real estate was any more affordable than the rest of the country. I do know that we have lots of space and we kept building further and further out which also kept a lid on prices.

I do not know that Prop 13 had much to do with that. I do know that any city that wanted to pass a local Prop 13 law could have done so.

I also know that more and more power moved to the state level where it is harder to make changes.

Even with all of the liberals in New York, there are enough people upstate to keep their legislature balanced. Even the Illinois legislature was dependably Republican until the 1990's.

In California the once staunch conservative stronghold of Orange County is now just barely Republican and certainly not conservative by any stretch of the imagination.

If you're right, then what kind of conservatives were those that collected their lottery winnings when house prices rocketed in the 80's and then left for greener pastures? Did they have any thoughts for their "community"? Or were they just a bunch of self-interested libertarians that got while the getting was good?

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.