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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.