California is looking for stimulus money from the Federal taxpayer, or, perhaps more precisely, from the federal taxpayers' children.
Yet for the past 30 years, California law, created under 1978's Proposition 13" has PROHIBITED the taxation of land value at a rate higher than 1% of assessed value, and, in addition, limits the annual increase in assessed value to 2%, even when and where market values rise by 10% or 20% or more, until the property is resold, which results in both a very low and a very uneven taxation of land value.
This forces California into using taxes which both burden the poor and damage their economy: sales taxes, wage taxes.
It also strangles any effort to collect back for the commons that which our common spending creates. 4 shares for the landholder, 1 share for the community ... or , if you've owned your California property for 10 or 20 years, 9 shares for the landholder and 1 share for the community.
Meanwhile, California has one of the lowest homeownership rates in the entire US. For 1Q 2009, the US homeownership rate was 67.3% (down from a peak of 69.1% four years earlier); California's was 56.8%, down from 59.9% 1Q2005. So nearly half of Californians are paying rent, and paying it to landlords who pass only a tiny fraction of it on to the community in the form of taxes -- leaving the tenants to pay sales and wage taxes. Perverse, cruel, dumb, privilege-maintaining.
The classical economists observed hundreds of years ago that all benefits go to the landlord. Landlords grow rich in their sleep. Land rises in value for reasons which have nothing to do with the activity or inactivity of the individual landholder, and everything to do with the presence of the community, the public spending of the community on infrastructure and services. California's voters -- knowingly or unknowingly, but most likely the latter -- said that that was just fine with them, and the young people and the renters be damned!
Please don't come asking the rest of us to tax our wages to fund your "stimulus" when you won't tax your own landholders more than 1% -- and many of them a tiny fraction of 1% -- to meet your own state's needs.
If your current governor, who benefits mightily from Proposition 13, won't lead you in the right direction, elect someone who will.
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