California Is Deteriorating into a Feudal Society of Inherited Land Wealth | Hacker News Reader

California Is Deteriorating into a Feudal Society of Inherited Land Wealth

slate.com

90 pointsSQL221931 comments

Props like 13 and 58 were passed in the name of poor grannies; when we look at differential benefits, it is actually rich grannies who end up benefiting 10 folds better than a grannie living in San Bernardino county.

This has parallels in other laws: in the name of terrorism, many laws were passed to spy on everyone—ranging from anti money laundering, know your customer, enhanced due diligence, forcing private companies to be active partners in spying.

One way to kill the beast is by partial repeal of commercial properties. Apple claimed its real estate value’s worth is $200.

I think a better parallel are tax breaks such as mortgage interest deductions and other tax breaks that the poor generally don't use to get into a house and the wealthy benefit from a great deal. Same goes for the systems for prepaying for college and such.

> One way to kill the beast is by partial repeal of commercial properties. Apple claimed its real estate value’s worth is $200.

That has nothing to do with Prop 58 - it’s accounting rules and depreciation there...

Could the government use this as a basis to purchase this property for $200 via eminent domain?

Sure. Then Apple would use its money to replace the government. They’d end up with a $2B payday from the government and their land back when the new regime took power.

You don’t own a home or have depreciated a business property have you? You can depreciate the value of a building over time but not the property itself.

Land value is still land value and will never be “depreciated”.

What happens is that folks like Disney in Anaheim as well as it seems, Apple owned the land for a long time. So Disney’s real estate tax bill is near nothing for Disneyland.

That’s the pain of prop 13. Should have been modified for sure!

FTA: “All in all, the state preserves old assessments on 60,000 to 80,000 inherited properties each year”

There are roughly 13 Million homes in California. It sounds like this is a fairly small problem to be evidence of a ‘feudal society’. Am I missing something?

“or 2.5 percent of total statewide property tax revenue”

Oh, nope - not missing anything. It is a small problem.

Overheated rhetoric like this article title is extremely unhelpful if your goal is to actually solve small problems. Then again if your goal is to inflame classist tendencies and generate clicks, I guess it’ll do just fine.

I'd want to see the rate of inheriting tax status versus reassessing the tax status on sale or transfer. If this is somewhere even in the double digit range I'd consider it a substantial issue that may snowball over time. The government discrimination by the government due to an individuals' ancestry is generally regarded to be unacceptable - the times we've done this in the post have mostly been remembered as immoral and wrong.

The whole point is it's not about the individual home owners. It's about the trusts and businesses that own huge amounts of property and which pay easentially zero property tax because they were covered under prop 13.

Well, California's been in the United States a lot longer than any of us.

Back when it was in Mexico an interesting thing about the land grants is that they could be thought of as deliverance from poverty or toward wealth depending on your point of view or actual outcomes.

As a certain amount of wealth or poverty has always been ordained by the ultimate taxing entity whose original claim to authority traces back to discovery of undocumented territory, often including a large component of violent conquest.

Then with the march of time you progress through subsequent entities and add layers of middlemen much more reliably by purchases and dealmaking rather than violence, but the iron fist is never completely off the table.

When taxpaying subjects are traded between jurisdictions the prevailing party can profit handsomely from that point onward with only a small margin added to the perpetual cost for the occupant to remain, or the newcomer to arrive.

Seems to me that's where the exponential growth in non-productive occupancy costs begins, which will always be devastating eventually. And the day of reckoning is accelerated or delayed based on the greed or benevolence of each successive regime. With accompanying incompetence or deception being deducted wholesale from any benevolence, and directly augmenting the damage resulting from the greed factor.

It would have been good if the quaint 20th century propositions had been crafted to excuse all California citizens from the risk of eventual property seizure. Shameful that the politicians were not of adequate caliber. At least they were able to protect their most valuable citizens, the ones who paid to persuade the voters.

My question is when exactly was California improved beyond a feudal society of inherited land wealth anyway?

Documentation please . . .

Something I find interesting is that so many states that are heavily democrat have such high income inequality. I've always hoped that states like Massachusetts, California and New York would do more to help the poor considering that they seem to have enough voter support to do that.

https://www.axios.com/income-inequality-blue-red-districts-6...

We do. We send our tax dollars to help support the impoverished red states. ;-)

It’s more that the Federal Government sends a lower proportion of the $1 trillion borrowed every year to the blue states, compared to the red states.

Nice strawman. You could, at least, back the claim.

LMGTFY.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...

https://www.businessinsider.com/red-states-are-welfare-queen...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/04/democ...

Also, even if you don't believe it, it's not a strawman because it wasn't being attributed to someone else. Please try to balance out the random general-purpose rhetorical tricks with some actual facts or insight of your own next time.

As well as:

https://www.apnews.com/2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/11/please-cut-th...

And speaking of rhetorical strategy, I don't know what it's called but the recent right wing way of speech as expressed by the person I was replying to is great:

>I've always hoped that states like Massachusetts, California and New York would do more to help the poor considering that they seem to have enough voter support to do that.

It's like getting their political agenda in there but trying to act as if they've always innocently been expressing concern and interest about this subject. So facetious and they think they're sly.

Thanks for the petty insults, it's sadly typical for HNers like you these days. However, I am in California and really wish the government would do more. It's not facetious. I don't expect much from states like Alabama, but blue states with lots of rich democrats need to do so much more. And as for being right-wing, I believe in socialized medicine, stronger environmental laws, higher taxes, and more strict regulation of corporations.

You're welcome.

And I think the California government and many of its supposedly liberal citizens could do more as well. "Screw you, I got mine" applies to both sides.

Even better, we as a nation should be implementing all those and not just leaving it up to wealthy states.

> Thanks for the petty insults

Maybe don't accuse people of making strawman arguments when they merely repeated well known facts, then. That's not civil either.

I think you're confusing me with another user. I never made any strawman accusation at all.

Must have been confused because you were complaining about insults directed at another user. How odd.

I've banned this account for trolling, including because of the trollish username. At a minimum, that is distracting. Would you please not do it again?

More importantly, please stop posting flamebait to HN threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Tossing political flamebait into HN threads like this is vandalism. So is perpetuating the flamewar after you started it.

We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, regardless of which color the flames burn. Please don't do this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How was the parent comment not similar?

How is anything politically-related on this forum, supposedly for discussion of startups, not in some way inflammatory? What about the post itself? Not to mention that I and another user backed up my (yes, off-the-cuff) comment with references? I don't see how that 'perpetuates a flamewar'?

Vandalism is a rather strong word.

Feel free to ban this account. I can always make another if I decide there's any discussions worth participating in.

Are you sure that they don't help the poor, or could it be that they just have more poor? Poor people are more likely to stay in (or gravitate toward) places where more aid is available. They're more likely to die in places where less aid is available due to "you deserved it" moralizing with an undercurrent of discrimination (somehow people who look just like the donors do get aid instead of blame). Also, disproportionately-poor immigrants tend to arrive in "blue" coastal cities and stay in them to be around people with whom they share language and culture.

So yes, there are a lot of poor people in "blue" areas not because of but despite greater efforts to reduce inequality. There are also more people pulling on the other end of the distribution because "blueness" tends to be highly correlated with growth especially in areas like tech and finance. The relative uniformity of "red" areas has a bit of a Harrison Bergeron quality to it, and that's not a good thing.

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