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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

I am by no means conservative but the taxes on regular people in California are so high because the taxes on longtime landowners are low. And I also don’t think the taxes are being spent well enough to justify them. It’s also quite a stretch to call anything about obstructionist NIMBYism “liberal”

Also many of the people paying the highest taxes in CA are not even from there (executives, tech workers, entertainment workers), which kind of breaks down the argument of giving back to the environment that produced you.

I would be perfectly happy with paying income and sales taxes as high as they are in California if they were assessed more fairly (no low taxes because your grandparents lived here) and if I felt like I got enough out of public services.

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> are not even from there (executives, tech workers, entertainment workers), which kind of breaks down the argument of giving back to the environment that produced you.

This doesn't make sense. Are you saying people should only pay taxes in the state they were born in forever? That's not how taxation works.

Not exactly, what I’m saying is I don’t buy any argument that the taxes are so high in CA because they need to be to provide the services that allow it to have a good economy. The only possible exception to this is the UC system. Other than that I think California has a good economy mostly as a result of its location, size, and geography

Man, if ever there was a proposition that need to be repealed. I lived in NorCal for 22 years. Prop 13 is why schools in non-rich neighborhoods are literally collapsing. There are schools in South Sacto that have been holding classes in "temporary" trailers for over 20 years. What a huge mistake 1978 made.

> Prop 13 is why schools in non-rich neighborhoods are literally collapsing.

Let's say Prop 13 was repealed. Rich neighborhoods would still get more property tax revenue than poor neighborhoods, because the properties in rich neighborhoods are worth more.

If you want to solve the disparity in school funding you need to stop basing it on the values of the homes in the neighborhoods surrounding the schools.

Repealing Prop 13 will give schools in poor areas more money than they have now, but they will never get as much money as schools in rich areas as long as the property tax funding model persists.

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