Revoking Proposition 13 is best solution. If boomers had to pay 1% tax on the current value of their CA house they'd quickly downsize.
Tax proportionately to the footprint of the property, growing non-linearly.
Tax non-primary-residence units at at least 5X the rate; tax unoccupied units at 10X the rate.
Then there's an incentive to build up, while not screwing over existing residents.
Property tax / land value tax on primary residence is just rent collected by the government for living somewhere.
That rent shouldn't be higher in lucrative locations. Grocery store employees should be able to live where they work; we should not be pushing them away with higher taxes on top of the pressure the market puts on them.
Perhaps food and shelter shouldn't be taxed altogether. The government shouldn't be collecting a rent on people existing.
That would also make redlining of residential neighborhoods harder, as if will force decoupling of local infrastructure funding from property values.
Still much better than status quo.
In the end it approximates land value tax, is more politically feasible, so it is likely a step in the right direction.
Shell company of a dog doesn't have a primary residence.
As for the rest, either they'll have to live there (in which case, it's fair), or they'll go behind the bars for properly tax evasion.
And it doesn't take much to find out that a property listed as primary residence for tax purposes is being rented out. Add some reporting incentives, and hey, that loophole takes care of itself.
Nice idea, but has loopholes.
we will have to wait and see how the common prosperity laws that Xi proposed will further change the life of people - and if they actually work, we must start thinking why WE were not able to do that in the first place with our democratic system that is supposed to represent the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_19
But the whole conversation about Grandma is stupid anyway. The California Tax Postponment Program allows her to stay in her house, with zero tax pressure, forever. Plenty of states, even high property tax NJ, have something like that and it's just fine.
I can understand you want to reward people who stay in the area for a long time, the reward is too great IMO.
Your parents, assuming they are old enough to be seniors, will be fine. Your well-founded concern has been heard and handled. You can rest easy, knowing that your parents and other homeowning elders in California will not be forced out of their homes by property taxes they cannot afford.
Nobody likes paying taxes. It's literally never a pleasurable or enjoyable experience. Yet it's one that furthers society and allows it to do things like fund schools - a chronic problem in California.
Not disagreeing with your points, but one major reason that it's "never a pleasurable experience" to pay tax in America is that ideologues deliberately designed the process to be as painful as possible, to give taxation a bad name. Sadly, it's working.
If parents bought a home in CA in 1980 for $300k, and then did little more than regular upkeep and minor improvements, and then die in 2021, why should their offspring be entitled to a $10M windfall? They've done nothing to earn it, besides being lucky to be born to parents who were lucky enough to be able to buy housing in an area that they were lucky enough to keep living in when that area became popular.
> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.
(Though really, even before I knew of Jefferson's attitudes about inherited wealth, I'd read enough to know that divesting children of unearned windfalls isn't necessarily a bad thing. Can't take it with you, ya know.)
If they wanted to stay in their neighborhood they should have made more money before retiring.
Sarcasm aside, I’d like to see an example of increasing taxes on a good or service somehow making it cheaper.
If the problem is "kicking old ladies out", why not just allow seniors to defer their property tax, instead of what we have now, where even corporations pay the same fixed tax? Seems a little absurd to give the entire state a tax break for a problem that only effects 10% (at most).
The "old ladies" argument was just a cover for the real reason, and you've been duped.
> I’d like to see an example of increasing taxes on a good or service somehow making it cheaper.
It's fairly well known that a land value tax actually has negative deadweight loss, because it incentivizes more efficient land use. It definitely can't make housing more expensive, since the supply-demand curve remains the same (the supply of land is fixed).
Also: http://www.savingcommunities.org/issues/taxes/property/affor...
The comment I replied to was literally about making old people pay more for the houses they already paid for.
It’s the same logic as a carbon tax.
Increasing the property tax would allow California to cut their sales tax, which would benefit lower income people.
I think to actually eliminate sales tax you'd need to end reassessment immunity and the 1% limit.
You’d need to show a case where an increase in taxes caused a good’s total cost to become cheaper.