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Comment by notJim | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a riskily reductionist point, as we know that people aren't always single-issue voters focused on achieving their financial best interests.

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Oh, definitely. Even folks who are single-issue voters realize that outside of supermajority years executive branch of government has to compromise.

However, the anecdotal evidence of "stored wealth vs current income" tax is there, notice how "let's-back-tax-everybodys-income" Prop-30-happy California is also home to "dont-you-dare-to-raise-taxes-on-my-mansions" Prop 13. My original remark was to point out that wealthy people and high income people are frequently advocating opposite causes.

>Prop-30-happy California is also home to "dont-you-dare-to-raise-taxes-on-my-mansions" Prop 13.

Mansions? Hardly. More like "Don't raise taxes on my tiny tract home through the roof based on ridiculously inflated real estate values."

If you look at the places with highest volatility, it tends to be jobs-heavy SF Bay Area and LA. A farmer in Oxnard might see his farmhouse appreciate 10% here and there, East Palo Alto and Antioch (which I think you're describing) did not experience any significant swings even during the height of real estate bubble.

I was living in Southern California when prop 13 passed by an overwhelming margin. The people who benefited the most weren't wealthy at all. Instead, they were retired people on fixed incomes who were being forced by tax increases to move from houses in which they'd lived for three or four decades.

Maybe in a state that didn't have both high sales taxes and high income taxes a cap on property taxes wouldn't make sense. But in California it does.

But categorically I would expect it to be a reasonable heuristic.

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