SECTION 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on real property shall not exceed One percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties….
Section 3. From and after the effective date of this article, any changes in state taxes enacted for the purpose of increasing revenues collected pursuant thereto whether by increased rates or changes in methods of computation must be imposed by an Act passed by not less than two-thirds of all members elected to each of the two houses of the Legislature, except that no new ad valorem taxes on real property, or sales or transaction taxes on the sales of real property may be imposed. [emphasis added]
-- from the text of “Prop. 13”
Some years ago, I spent a semester teaching two courses at San Francisco State. It wasn’t my finest hour as a teacher … the courses, on California culture and San Francisco culture, were outside of my normal areas of expertise, and while some will say if you can teach, you can teach, I spent a lot of time in those classes just half a step ahead of the syllabus. (The smartest thing I did was invite my friend Pete Richardson to give a guest lecture in the California course. You could say it went well … Pete teaches that course now, and unlike me, he’s qualified, having written books on Carey McWilliams and Ramparts magazine while currently serving as the interim chair of the California Studies Association.)
The theme of the course, to the extent I was able to pull it off, was that California, once the “Promised Land,” had fallen into decline, a fall which could be connected to the passage of Proposition 13.
In today’s Chronicle, Arthur I. Blaustein, who wrote a prescient article on Prop. 13 for Harper’s in 1978, wrote again on Prop. 13 and the current state of California:
Prop. 13 was to become California's Folly. I thought then, and am firmly convinced now, that the key elements in the proposition - the taxation formula and the two-thirds legislative requirement - would be responsible for causing a fiscal and social disaster. These two requirements have, in time, helped to lead the state into financial bankruptcy and created a dysfunctional state government.
With Gavin Newsom’s withdrawal from the race to win nomination as the Democratic Party’s candidate for Governor in the next election, our old friend Jerry Brown is clearly the man who will represent his party in that election. Brown is many things to many people, or at least he tries to be. In his book Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (which was the central text in my course), Peter Schrag wrote:
Governor Jerry Brown, the prophet of lowered expectations and now dubbed “Jerry Jarvis,” not only announced he would do everything he could to make Proposition 13 work, a matter on which he had little choice, but as the chief apostle of the “era of limits,” slipped into the new mode with the ease of a man who had always been waiting for it. He had, he said, become “a born-again tax cutter." (153)
Interestingly, if you check out Brown’s bio on his campaign website, you’ll see that in 1975 he was inaugurated as Governor of California, and in 1979 he met with Menachim Begin. Nothing notable happened between those years, I guess … somehow he left 1978 out entirely.
Good luck, California.
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