California Reckoning - WSJ.com
Fundamental misunderstanding of the political and economic situation in California leads to ignorant editorials like this.
Repeal Prop 13! 13 Was not a populist tax revolt. No grandmothers were being kicked to the curb as their property taxes increased with their property value. 13 was simply a power and money grab by state politicians and already-wealthy interests, and led to fundamental changes in both residential real estate and local government.
The boom and bust cycles that followed 13 in CA, although not unprecedented, have simply led to exclusion - the majority of residents of much of CA can't afford to buy a home here, something people from out of state or insanely out of the middle-class, like Murdoch's minions. When your neighbor, simply by staying put, pays 1/10 of what you do in property taxes for the same 1959 tract home, something's fundamentally wrong.
When CA goes from the top of the heap in education and other hallmarks of society to nearly the bottom, something's fundamentally wrong.
It's the state's voters who have voted away local power and local jobs. When we give this to a state legislature but also tie their hands with restrictive proposition after restrictive proposition, it is us who drove into this gridlock.
Yes, vote down these initiatives, except for 1F as a symbolic gesture (in my opinion, legislators should work for no pay until they get the state working reasonably again). But we will all need to suffer , and pay more, for our shortsighted devotion to the insane Jarvis extremists.
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