Prop 13 tax revolt
see main initiative, also jarvis
did this set up boom bust instability?
9/16 broadened to include pioneer and its ripple effects
last angry man prop 13
prop 13 root of problem; rich ppl house need signal
ucla prof michael storper sp rise and fall of urban economies (LA and SF)
replay/glitch
70/ 30% 2 do not insteresect
housing but does big macroeconomy/hist post wwii
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-june-25-2019/
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MORal maj , evwen abort no work, but irs had to figure out tax segregation academies
prop 13 , big tax cut, unions decline, astroturf pioneer
Aug 20, 2026
Vanessa Williamson on Taxes and Democracy: What tax history teaches us about this dire moment This week, I’m talking to Vanessa Williamson, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of a fantastic short history of taxation called “The Price of Democracy.” Because I’m so interested these days in tax policy, I thought I could talk to Vanessa to get a sense of a lot of these issues where I am very much an amateur and she’s done the homework. Subscribe to Paul Krugman on Substack here: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/subs...
// Vanessa Williamson on Taxes and Democracy
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1978 Prop 13: 52% drop 1st year; Since Proposition 13 became law, California has slid from 7th place among states to 27th place in spending per pupil. In 60’s California among the best, 48th in student achievement by some measures
[The evolution of direct democracy from a progressive standby into a tool of wealthy interests culminated in Proposition 13 in 1978.This measure was packaged and sold to California voters as tax relief for average homeowners, when it fact it mostly benefited big landlords and investors in commercial real estate who put up the money behind it.55 Observers of California politics recognize that direct democracy has changed significantly following Proposition 13.
The number of ballot initiatives has risen sharply since the late 1970s – and so has the amount of money spent on campaigns. Wealthy special interests ranging from casino owners and lottery consultants to the insurance and tobacco industries have willingly invested millions in initiatives that promise to deliver billions in profits. The gamble does not always pay off: studies of direct democracy show that the side spending the most money in the election does not always win – but it usually does. Heavy spending is especially effective on the negative side which can neutralize those rare few progressive-style measures on behalf of workers, consumers, small business, minorities, or the environment that do occasionally make it onto the ballot. 56
Campaign spending for and against ballot propositions is loosely regulated by the California Political Reform Act of 1974, which originally tried to limit such spending – but those limits were removed just two years later, following the U.S. Supreme Court decision inBuckley v. Valeo(1976) which equated campaign spending with free speech. Money raised and spent in California to support or oppose ballot propositions has to be reported, but it has no limits, and in any case the final report of campaign expenditures does not appear until a month after the election, which deprives voters of access to this information until it is too late to matter. Spending on direct democracy campaigns in recent years has sometimes topped tens of millions of dollars per proposition and is rising fast.57]
JARVIS:PIC, Pacific Research
Today, Jon Coupal [ earlier K?] is responsible for spreading the Jarvis message. A 54-year-old attorney who is as smooth as Jarvis was bombastic, Coupal has been a denizen of the political scene for more than two decades. After working for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation he joined the Jarvis organization in 1991, ascending to its presidency in 1999, a post that paid$255,000last year.
==http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29
Gave us RR
On education and public services
Effect on public schools
California public schools, which in the 1960s had been ranked nationally as among the best, have fallen to 48th in many surveys of student achievement.[[32]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29#cite_note-rand-31) Some [[33]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29#cite_note-merrow-32) have disputed Proposition 13's direct role in the move to state financing of public schools, because schools financed mostly by property taxes were declared unconstitutional in Serrano vs. Priest, and Proposition 13 was then passed partially as a result of that case.[[31]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29#cite_note-ppi-30) California's spending per pupil was the same as the national average until about 1985, when it began dropping, which led to another referendum, Proposition 98, that requires a certain percentage of the state's budget to be directed towards education.[[4]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29#cite_note-senpeace-3)
Loss of funding for libraries, fire departments
Public libraries have seen a decrease in funding from cities.[[31]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29#cite_note-ppi-30) Police departments received generally the same amount of funding, from 15% in 1978 to 16% in 1995.[[31]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29#cite_note-ppi-30) Cities also cut water, gas and electricity expenses.[31]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-12/california-schools-suffering-as-proposition-13-tax-cap-breeds-fiscal-chaos
California Schools Suffer Under Proposition 13 Tax Cap’s Chaos
Michael B. Marois and James Nash
July 11, 2011 — 9:01 PM PDT
Before Proposition 13, cities, counties, school districts and other local agencies could set their own tax rates and collect and spend the proceeds as they saw fit.
Three decades after Californians voted to limit their property taxes and helped start a national revolt with Proposition 13, some consequences are still emerging.
The average California real-estate tax rate is 60 percent lower than when the law passed in 1978, according to the Board of Equalization, the state’s tax administrator.The most populous U.S. state ranks 28th nationally in combined state and local property-tax collections per person in a 2011 study by the Washington-based Tax Foundation.
Yet the measure that inspired tax-limiting laws in New York and New Jersey is also blamed for California’s perennial budget crises, the proliferation of strip malls and auto dealerships, a decline in the state’s once top-10 ranking for spending on students and unequal tax bills among neighbors.
“Prop. 13 helped usher in the modern anti-tax movement,” said Robert Ward, the deputy director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, New York. “Now, other states look at Prop. 13 as an example of what to avoid.”
Proposition 13 was born in a petition drive that gathered enough signatures to get on a statewide ballot, bypassing the legislative process. It passed with 65 percent of the vote.
The measure rolled back and froze assessments for both residential and commercial property at 1976 levels. It set the tax rate at 1 percent of that valuation, and limited annual increases of the value to 2 percent. Only when property is sold is its value reassessed. That means people who have owned the same property for years may have a far lower tax bill than a neighbor who just bought a comparable home.
More Oregonians
If it weren’t for the tax cap, “a lot more Californians would be called Oregonians or Nevadans,” said Kris Vosburgh, executive director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, named after the initiative’s late author. “We have a high-tax state. People see jobs and taxpayers leaving the state. People see that the only defense they have is Prop. 13.”
In the first year under the new system, property tax collections dropped 52 percent to $4.9 billion from $10.3 billion in 1978, according to Board of Equalization data.
Cities and counties, unable to raise property taxes, realized that one way to get more revenue was to encourage businesses that generate sales taxes, such as auto dealerships and strip malls. California’s statewide sales-tax rate, which was lowered to 7.25 percent from 8.25 percent this month, is still the highest in the U.S. Local governments are allowed to add as much as another 1.5 percent.
Cities, Counties, Schools
Before Proposition 13, cities, counties, school districts and other local agencies could set their own tax rates and collect and spend the proceeds as they saw fit. The ballot measure changed that, putting the state in charge of allocating proceeds of a property tax set at a statewide, uniform rate.
“Very few people anticipated the increased role of Sacramento as a byproduct of 13’s passage,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican former political consultant who now directs the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. “Arguably that’s had as great an impact on how California functions as the freeze on property taxes did.”
Proposition 13 also required that any statewide tax increase be approved by a two-thirds vote of each chamber in the Legislature. The struggle to find compromise to fill deficits without higher levies led to a record 100-day late spending plan in 2010. The previous year, the state ran out of cash and had to issue $2.6 billion of IOUs.
Critics such as Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat, say Californians eventually will have to come to terms with what he called an inequitable tax structure that sapped schools of funds and lets business avoid assessments.
Education Funding
Since Proposition 13 became law, California has slid from 7th place among states to 27th place in spending per pupil, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, as the law constricted the biggest traditional source of education money.
Ammiano, a former public-school teacher, has introduced a bill that would create a tiered system that would assess commercial and industrial property differently from residential. It would require land and buildings owned by publicly traded companies to be reassessed every three years instead of just when the assets change hands.
“I know there is a way to do it, where seniors are protected and without making public education suffer,” Ammiano said in a telephone interview. “There’s a way to do to it that makes commercial property man up and stop playing Three-Card Monte with this law for their own advantage.”
Effort to Weaken
Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat who was also governor when Proposition 13 was enacted, said in June at a San Francisco housing conference that his failure to win Republican support to extend $11 billion of now-expired taxes and fees to offset deeper spending cuts may spur a move to weaken Proposition 13’s commercial property protections.
“I believe there will be efforts to accelerate the reassessment of commercial property,” he said. “I think the core of Prop. 13 is very important to Californians.”
Vosburgh of the Jarvis Taxpayers Association said any attempt to weaken Proposition 13 is doomed to fail, as opposition is driven by a “fringe element” of public-employee unions with limited support. Proposition 13 remains as valid now as it was in 1978, he said, with only one possible change.
“Well, maybe they could reduce the tax rate,” he said.
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