Originally posted by: Craig234
Originally posted by: Double Trouble
Originally posted by: eskimospy
Actually California is home to some of the most radical right wing areas in the country, the inland empire is full of the ultra-right.
Prop 13 needs to repealed, and other taxes lowered to compensate.
And those fringe ultra-right people control CA and are numerous enough to get props like 13 passed? That doesn't make sense. Things like prop 13 pass because the general population is frustrated, and they see a way to fix it. If the tax happy government had not jacked up property taxes all the time, the general population would not have put in prop 13.
Every state in the country needs something like prop 13. The only flaw is that they curbed taxation without curbing spending. The two need to go hand in hand.
Californians get 'duped' by the radical right from time to time, and that was a classic example.
As I said above, the skyrocketing real estate prices during a period did result in problems of excessive property taxes, and so there was a big appetite to do *something*.
It's just that instead of doing the right thing, and adjusting the taxes, the radical right grabbed the issue and the left defaulted, and so what got done was prop 13.
They took some things that couldn't and shouldn't get passed on their own - *commercial* property tax slashing, and changing the tax requirement from 50% to 66% -and bundled them in with the very popular reduction on *residential* property taxes - indeed not just a reduction but a pretty extreme rule letting them barely go up, that made neighbors pay very different taxes on similar properties, and 'trapped' people in big homes.
In fact, if I recall correctly, that may have been a reason why CA started clearly limiting ballot initiatives to one issue, because that bundling is a terrible way to sneak things in.
If you want to try to say something simple about California voters, start by explaining our electing Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan back to back.
After that you can explain how they recalled a decent governor who was the enemy of Enrion, when they got angry about Enron, to replace him with a close friend of Enron.
CA has a bunch of different groups, some tea baggers, some liberals, plenty in the 'middle', plenty almost apolitical, many minorities.
They vote a variety of ways, sometimes good and sometimes bad. They did not understand the diaster prop 13 would be.
It was a backlash used to get bad things passed, not all that different from 9/11 getting used to get support for the Iraq war that the public was otherwise against.
Would you say the US is filled with Neocons because the Iraq war occured (with Bush re-elected)? No, and prop 13 doesn't prove voters were largely radical right.