‘Challenge to Prop. 13’
In the 1930s, my family bought our house in Westwood for $5,750. By 1975 we were paying almost $4,000 a year in taxes. Without Prop. 13, what would we be paying now?
A neighbor in her 80s sold her car, then her piano, and finally her living room furniture in order to remain in the home where she had lived for most of her life. In 1975 there were no “reverse mortgages” or arrangements for executors of estates to pay real estate taxes.
The major beneficiaries of Prop. 13 may be businesses, but in a kinder, gentler nation the more important beneficiaries are the elderly, who may never have earned $10,000 a year in their lives but who would like to continue living in their own homes.
Why is it more moral to tax paper profits on real estate than to tax paper profits on stocks or bonds?
MARGARET W. ROMANI
Los Angeles
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