Unfair Property Tax Base

A response to Bill Stall’s “The Family Home Sits on an Unfair Tax Base,” Opinion, March 26:

If we can agree that no taxing system is really fair, but that some are just less “unfair” than others, then we can understand why if Proposition 13 was put to a vote today it would pass easily. Predictability. Before Proposition 13, a buyer did not know what to expect. The assessment on the house may have been three years old, which meant a temporary bonanza. However, if the assessor should come around in two years with house prices flying, there was no telling how high the bill might be.

It is not a horror story that one’s neighbor is paying a much smaller tax on an identical house. The neighbor determined that he could afford the tax when he bought the house, just as the recent buyer made the same determination at the time of purchase.

The real horror was pre-Proposition 13 when someone had paid his dues for 20 or 30 years and now owned his home only to discover that he was being taxed out into the street.

If you want to root out a true inequity then admit that the property tax is unfair under any scheme. One can own a million dollars in cash, art, jewels or even stocks and pay no tax unless sold at a profit. Invest the same money in property and you become a target. It is visible and you cannot carry it off in the night when the tax man wants a bigger bite.

Looked at another way: If a worker spends all of his earnings he will be taxed on his income and once on some of his purchases. But, if he decides to spend some of his after-tax earnings on some property, he will be taxed not on the amount he invested, but on the full market value of that property, and he must continue to pay the tax yearly whether the property produces income or not. That’s enough unfairness for at least three articles.

STEVEN M. GOODMAN

Encino