221–230 of 272 posts
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Because your house is now more valuable and as a general rule progressive taxes are best where those with more money pay more tax.
My house going up or down in value doesn’t make me richer or poorer I could see the point of your argument if I sell and make a profit - but before I do that my QOL within my house is not affected
Wealth = assets minus liabilities
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My prediction is remote work won’t last. Maybe for specific workers and tech must be the last, but other office jobs? They’ll be a slow but growing expectation to be in the office and the folks that show up will be the ones getting the desirable projects, the promotions and raises. It might take a few years until we get there, but we will.
I’ll take an office job when by travel time is taken off my work week/fully paid (including car/bus/w/e costs). But that job would also have to have affordable and desirable housing commensurate with the compensation. What we’re actually going to see is a division better highly skilled people going to companies that understand what humans need and lesser skilled or otherwise problematic employees settling for the les…
But sure, people with negotiating power will likely keep WFH and people without will have to come in.
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Prop 13 ensures that once you’ve bought in you feel no more pain from the housing crisis, and thus most Californian voters would have to vote against their own individual self-interest to do anything positive on housing, which just won’t happen. By contrast, in Texas there is no income tax but high property tax, and as prices have shot up recently most homeowners have reason to be worried about it and to vote to take…
Prop 13 also stabilizes property tax revenues. When housing drops 10% in a year, my property tax bill, like most people who bought a few years go, goes up 2%. Yes, my property tax bill also goes up 2% when property value jump 10%. But, the cost of govt services didn't jump 10% that year, so why should property tax go up that much?
Not really; yes, it reduces total volatitlity in property tax revenues asymmetrically, since tax assessments fall without restriction in downturns irrespective of turnover, but rise with a sharp limit in upturns outside of a limited set of qualifying events.
But stabilizing property tax revenues, even to the extent it is true, is made less relevant by the way Prop 13 cuts property taxes so low that it shifts the burden to other, more volatile, revenue streams. (While the assessment increase is what most people focus on with Prop 13, it also capped nominal property tax rates in California at a low rate.)
No wonder it's struggling with remote work, there's no incentive to go there. If somebody would be living there, then there would always be someone around to shop, drink or go to work.
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Prop 13 is one of the legs of the stool of most dysfunction in California. Some of these are gonna spark controversy but term limits, the recall and ease of passing propositions are some of the other ones. The legislature is no longer professional enough to govern, so the people do it at the ballot box, at the behest of whom ever has the most money to spend. The fact that California is a single party state because of…
Terms limits are a red herring. They punish good and bad candidates, and don't actually help the problems with the elected class: campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering. Wanna know what its a "single party state"? Because one of the major parties, up until Pete Wilson, acted like a real party, then became a caricature (the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys…
The last is really not true; Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters in a way that could win statewide elections or legislative majorities and instead committed itself to appealing to the most extreme of the national Republican donor class. That's why they (and particularly Darryl Issa, who hoped to used it as a vehicle for his own election) funded the recall drive, aiming for an opportunity where they wouldn't actually need to get more votes than retention to win.
But once the recall was set, Schwarzenegger, who had basically no connection to the institutional Republican Party, swept in and blew away the establishment Republicans (leading to Darryl Issa’s literally tearful exit from the race that he has spent $1.7 million out of his own pocket to make happen).
> The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because
Largely of the lack of internal ideological coherence and stability, making them able to run at least one candidate that fits the moment and district in any given election.
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Terms limits are a red herring. They punish good and bad candidates, and don't actually help the problems with the elected class: campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering. Wanna know what its a "single party state"? Because one of the major parties, up until Pete Wilson, acted like a real party, then became a caricature (the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys…
Compare the quality of legislation passed before term limits to after (the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits), I remember the difference. The current system encourages "make a name for yourself than move on to bigger and better things" and prevents the legislature acting as a base of political power - that gets in the way of long term thinking. To the rest of your comment - I th…
After is generally better, at least than in an equal time period before, though I don't attribute it to term limits, which were a bad idea.
> the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits
The last major structural reform to state government was when it was finally made modestly governable by the repeal of the supermajority budget requirement in 2010, 14 years after term limits applied to the Assembly (a little over two full turnovers forced by term limits), 12 years after they applied to the Senate (one full turnover and halfway through the next.)
The last major structural reforms of government administration (which may be more what you are thinking of, though of less practical effect) were a series under Schwarzenegger in 2005 (or so, not sure they all happened that year), still well after term limits.
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Terms limits are a red herring. They punish good and bad candidates, and don't actually help the problems with the elected class: campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering. Wanna know what its a "single party state"? Because one of the major parties, up until Pete Wilson, acted like a real party, then became a caricature (the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys…
> the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys like Nixon, Reagan, Deukmajian, Schwartzenegger etc all got elected The last is really not true; Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters in a way that could win statewide elections or legislative majorities and instead committed itself to appealing…
No, but his tenure helped to foment their internal confusion about where to go. Arnold himself refused to play a party line game, and that in turn led to ever larger fissures between the national RNC and the State leadership.
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Because your house is now more valuable and as a general rule progressive taxes are best where those with more money pay more tax.
Your house becoming more valuable doesn’t mean you have more money.
Of course not, stock shares or real estate are not money. But they are wealth.
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16M square feet is last year’s estimate. Wonder what the figure is today
18.7 as of April https://socketsite.com/archives/2022/04/visualizing-all-the-...
Definitely would help a ton though, and I probably shouldn't be hopeful of a single solution here.
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It's absolutely insane that the government has any say in what a building gets used for. I can see some arguments why the government has a say in constructing a building in the first place, but controlling what it's used for is just planned economy, communist hubris!
You should talk to people in Houston. It effectively has no zoning which means you get oil processing plants built next door to elementary schools. The Austrian Economists will jump in here and say that's why certain private property developments buy the equivalent of "sky rights" (or "land rights" I guess) with adjoining properties to effectively create their own zoning.
Houston may not have zoning but it has plenty of code that mandate car dependency and huge amounts of driving and therefore suburban blandness.
Regulation versus deregulation is a barren framing, the real problem is absolutely terrible urban planning rules in the US that have created our bad situations. As a field, it would probably be better if it never existed.