What return? There is no return unless they sell. Should people who got their education paid for via government loans be required to pay an adjusted interest rate for their own since their education has now become more valuable and presumably increased their potential value?
I guess I just don't understand your argument. Are you of the opinion that people shouldn't be allowed to retire in the house they've been paying for their entire life? Is there another type of property that one owns where they must pay the appreciated value in order to keep it?
My opinion is that people shouldn’t get extra special tax breaks based on how long they have occupied a specific address. If you are taxing property it makes no sense to tax two equally valuable pieces of property different amounts based on how long someone has lived there.
Every argument I see in favor of prop 13 is an emotional one about how people should be able to live in a house they bought a long time ago in perpetuity. I see no reason for this
Lets attack this issue from a different angle. What is it that you hope to achieve by tying property taxes to the current assessed value of a home?
It has so many benefits it’s just crazy. Prop 13 is seriously one of the worst pieces of ‘legislation’ ever created in the US.
First, it would vastly increase housing market liquidity by removing the incentive to turtle. For example, say you are a couple that used to have a bunch of kids in the house that all grew up and want to downsize from a four bedroom house to a more modest one because you can’t use the space. If you move to that one bedroom across the street though, your property taxes get reset at a new, much higher level, so now you don’t save anything. What do you do instead? Stay there and leave three bedrooms empty because it’s actually cheaper to waste space even during a housing crisis.
Second, it returns balance to the tax system by eliminating the super regressive nature of prop 13. Currently, newer and less wealthy people pay vastly higher taxes on their property than older and wealthier people. For every poor grandma on a fixed income not getting forced out of their home you have tons of people with very high incomes in their 50’s paying a small fraction of what younger, poorer people are paying in property taxes. It’s yet another intergenerational transfer of wealth. Don’t even get me started on how it does nothing to protect the people who actually tend to get priced out, poor renters.
Third, it removes a massive source of instability from government. As woolfe mentioned since prop 13 kneecapped property tax revenues California has raised other taxes to compensate, ones like the sales tax which is highly unstable. This is one of the reasons California almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis as they are now vulnerable to huge swings in revenue.
I could go on, but that’s a bunch of pretty great things for California to achieve. Everyone likes to focus on grandma sitting in her house and nobody likes to focus on the suffering inflicted on other people in order to do that.