Perverse Taxation in California

[ndrosen]

There was an article in Slate recently by Henry Graber, on how California is deteriorating into a feudal society of inherited wealth. Proposition 13 nearly froze property tax assessments so long as the property remained in the same hands, and then Proposition 58 required the assessments to increase only slowly when the property was inherited. In other words, the Smith family and the Jones family can pay enormously different tax bills for similar houses on similar tracts of land, if the Joneses bought their home last year, and Mr. Smith inherited the property from his father, who owned it when Proposition 13 passed in 1978.

My only quarrel with the article is a matter of terminology: In Georgist political economy, wealth refers to things of human production, but does not include land, and property ownership in California may be highly unequal, but it isn’t literally feudal; the landowners don’t have to perform military service or other obligations as a condition of holding their estates. I have no disagreement with the term “deteriorating.”