We at COTTonLINE hoped Brown would see the need for change, and move in a helpful direction ala Nixon in China. I guess that was like hoping your average house cat would take up swimming. As Hill reports, it appears Jerry Brown is headed in the direction of creating an unstoppable pressure for increasing property taxes.
My understanding is that his plan may work as follows: when Prop 13 was passed, the state took over funding - out of income and sales tax revenues - a number of functions previously funded by its counties out of property tax revenues. Now a broke state government will stop paying for these functions and dump them back on the shoulders of county governments.
Burdened county governments will do some combination of cutting services and demanding to be allowed to raise property taxes. Faced with diminished services and local pressure, Brown suspects California voters will agree to abrogating some aspects of Proposition 13 so that counties can raise property taxes.
The ugly political undertow in all of this is that most California voters who do not own property vote Democrat. I understand that renters pay property tax indirectly, and that rents are likely to rise. But rising rents are blamed on landlords, rarely on the rising taxes that those landlords pay. County supervisors in California do not run with a party label. When they press the voters for rolling back popular Prop. 13, it will not create bad vibes for the Democrats.
