Romney compares California's economy to Greece

[slackmaster]

28. My perspective on that is a little different because my parents were getting hit with ridiculous...

...increases in the property tax they owed on our family home several years in a row.

Their San Diego County property tax assessment for 1977-78 was more than 10 times what it had been just 10 years earlier.

The house had about quintupled in assessed value since 1966, and the county had doubled the property tax rate.

The increase in value was due to market conditions totally beyond my parents' control, and there was no available avenue of appeal for unconscionable increases in property tax bills. The county was systematically soaking neighborhoods that happened to be popular with home buyers - Our home happened to be less than a mile from the rapidly expanding UC San Diego campus where my mom worked for many years after my father died unexpectedly. My stepfather, whom she married two years after buying the house on her own, had his income severely reduced by a nasty divorce from his first wife, with huge alimony and child support payments which he paid faithfully.

The property tax bills plus rapid inflation of basic commodities like food had made it impossible for my parents to run the family budget. At one point after my stepfather was laid off of his job, they were in real danger of losing the house. Fortunately my stepfather got his job back, but it was a very close call.

My mom was an Eisenhower Republican, dad was a New Deal Democrat. They often found themselves cancelling out each others' votes, but not on Proposition 13. I was 20 years old at the time, and I voted for it as well.

The hidden "gotcha" that few people saw was that the tax rate and increase caps that were quite reasonable for residential property also apply to commercial parcels, which through some sleight-of-hand moves that are perfectly legal can appear to be owned by the same party as they are transferred through an unlimited number of business entities.

Everyone wants what taxes pay for but no one wants to pay taxes.

I'm sick of the arrogance of people who say things like this in regard to the valuable protection Proposition 13's limits on residential property assessments provide to homeowners. If you weren't being taxed out of house and home by your county assessor because you weren't a homeowner, you were either a dependent of someone who was, or you were a renter and the outrageous property tax bills were being passed down to you anyway.

The out-of-control assessments of the mid- to late-1970s hurt a lot of people. Proposition 13 fixed that. Property taxes have always been collected by counties and have NEVER appeared on the income side of the state's budget as a specific line item. Even before Proposition 13 more than half of the state's revenue came from personal income taxes, followed by sales taxes and corporate taxes.

The ignorance about this issue is not surprising considering the constant barrage of simplistic anti-homeowner propaganda that gets spewed on the Internet. Proposition 13 is NOT the main cause of the state's financial problems. Not even close.