Proposition 13: Tax Breaks For The Big Boys
By Peter Schrag
It’s been just a third of a century since the passage of Proposition 13 in June, 1978. In that time few of its offspring have caused more damage than the great loopholes allowing corporations to evade hundreds of millions in local property taxes that they’d owe in any fair and economically rational revenue system.
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but as schools, cities, counties and other local agencies scratch for funds to pay cops, firefighters, teachers, librarians, and park and street maintenance workers, the cost becomes more glaring by the day.
In county after county, as Lenny Goldberg of the California Tax Reform Association has been trying to tell us for years – and as he demonstrated again in a 2010 report written with David Kirsten – Proposition 13, which was supposed to protect homeowners, has become a great gusher of benefits for banks, drug and grocery chains, hotel corporations, oil companies, and real estate speculators.
