1. A lot of these property values wouldn’t be 2M if current owners had to pay the taxes. Prop 13 directly incentivizes home owners to (a) never sell and (b) block new housing in their neighborhood that might increase supply.
2. Prop 13 directly incentivizes cities to court Google/FB/Apple to come in. With Prop 13 limiting access to property taxes, most cities look to sales and business tax income to fill in the difference.
3. It’s not all or nothing like ”we need Prop 13 or seniors get kicked out of their homes!” Prop 13 is unique in that it blindly exempts large businesses and wealthy folks who can afford to pay, not just folks who need help.
Other regions (e.g. Boston area) address this with targeted property tax breaks for vulnerable communities, and California would be better served with a well-tested, reliable solution like that.
But that’s hard to implement because California ballot props are wildly difficult to get rid of.
I feel like this gives an overly rosy picture of the past—
The need to serve Paradigm 2 existed all over the place in the plain html days.
It’s just instead of having standards-based languages for Paradigm 2, we used to embed janky Flash SWFs and Java applets, were dependent on single vendors to patch zero-days in closed source code, and had to pay hundreds of dollars for licenses for developer tools.
Today’s Paradigm 2 now has multiple competing implementations, open standards, and powerful DOM inspectors in almost every web browser to tear apart any modern Paradigm 2 app you come across.
I think today’s Paradigm 2 gives more power to users than the Paradigm 2 of the past :)
Tufts had a professor who was nationally recognized for incredible intro CS lessons: https://www.computer.org/profiles/benjamin-hescott
They denied him tenure: https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2017/08/29/professor-computer-sc...