I wish people here would stop telling me what's good for me too.
Whether that’s important to you is - as always - completely up to you in this country. I don’t understand the animosity between different states; we can all go wherever we fit best and that’s a great thing.
Nothing wrong with wanting a big house, but also nothing wrong or coercive with mentioning it has environmental impacts
When something affects you personally because it is forced on you it is much harder to be tolerant.
If it only affects the people who want that law then it is much easier to just say "I do me, you do you".
Different states are supposed to have different ways of life based on different value systems. That way people can move to the states that are most in alignment with their values. Laws at the Federal level take that freedom away.
Who are you to cast stones?
I mean they own the home, so presumably that gives them a right to live there. They went there and bought a home for market value, even if it was a struggle to do so. They didn't complain about the existing residents or suggest that everything had to change to accommodate them. So I'm not quite sure what you're asking.
The local government committee meetings on these matters is predominantly filled by two groups of people: those same seniors, and people who are effectively independently wealthy. It's NIMBY-ism all over the place here driven primarily by the wealthy and the old. I don't know if it's the same in other communities or towns in this area, but that's what it is here.
House prices are high in SV because they're not building enough housing. Blame zoning laws and racism (Palo Alto only builds low-income housing for people with college degrees and no criminal records. They call it "teacher housing.") Don't blame the generation that came before you.
> make their house unaffordable were it not for the protections
FB isn't the problem, the problem is zoning... Artificially cutting off supply to the benefit of landowners and capital.
- Direct your discontent toward the corporations and landlords who are exploiting Prop 13 when it wasn't intended for them. It was intended to protect homeowners (often on retirement income) from skyrocketing property values that is out of their control. It's done great at that, but unfortunately (like any regulation) has also been exploited by the greedy.
- That aside, don't presume to be entitled to buy the house you want in the place you want it to be for the amount you want to pay for it. It sucks that I can't afford to buy a nice home in my hometown because FAANG came in and made it the place to be, but I'm also not entitled to that. The notion that people like my parents ought to be taxed out of their home so that well-off twentysomethings can have a more favorable property market really grinds my gears. There are lots of people trying to just live in their hard-earned homes after doing the work and taking the risks of building the tech industry, and most of them didn't become wealthy venture capitalists in the end. Just like most of us won't.
Luckily, if someone is being priced out by fair property taxes, they still own a valuable asset.
How about I go to your hometown and bully your folks out of their house? They ought to be fine with that, right? It's just an asset. Come on.
The median property tax paid by homeowners in NY State -- a state with no "Prop 13" is $5,865 (according to facts I just googled).
What, exactly, am I getting away with? How will increasing property taxes in a state with the highest income and sales tax solve the housing crisis?
They need to build more housing, and more dense housing.
I live in CA about 8 months/year, and spend the Feb-May in Tel Aviv. We're actively looking to move our U.S. home to Nashville, TN.
What are you getting away with? Paying less for schools and common infrastructure than your neighbors who bought in the last decade. They're probably paying 3X more tax than you are, right?
How will increasing it help? For one, it would have forced you to sell and move since you have limited interest in living there. You’re not entitled to live where you want just because you were born first. Property taxes specifically exist so that there isn’t a perpetual inheritance of land with no incentive to relinquish it.
And you're not entitled to send men from the government to take my house. (As was done to my grandparents in 1929. See: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-of-jewish-settl... )
When I think of all the people living in their cars around Oakland, raising property taxes and pooling them into social services is something I favor. Highest income is misleading. Lots of people work retail or similar and will never own a home.
> I live in CA about 8 months/year, and spend the Feb-May in Tel Aviv.
I think this speaks to privilege. I’m not saying it’s unearned, I don’t know you. I do agree that more dense housing is badly needed.
The insanely low real estate tax increases over time make California real estate investments more appealing to small scale investors. Especially overseas.
I like what Matthew McConaughey said about people moving from California to Austin - "Remember why you moved here, and understand you're going to have to vote a certain way if don't want to move again in the future."
No, they just don’t want their neighborhoods to change (read: poor people, more traffic). I don’t think most of them are frankly thinking about their property values because it’s just not super relevant, thanks to prop 13.
> For another example, there is no incentive to renovate/tear down/rebuild bigger because now you will pay significantly higher property taxes. Single family homes don't get turned into denser properties.
There is a ton of incentive to build more units: for one, you could sell them for a ton more in aggregate! But there is also a huge disincentive that is not prop 13: zoning laws that prevent basically any increase in density in some absurd fraction of California, especially absurd in central areas and inner ring suburbs.
Prop 13 is definitely an issue, but it’s not the dominant one for the effects you describe.
Prop 13 shields NIMBYs from negative externalities of their desire for their neighborhoods not to change. Housing is in short supply which inflates property values, but they don't have to worry about that because they don't want to sell and property taxes continue to remain low due to Prop 13. They can either pass down their property to their children (taxes remain unchanged) or they sell and cash out on their uber expensive property and move out of state sometime later in life. As I alluded in other comments, I suspect it is more often the former rather than the latter since it doesn't make sense to sell.
The incentive to build is low because most existing property owners want to continue living somewhere in the Bay Area and if they move, their taxes reset. Building more units on the same property is a non-starter for that reason. Yes, zoning is also a factor, and goes hand-in-hand with the same agenda that Prop 13 came out of. It's multiple cuts from the same cloth.
This is a really good point, and this framing helps me understand your argument much better, thanks!
> The incentive to build is low because most existing property owners want to continue living somewhere in the Bay Area and if they move, their taxes reset.
I don't think this is right, though -- the incentive to move is low, but the incentive to build is high. Since people do move, even though there is a strong counterincentive, we find that properties do come on the market, and overwhelmingly the reason they are not bought by developers to build larger structures with more units is zoning.
If developers could buy a SFH for $2m and build a 4-plex, selling each unit for $1m (numbers that are pretty common in wealthy Bay Area neighborhoods), then they absolutely would and we'd see this all over the place. In my neighborhood this happens every time edge cases in zoning allow it. (Large enough lot that it can be split? Developer buys it, builds two units. Weird commercial conversion with higher floor limits? Developer buys it, builds three units.)
I agree that prop 13 has an impact here, but zoning in most neighborhoods literally prohibits new construction -- so I don't think a prop 13 repeal would have nearly as much of an impact on new housing construction as upzoning or other zoning mitigation. Of course, from an economic perspective both are highly problematic distortions of pricing (along with rent control!), and both need to be reevaluated -- but if I had to pick one, I'd pick zoning!
Convincing retort there, I should have realized my argument is idiotic! Consider my mind changed.
And I bet you’ve convinced everyone else reading this thread too.
The history of exclusionary zoning is a history of replacing restrictive racial covenants (binding agreements on property titles that prevent sales to certain groups) and redlining (which rendered unavailable mortgage loans to anyone for properties in neighborhoods that were not majority-white), both of which were invalidated by the Fair Housing Act in 1968, triggering the wave of exclusionary zoning intended to keep out the same people.
The history is clear that this type of zoning is explicitly designed to keep properties expensive, to keep them out of the hands of "undesirables". Prop 13 then insulates longtime residents from that same increase in cost. They go hand in hand, but I'm not sure it's fair to say that Prop 13 contributes to zoning.
[0]: https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2012/tax/property-tax-primer-1129...
I think Texas got this right. Higher property taxes are assessed every year on the current property value. This has the positive effect to keep the real estate market within reason. Home owners have no incentive to see their taxes explode, unless they plan to sell and move.
CA is a mess! And don't get me started on the fact that property taxes pay for public schools, so if I buy a property today say at $1M whereas my neighbor bought 10y ago and payed $100k guess who is paying the most to finance schools ? It is utterly unfair!
Hence, after almost a decade in SF, I and my finally finally moved on, I kept my job and bought a nice, modern, luxury house in Austin! I and my family are super happy now.
I voted democrats my entire life, I have now realized how wrong I was! SF and CA turned me into a republican! And that's what I vote now.
And yet density is anathema, single family home zoning is everywhere, and new development construction happens on the edges, and traffic and cost gets worse every year. Just a little more slowly than in the current CA bubble. But make the TX bubble hotter, and watch the prices then!
Republicans who haven't yet had to deal with the same level of bubble-driven rapid inequality growth don't have some better policies in mind - they just haven't hit the breaking point yet. I'm sure things will get there in another decade or two, but I guess perpetually running away from self-induced problems is a pretty good strategy for folks with the money.
NIMBYism and zoning exists in SO many places without Prop 13, and does the same thing. It keeps the poor people (denser housing) out. It keeps the transit stops away. It keeps the power station away.
"Bad policy" it may be, if your goal is "the cheapest aggregate housing for everyone," but talking about getting rid of Prop 13 without all the other causes of NIMBYism will just get your expensive houses slowly replaced with expensive condo buildings and do next to nothing for the poor and homeless. We have exactly zero politicians or parties in this country who are telling us what "good policy" would look like on this issue.
And maybe America and certainly California don't need half the country moving to just one state.
None of the people I’ve encountered who oppose housing construction seem to see things this way. Most of them seem to be economic conservatives who see themselves as having won a “fair game” and the fact that they’re using the government to strip others of their property rights - rights to build, rights to house - is lost to them. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and post-hoc rationalization in this group.
Thus there is no right to build: an 80-story apartment tower, a supervised injection place for IV drug users, an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant.
The demand is there for even more restriction. In many areas, new housing is exclusively in home owner associations or in condominiums.
These tax savings pass to homeowner families who stay in one location for multiple decades, especially as land values rise.
Homeowners are very opposed to being displaced, since moving means their taxes would reset to a higher level.
Renters are excluded from these savings.
Not exactly. It is more complex than that. The tax base is supposed to be the market value but if the market value raises, the tax base is allowed to follow only up to a certain margin. With CA and especially Bay Area prices skyrocketing for a while, the effect has been than the tax base lags very far from the actual market value, and for people who bought in the 80s the tax base may be a fraction of their current market value.
When you buy the house your tax rate is 1% (+ local fees) of your purchase price. Every year thereafter, it goes up by at least 2%.
The assessed value will go up by 2% (that's prop13) so the base tax will go up by 2%. However, local city and county can add their own fees on top of that (so they do), therefore in many years the actual dollar amount increase will be more than 2%.
(Source: my property tax bill over the last 23 years.)
Source: just bought my first home in CA. Taxes were surprisingly reasonable
Also your property taxes start out at 1% of assessed value, which is very low compared with many other high-wealth states.
edit: added more
Imagine property tax is 0. Why would anyone ever sell? All the land would effectively be owned by hereditary feudal lords.
Texas has higher property taxes than California but more affordable housing. Makes you think.
You'd sell for the usual reason, i.e. you'd prefer having money rather than that particular piece of land? That money would be then spent on either consumption or an investment with higher yield than land-holding.
In my home country Poland the land tax is negligible and yet the market for land exists, it's not held forever by "feudal lords".
I suspect if you pick apart of the BA housing market you'll see some very large landlords with huge property portfolios. While they're not literally "feudal lords" they might as well be in terms of their self-serving influence on housing policy.
Perhaps not coincidentally, some of them are FAANGs.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/11/03/meet-silicon-valleys-...
Whether or not you think efficient land use is a good thing is up to you. The question of what taxes accomplish is separate from the question of if a policy objective is "good".
I think the last new tax I voted for was in 2004. Back when I was 25 and didn’t fully understand how terribly mismanaged the funds were.
The new comers came because California already had an ecosystem and infrastructure in place built ready made for them to thrive.
New comers are not subsidizing existing property owners. They ..and their children use the infrastructure already in place that is subsidized for them.
People with children older than 18 or with no kids have no use for public schools. Since property taxes are being used to fund public education, it’s essentially everyone subsidizing public education. For all. And this includes renters, undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, those who pay taxes and those who don’t. Everyone. That’s what’s free public education means. For everyone in CA as public school fund budget is redistributed to all counties in California and not just the zip code it’s collected from...
Tweaking Prop 13 won’t miraculously get us better roads or infrastructure. Or affordable housing. It will only go to fix the gap of the unfunded pension liabilities of unionized teachers[1]. Wages account for 60-80% of school budgets. Public education accounts for 44% of state budget. Almost all of property taxes goes towards public education.
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/html/worst-union-america-13470.... The Worst Union in America How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state
Further:
+ https://reason.com/2018/11/09/california-teachers-unions-opp... California Teachers Unions Oppose Paying Teachers More Because It Would Introduce Too Much Competition Into Public Schools
+ https://fee.org/articles/teachers-unions-are-the-schools-run... Teachers Unions: Are the Schools Run for Them?
+ http://laschoolreport.com/antonucci-california-teachers-asso... Antonucci: California Teachers Association pledges support for Prop. 13 overhaul
It is unbelievable to see this actually written down, and in an argument asserting that people from generations ago built an ecosystem for what is currently an exploding knowledge based economy, no less.
2. There are 18 years of subsidized free public education.
3. The average home value is around 500k and sometimes higher. Average property tax bill is 6k. But often 15-20k in the Bay Area.
4. Homes that pay 15-20k in the Bay Area only get less than 8k-10k/student. Oakland that makes still less in property taxes has a budget allocation of 14k/student. This is a redistribution of taxes so everyone gets an education.
5. If A has 5 children and rent a home, education is still free.
If B is an undocumented immigrant picking strawberries for minimum wage and have 3 kids, education is still free.
If C has two children and pay 12k as property tax, education is still free for my two kids.
If I am 70 years old and my kids have grown up, my kids are paying taxes. I am still paying taxes on a property that I haven’t sold yet.
Why should I pay MORE taxes for a home that I paid mortgage for ..when all of my property taxes have been paid for 40-50 years. When I get no benefit out of the current school system but still willing to pay my promised share on the home that I finally own after 30 years of mortgage.
Trying to displace elders and seniors who have done their part to educate the children of YOUR loins is like robbing old people to buy candy for your kids.
The younger generation needs to grow up and stop being grabby. We should be taking care of our seniors. We stand on their shoulders. Pay your fucking taxes and raise your own kids instead of trying to chase older people out of their homes because you can’t manage your finances or elect leaders to do their jobs. Stop protesting and go to a city council meeting instead and ask why the taxes you already pay aren’t used for what they are meant for.. fucking hell! Show some fucking respect for all the freebies you enjoy from those who built these cities after wars and depressions and recessions before you were a twinkle in your fathers eye. Goddamit! California needs to fucking wake up.
What you type are talking points that make no sense. Ask anyone who had lived and paid taxes and mortgages in California before 1980, they will tell you why prop 13 is the third rail and the disastrous consequences it had on Californians when they tried to touch it.
These talking points when examined are literally..and I mean literally..meaningless. They are repeated and never analysed. Young people don’t research, look at CA budgets or the insane nutcase formulas Gov. Jerry Brown instituted that has made CA budgetary maze a house of mirrors.
Here is an easy one to remember: when someone is being blamed and loudly and often, pause. Examine. More likely than not they are an easy scapegoat. Consider who is screeching and yelling at them. They are the problem.
California politicians have successfully turned its people against each other. Older Californians feel like the state has become unaffordable and are being strangled to pay the taxes of the new comers who walked into a ready infrastructure ready state. The schools, roads, cities were already planned and ready to be taken over by the tech horde.
On the other hand, there is the tech crowd. Young and having had 18 years of their schooling subsidized by the very people they are trying to unhouse with demands for punitive taxes that offer them no benefits in their old age where they only look forward to a fixed income. They see the young people in their late 20s and 30s trying to grab their homes and can’t understand why these so called millionaires and educated class earning 5 figures need them to die or fuck off to be able to afford a home.
Meanwhile in the background, unions and our ELECTED leaders are pulling the puppet strings to create conflict so that in the chaos of calling each other names, the public will ignore their machinations. The only goal: extract as much taxes as possible to pad public sector jobs/salaries and unfunded pension liabilities. Unions, homeless activists, diversity and inclusionary departments, prison rehab, housing activist are ALL union backed. Everyone else is a puppet too. Look.it.up. Look up CA budget. The unholy alliance to create vote banks for public funding.
The people who are shelling out the money as taxes should stop fighting and take a breath. Look at the REAL enemy. Look how smart he is to keep two cash cows to fighting each other. Wake up.
That was the stated objective given to economically illiterate voters but not the intended purpose. Those property owners can be targeted with tax exemptions without the "unintended" consequences of Proposition 13. The vast majority of the beneficiaries of Proposition 13 are not seniors who would be put on the street, and the fact that the tax benefit is inheritable makes the idea that this was the purpose of the initiative even more of a farce.
https://www.sccassessor.org/index.php/about-us/department-or...
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/dtac/tax/Pages/parcel-tax-exemp...
if you are talking about the exemption given to the children who inherit property and the prop 13 benefits along with it, i am in agreement.
i am also in cautious agreement with prop 13 being amended when it comes to commercial properties.
any prop 13 amendment that adversely affects tax paying citizens or senior citizens who own property is the untouchable third rail.
any increase in taxes will result in higher cost of living. just like the myth that high density living is sustainable (because a cluster of high density homes within feet of each other is not high density but just over crowded. high density is only sustainable if it spares sprawl and lives within allocated available resources), the notion that high taxes will somehow benefit the state is a very ill thought out plan.
there are a million ways to raise taxes. but following that dollar isnt as easy. every single tax dollar misappropriated by our politicians is a travesty. we are already a highly taxed state. before demanding to tax others on our behalf, perhaps we should first ask WHERE the tax dollars are going right NOW. it's not like we are a tax free state. anyone paying taxes and making a paycheck in california is just an ambulatory ATM for sacramento. tits to balls, we are taxed to death.
Have you heard of financial literacy or scientific literacy? Economic literacy is similar. I am using the English language in a very straightforward manner.
> the notion that high taxes will somehow benefit the state is a very ill thought out plan.
Who said anything about increasing total state revenue? After Prop 13 passed, a big chunk of the state revenue was tied up in propping up local governments. By undoing the damage of this highly regressive policy, the state will have the ability to reduce regressive taxes and even income taxes. It will also encourage development (new property developers will no longer be disadvantaged vs. existing landowners), bringing in more money (and reducing blight) and reducing the need to tax individual earners even more.
english is not my first language. economic literacy wrt this topic seems irrelevant.
>After Prop 13 passed, a big chunk of the state revenue was tied up in propping up local governments.
wrong. property taxes are diverted to the state's public education program through a complicated set of formulas called LCFF.[1]
it collects all the property taxes. dumps them in a big pot and redistributes them. for example: an affluent bay area neighbourhood's property taxes will go fund a farm labourer community in central california. 44% of state income goes to public schools. you wont see a dime of it to pursue any of the above stated goals. what is the point in unhousing and imposing punitive taxes on the senior population who have worked hard to buy their homes.
if they are paying low taxes, it automatically means that they bought it years ago. the solution is to regulate housing prices and engage other controls and processes so housing costs dont spiral out of control due to speculative housing markets.
>It will also encourage development (new property developers will no longer be disadvantaged vs. existing landowners), bringing in more money (and reducing blight) and reducing the need to tax individual earners even more.
how? how will increasing taxes on older properties that are still housing original buyers and havent been resold.. 'encourage development' without UNHOUSING existing people with fixed incomes who are already living there.
i think the word you are looking for or didnt mention is 'gentrification'.
people with income and those who consume should be taxed. if someone earns 200k as a FAANG employee, they shouldnt be given more tax breaks than a 70 year old senior houseowner on a fixed income. you are asking that prop 13 punish older houseowners so they will be forced to give up their residences to fund the younger citizenry.
those who consume from smart phones to game consoles to electric cars should be taxed for their higher consumption.
those who have children should be taxed because the children consume resources and need to be educated. the peers of parents should share the burden. not the generation that has already done it's part and is getting ready to retire.
people should be taxed on income. if at all. people shouldnt be taxed because they are old and have fixed immovable assets.
your comment suggests that we should 'reduce the need to tax individual earners' more and by messing with prop 13, you want to increase the burden of taxation on NON EARNERS with non income producing fixed assets. homes are not for income generation or speculative purposes or tax cows.
your proposal wants to add tax paying seniors to the throngs of drug addicted, mentally ill, financially insolvent people, unfortunate people who are already housing insecure.
and we will spend more money on social programs to house them. unless you are hoping that the high taxes will drive them away by making them sell their homes and they will move elsewhere. because the younger generation cannot live within their means and are financially illiterate?
no.
It is supremely relevant. You are advocating a regressive policy that hampers growth, and it's easy to figure this out with economic thinking.
> wrong. property taxes are diverted to the state's public education program through a complicated set of formulas called LCFF.[1]
That doesn't say I'm wrong. It just shows the formula by which the state props up each local government.
> how? how will increasing taxes on older properties that are still housing original buyers and havent been resold.. 'encourage development' without UNHOUSING existing people with fixed incomes who are already living there.
You're making at least three mistakes. The first is that you assume all property is residential. The second is that you assume that all property is developed. Due to Prop 13, there are several undeveloped lots with keep out signs in my neighborhood of million dollar houses. The third is that you assume that apartments can't be redeveloped to house more people. Prop 13 increases the cost of doing so to not only the fixed cost of redeveloping the property but the ongoing cost of significantly higher taxes.
> you are asking that prop 13 punish older houseowners so they will be forced to give up their residences to fund the younger citizenry.
You're falling for a marketing trick the proponents of the initiative intended for rubes. The correct way to keep the few old people in their homes is via tax exemptions, as I've already explained. It is not to give incumbent landowners a huge competitive advantage over new landowners, leading to de facto serfdom.
> you want to increase the burden of taxation on NON EARNERS with non income producing fixed assets.
Who said that? These landlords are producing massive unearned profits. The rents go up with demand, but their costs stay low. Removing prop 13 would bring their profits in line with newer landlords.
> those who have children should be taxed because the children consume resources and need to be educated. the peers of parents should share the burden. not the generation that has already done it's part and is getting ready to retire.
This is economically nonsensical. Who is going to pay the taxes to take care of the elderly if not the children? The state has every incentive to make these children as productive as possible, which means educating them.
Do you know any neighbors or relatives or friends who you think are benefiting from prop 13? I do. I see them everyday. Many of them pay a fraction of what I pay and I know new home owners will pay more than me.
Those before me also make a lot less and non inflation adjusted income than I do and the kid next door whines about making ‘only 500k’ as joint income and lives paycheck to paycheck. Because two kids.
The problem is not prop 13. The solution doesn’t lie with prop 13 either. Both of them are with California budget and its allocations. The solution lies in LOWER taxes, not higher. The solution lies in local governance and not regional governance. The solution lies in weaning off the teat of Sacramento that itself is attached to the bosom of the likes of highly taxed Bay Area enclaves and figuring out economic opportunities for every part of California. The solution lies in keeping home prices stable and not allow it to fluctuate. The solution lies in NOT concentrating jobs and earning potentials in small high density enclaves. The only advantage of high density high income cities is that they can be taxed heavily.
Because asset valuation is a function of the GDP and economic health/vigor AT THE TIME of sale. For most people, it’s mortgage debt that demands interest. Which itself fluctuates with the health of the country.
And it happens at Wall Street. You know what else happens at Wall Street? The money that comes back as pensions and 401k. The unions and pension funds and insurance companies invest in Wall Street. The whole thing is a like a pit of vipers all entwined and tangled. If you stick your hand into the viper pit, it’s not the vipers that will be bitten.
We should look to stabilize the property market and stop treating housing as a speculative asset. Instead people are lathered up into a frenzy to attack those who they imagine have an unfair advantage over them.
I know homes that have been bought sight unseen by foreign home buyers who rent it out and flip it to buy multiple properties in 4-5 years. In my neighborhood. Tax them! Maybe we should ban foreign investors and speculative investors who treat our housing stock as a gambling chip. That would be a better strategy to deal with California’s housing woes.
But wait! Try. Just try suggesting it at your city council meeting. Try to move it up to your county seat. Try to make it a bill or a proposition. The blinds will come off our collective vision about the nanny state of CA when we actually hold our politician and elected leaders accountable.
But take heart. You will fail. Because they don’t work for you. You work for them.
A proposal: instead of twin cities all over the world, we should be twinning cities within California to avail more economically developed cities to assist less advantaged regions in California. Having a mentor-mentee relationship and sharing resources between two counties is more viable and sustainable. Results will be quicker and more transparent. We can become one truly golden state because we helped each other.
We should all strive to be Robin Hood. Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men did not..as most believe..’steal from the rich and gave it to the poor’. He took from the tax collector and gave it back to the people. We need Robinhood. Not Karl Marx.
How? How is it a regressive policy? It is not like you are taxing real wealth or real income. The value of a property that is a domicile is taxed Ad Valorem. You are taxing a non income. It is not regressive but is in fact, a punitive tax.
A regressive tax policy only applies to that which has entered the economic circulation. An occupied home that is considered a owner occupied residence and generates NO income when punitively taxes is NOT progressive policy.
I don’t want easy. I want facts. Stating something doesn’t make a case for punitive taxes.
> That doesn't say I'm wrong. It just shows the formula by which the state props up each local government.
Yes. It shows that you are wrong. Because it’s NOT for local govt but for regional and state coffers. If you had looked into LCFF you’d have understood that.
>You're making at least three mistakes. The first is that you assume all property is residential.
That is not a mistake. I had stated elsewhere that my argument is only for owner occupied residential properties. Not for commercial properties or rental/investment properties. I am also not in favour of prop 13 benefits being passed on to children of the original owners.
>The second is that you assume that all property is developed. Due to Prop 13, there are several undeveloped lots with keep out signs in my neighborhood of million dollar houses.
I don’t think undeveloped lots should be punitively taxed. Property rights are the corner stone of capitalism and America. If you change that, we will have to accept that we have to amend the constitution.
>The third is that you assume that apartments can't be redeveloped to house more people.
It is not an assumption. High density occupation is not sustainable or desirable. High density homes are suitable for transitional homes and senior housing where the resource spending and consumption activity doesn’t stress the public facilities.
Example: have a high density homes for families in a city that can’t support playgrounds or schools is a bad idea. We have seen in the past that as high density increases for family homes with children, expenditure for public schools also increase. The biggest expenditure of public schools are not salaries and wages, but the pension liabilities as unions negotiate increases every year that gets accrued as pensions. This is absolutely unsustainable and will plunge the state into debt.
>Prop 13 increases the cost of doing so to not only the fixed cost of redeveloping the property but the ongoing cost of significantly higher taxes.
That makes no sense. Your entire premise is based upon the virtue of taxation. It has never occurred to you that the functioning of a state that relies on higher and higher states of taxation is abnormal and odd.
Example: The city and state has done nothing to increase the revenues of ..let’s say..google. Yet, the google employees have filled the state coffers with all manner of taxes. The state of California has had a windfall with taxable income. And yet. YET, they can’t manage their finances.
Instead of trying to keep patching the waterfall of deficit with a bandaid over the rocks, ask WHY?
The solution to our problems is not ask the Dept of taxes to act like our henchmen to collect taxes from those whom we feel are not like us.
>You're falling for a marketing trick the proponents of the initiative intended for rubes.
That’s a dumbass insult and I won’t respond to it.
>The correct way to keep the few old people in their homes is via tax exemptions, as I've already explained. It is not to give incumbent landowners a huge competitive advantage over new landowners, leading to de facto serfdom.
This makes no sense. Rubes, marketing trick, serfdom. I will address this when it makes sense to me.
>Who said that? These landlords are producing massive unearned profits. The rents go up with demand, but their costs stay low. Removing prop 13 would bring their profits in line with newer landlords.
Define Landlords. Do you mean the random person who rents a second home to pad income or real estate/rental firms that rents out apartments to people or commercial building owners?
Anytime you tax someone, that is going to be passed down to the renter. The renter or non house owner is the most subsidized person here. Because public schools are funded by property taxes. And public school expenditure is being eaten up by union negotiated pension liabilities for years to come when your children and their children will still be paying the debts. If ever there was a Ponzi scheme.
>This is economically nonsensical. Who is going to pay the taxes to take care of the elderly if not the children?
You know what sounds nonsensical? When someone puts a fixed amount in the bank for thirty years and when they ask for it when they need it, the bank says that they would be happy to lend it as a high interest loan.
That’s exactly what you are suggesting. Who educated these ‘children’? The elderly have more net worth than the children upon whom millions were spent for education.
Who paid Medicare, social security taxes, 401k contributions that became CAPITAL that the next generations enjoy. They did so they don’t have to pay more taxes.
What you are arguing for is like asking someone to make a deposit and when the time comes for withdrawal, you want to collect interest.
>The state has every incentive to make these children as productive as possible, which means educating them.
This is the problem. Parents expect the state to be the nanny state.
It doesn’t seem to have done a good job, has it? Because it looks like the educated millions of youth can’t even manage their finances and want to run back to the nanny state that raised them to impose more taxes where in fact they should be the ones paying taxes.
Someone who graduated school in 2000 should be able to pay the taxes to educate their generation’s children in public schools. The elderly have already done the job of educating the previous generation.
The youth and state are using each other as henchmen and acting like thugs to separate those who have paid their dues from their assets. If this isnt co-ordinated thuggery, I don’t know what is... the nanny and ward robbing the parent blind.
Have a nice day.
People don't want sprawl. The live in sf because it's a city with an urban center. It's why, despite hours of traffic, people live in sf instead of mountain view, cupertino, etc. It REQUIRES densification. Sprawl will not meet this demand.
This keeps prices reasonable, and gives people somewhere to live.
And the escapades with legislators fleeing the state in order to block legislation makes for hilarity.
As an example it takes about 20 minutes to drive from my house to the airport, and 3 hours to get there by bus, not counting the walk to the bus stop. The light rail line goes nowhere near the majority of the city.
If we're doing any sort of event downtown or ACL or whatever, I rent a condo nearby instead of dealing with taxis or busses despite only living 15 minutes from the city center and very much "in Austin."
Nobody deals with publix transit if they can afford not to.
I was fortunate to live in a community on the Commuter rail stop (in Crestview) while I worked downtown and took the train daily for a couple years -- splendid. But though it was packed, I knew nearly nobody else in person that had used it, and many did not even know it existed -- such is the small areas it served.
IMO the best (commuter) features of Austin is it has the room to grow. Unlike Houston (or Dallas, I assume), it has much less roadway infrastructure and things seem slow to build here. So, despite being in and out of this city since college (~20 years ago), I still feel unsure what the future looks like.
https://fortune.com/2020/12/03/los-angeles-new-lockdown-rule...
dannyincolor - He issued an order. Its not an ask. This isnt a where you live thing, this is a govt overstepping their bounds thing. Id have no problem with asking.
In this specific case the Texas Attorney General is being investigated by the FBI and hoping to court favor with Trump for a pardon.
https://www.lamayor.org/sites/g/files/wph446/f/page/file/202...
It isn't as odious as it's made to seem.
You can still grab takeout from a restaurant, buy weed, go to the grocery store, do your laundry, go to an outdoor fitness class, go to youth sports, surf at the beach, do some outdoor lap swimming, get your nails done, go to the zoo, etc. The request to fill out an online form is a very, very basic attempt at contact tracing that is pretty non-invasive.
City of LA was facing a situation where its hospitals were going to wind up being effectively closed due to loss of capacity. Seems like a decent justification for extraordinary measures. Look at Barstow Community right now. 114% of inpatient beds occupied by COVID patients (as-of 12/15). Imagine if LA hospitals looked like that. It would be apocalyptic.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
As it is, even with that order having gone into effect, ICU capacity in LA county as-of the 11th is 2.7%.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11850757/california-icu-capacity-s...
Plus, if you look at a map of what actually constitutes the City of LA proper, it's a pretty tiny, but extremely high-density slice of the 'Greater LA Area.'
If you really, really want to wander around DTLA, just tell the cops you're walking to the grocery store. They're not walking around arresting anyone who steps outside.
This is a tool that lets city authorities put the brakes on people doing egregiously stupid stuff. They're not stopping people on the street like the gestapo for going about their business.
So, in short the parent comment seemed to express a knee-jerk reaction to a policy without offering an attempt at a reasoned assessment of the context and policy alternatives facing the City, as well as a pragmatic appreciation for the reality of enforcement on the ground. If they offered a viable alternative that seemed reasonable and well thought-out rather than just calling it an "absurd big liberal govt policy" I wouldn't have downvoted. Doesn't matter who runs the city, Repub or Dem, if when you call 911 there's nowhere for the ambulance to take you.
ICU beds are flexible, it's more of a designation than a hard constant. Sweden doubled their ICU capacity in a few weeks without much difficulty back in March. So it's normal for ICU to run near "capacity" because it'd be kind of wasteful if it didn't.
Remember also that "COVID patient" means "patient who tested positive for COVID", it doesn't mean that's the primary thing wrong with them. Hospitals are super-spreading sites, lots of patients turn up for something uninfected and pick up COVID in hospital. So the stats have to be interpreted carefully, even if you accept the premise that poor planning in the hospital system is justification to tell people they can't go outside. Also consider that COVID spreads inside, not out!
So, any patient in a hospital that tests positive should be going into a negative-pressure room so that the hospital doesn't become a super spreader event. When you get too many patients, it becomes impossible to actually do that, and it gets kind of scary both for people with non-COVID issues, as well as the staff. Doctors, and nurses, and ER techs, and social workers, and respiratory therapists, and security, and janitors, and radiology techs, and CNAs aren't disposable.
The other issue is that you need doctors and nurses to run the ICU. Critical care physicians and nurses are in high demand all over the country right now, and LA may not be able to double their number of ICU specialist staff on a week-by-week basis.
Sweden has a universal, socialized healthcare system, so they are able to allocate resources nationally based on demand. In the United States, it's a checkerboard of private, nonprofit, and county facilities, each with different structures, policies, health record systems, profit sources, etc. so planning and coordination becomes very complex.
Again, the order does not prevent people from going outside, there is a long, long list of exempted activities in the actual order.
I have turned this problem over in my head a lot, and I really can't think of a good alternate policy approach specific for the highly dense urban setting of LA city proper. I don't have a good answer along the lines of 'this is what they should be doing instead.'
'Terrified' is all relative, right? Such things are reported in recent years with nobody panicking like in 2020:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/saline-solution-s...
“This is a serious situation and right now we are at the limits of our conservation and adaptation strategy,” said Dr. Paul Biddinger, director of the Center for Disaster Medicine and vice chairman for emergency preparedness at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “We have seen an increase in the number of flu cases compared to last year. If this continues the current trend, we are worried that this will stress our system and make us run out of IV fluids,” added Dr. O’Neill Britton, chief medical officer at Mass General.
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
"Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents"
A lot of things that are actually not that alarming and do not cause mass deaths, have been recast this year into apocalyptic end-of-days events that must not be allowed to happen at literally any cost. It's not rooted in anything hard or real, it's to do with the scale of the original projections (which were all wrong).
If you were mayor of the City of Los Angeles, what would you do differently, and what would be your justification to the citizens for your policy?
Do you feel the policy you outlined would be judged to be significantly better than the current policy by the majority of voters of the City of Los Angeles?
If so, how much better, and measured by which metrics?
Do you feel that there would be pushback against your policy by City Council, Public Health Officials, Public Safety Officials, or other key stakeholders?
What would be the risks if your policy was wrong and you had misjudged the situation? What would be your contingency plans?
If your policies are workable, let's get them concisely outlined and email them to some key interest groups so that they can start getting them out to the public and key stakeholders.
Do you have experience in Public Administration and Public Health? If you're an epidemiologist or city official, your credentials will give your policies more weight and your knowledge and experience will be highly valued since it likely takes into account a variety of 'Chesterton's Fences' that a layperson wouldn't have considered.
Even if you have no knowledge of the field, you might have some great ideas.
1. I'd observe Sweden and follow the actions of Tegnell, as Sweden has had a pretty good pandemic so far.
2. To placate those who are worried I'd focus on raising hospital capacity as much as possible.
3. I'd get a grip on testing. Doctors are all trained not to do indiscriminate testing without any other signs of problems, a lesson that has been forgotten now. I'd end mass testing entirely and focus all testing on people who present with symptoms (this would still be a high level of over-testing because COVID symptoms were worked out by looking at anyone who tested positive so is polluted by a lot of FP noise).
Key metrics are hospital loads and excess deaths. It would be acceptable for the latter to go up by, say, 3x the level a normal flu season would see before starting to impose any population controls.
Pushback: of course there would be. They've all been told by "experts" who know nothing about disease that millions will die unless everyone is locked in their homes right now because exponential growth always lasts forever, don't you know, and they're all terrified of seeming to place anything above health outcomes. But if I were the mayor then they'd ultimately report to me, I guess (I don't live in the US so don't know much about mayoral politics).
The risk if the policy was wrong would be hospitals would get over-full. The contingency plan would be to buy capacity from hospitals in further away regions and invest in rapid buildouts of ambulances, helicopters etc to make it easy to shift capacity around and load balance between hospitals, including to neighbouring regions that disagreed. But I don't think that's likely because we know what happens if you ignore the projections: basically nothing. Look at Swedish all-cause death stats for the year. It'll come in a bit higher than 2018, probably a few percent higher. Nothing important.
W.r.t emailing key interest groups. It's way too far gone for that. People have been proposing rational and sensible alternative plans for the last 8 months, they're all ignored.
I have no experience in public health or epidemiology, thank god. If I did I wouldn't be able to consider alternatives because I'd be a part of the public sector/academic system in which personal reputation as a 'nice guy' or 'clever specialist' is the primary determinant of personal success. I'm much happier in the private sector where what matters is getting results, not the perception of niceness or reasonableness or cleverness.
"Health officials in Sweden have warned that intensive care units (ICUs) in and around Stockholm are under severe pressure and close to capacity for the first time during the pandemic."
"Although the city’s hospitals could increase the number of beds allocated to ICUs, there are insufficient specialist staff to support them, said Björn Eriksson, director of Region Stockholm Healthcare."
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4833
Again, placing a gurney in a closet doesn't make it an ICU bed. You need specialized staff, which are in short supply.
Consider the scale as well that you'll be working with as mayor of LA:
The population of the city of Los Angeles proper is 3.8 million, but the population of the greater LA area (19 million) is almost twice the population of the entire country of Sweden (10 million). Los Angeles has to make policy with limited control inside of a very complex environment.
The homeless population of Los Angeles is estimated to be around 66,000 people. That's twice that of the entire country of Sweden.
The state of California, alone, has 40 million people, and open borders with Arizona, a state with nearly the population of Sweden (7 million) and zero state-level mask restrictions.
Los Angeles County is currently seeing 134 deaths per day from Coronavirus, even with California in lockdown.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-16/l-a-coun...
> "The risk if the policy was wrong would be hospitals would get over-full."
This is not the risk. The risk is that thousands of people would die, both from Corona and the fact that hospitals will be closed to all patients Corona or not.
> "They've all been told by "experts" who know nothing about disease that millions will die unless everyone is locked in their homes right now"
300,000 people have died in the United States so far as a result of Coronavirus. People are projecting we might reach a million by the end of 2020. If we continued on the current trajectory that would be an almost certain bet.
> "The contingency plan would be to buy capacity from hospitals in further away regions and invest in rapid buildouts of ambulances, helicopters etc to make it easy to shift capacity around and load balance between hospitals, including to neighbouring regions that disagreed."
Who would pay for this? We have a private healthcare system, not a public one. The City of LA is not in the business of purchasing and operating helicopters for medical use. There is no budget for that. Private companies like Reach handle the overwhelming majority of medvac and transport helicopters in the U.S.. Ambulances are operated by a checkerboard of private companies and City/County fire. We don't have a socialized, universal healthcare system so it's basically impossible to coordinate resources like this. How would you 'buy' capacity? Billing is through private insurance. Would the city agree to pay all costs related to patients in a hospital in another county? I bet the hospitals wouldn't agree to that since it's almost guaranteed they wouldn't get paid.
One thing that limits the ability to transpose Sweden's policies on the United States is the sheer scale here. California is massive. The U.S. is massive. Individual states are the size of whole European countries, they effectively operate as a schengen area with no restrictions on the flow of people, and spotty mask compliance depending on where you are. And forget grand ideas of coordinating from one city or county to the next. Our system is private, and private companies get to do whatever they want. Unless they're going to be well-paid for something, you can bet they're not going to go along with it.
> "I'm much happier in the private sector where what matters is getting results, not the perception of niceness"
I don't know that putting California, and Los Angeles in another lockdown is being interpreted as niceness here. Lots of people are pissed, people are losing their businesses, but many many people are also dying and becoming very ill. Both Newsom and Garcetti are making some very difficult choices to get results.
I genuinely don't mind that you have a different take on the situation. I'm happy to just sit and discuss this stuff.
You use non-specialised staff, which is what they were willing to do earlier in the year.
I think there's a huge expectations gap that's developed here. It's not just in Sweden, the same can be seen in other countries: doctors are arguing that anything abnormal at all should be justification for sweeping lockdowns. Lockdowns are utterly destructive and evil partly because they relieve the healthcare sector from any expectation to increase capacity. They just say "no we won't" and everyone loses their minds as if that's the last word.
I think frankly we also have to remember that doctors aren't angels. They are ordinary people who can exaggerate, lie or lose perspective like anyone else. For example in Switzerland doctors recently complained to the government that the healthcare system was about to collapse. A few days later the official dashboard added hospital capacity graphs which showed the system was running at 75% load and when COVID patients started turning up outside of ICU, the total number of beds went up to preserve the headroom. 75% load is very low, it's typical for ICUs in other countries to run at 90%+ utilisation even in normal times. So one must ask, how can they be claiming they're stretched past breaking point when there are so many free beds? Either the national statistics are wrong, or they are wrong, or the stats are hiding important details.
From reading an interview with them (in Switzerland) it became clear that there were a few sources of problems:
1. Basically all COVID patients are very, very old. Past the average life expectancy. The doctors were arguing that they had to increase the number of staff per patient because the cases were so "complicated". This can be seen another way: yes, life extension is quite complicated. Of course if you feel like you should battle to extend every life by another six months and there are no limits to how much effort should be made, or how many sacrifices must be made by others, then it will seem like a lot of cases are incredibly complex and only the most specialised staff are acceptable.
2. They were in denial about hospital-caused infections. They even said nosocomial infections were a "taboo topic". Hospitals are by now generating a large fraction of all cases but they weren't discussing how to fix that, they were just ignoring it. Why bother when they can demand society self-destruct at their behest and the government will do it?
3. They weren't discussing how to increase capacity at all. Anyone could come up with a dozen ideas for what to do in a crisis, especially doctors. They weren't interested.
4. Their attitude to the destruction of public life they were creating was simple. It was words to the effect of, businesses can be rebuilt but a life can't be brought back. In other words they don't recognise that tradeoffs in healthcare exist. In fact, most of the businesses they destroy will never come back, they'll be as dead as the patients - and then who will pay the health insurance premiums? The doctors appeared as oblivious to that question as they were to questions of infection control or capacity increases.
The risk is that thousands of people would die, both from Corona and the fact that hospitals will be closed to all patients Corona or not.
How do you figure hospitals would be closed to all people? Are you saying you think the rate of discharge would drop to zero? Why? There are no situations in which hospitals would become closed to "all people", even if they became full. There'd still be a steady stream of discharges and deaths that free up capacity for new admissions.
300,000 people have died in the United States so far as a result of Coronavirus
No they haven't, not even close: they have died with the virus but many of those were simply relabelled.
Look at Sweden: 2020 will have total all cause deaths a few percent higher than previous years once December is counted. It's not a big number for a supposedly deadly global pandemic. A lot of COVID deaths are ambiguous.
Who would pay for this? We have a private healthcare system, not a public one. The City of LA is not in the business of purchasing and operating helicopters for medical use. There is no budget for that.
Are you really going to cite procedural and budget issues when the chosen alternative is to lock people in their homes and totally destroy the tax base? Lockdowns are such a totally extreme policy that basically anything is cheaper and more politically plausible than that.
I mean you're acting like the government paying hospitals for work is totally unthinkable even though the level of borrowing required to pay for lockdowns is astronomically higher than any hospital bill could ever be. Yes! Buy beds in nearby areas where hospital loads are lower! For crying out loud this is an utterly trivial thing to do compared to what's really being done. Lockdowns are perhaps the most expensive form of virus mitigation anyone could ever invent, literally anything is going to be cheaper than that.
As for size, none of my proposals are scale-dependent. I'm not sure why being bigger would matter.
I don't know that putting California, and Los Angeles in another lockdown is being interpreted as niceness here
Amongst the establishment it certainly is. I am 100% certain that Newsom etc are convinced that they're making the moral choice, the "nice guy" choice and if they told the hospital system to do whatever it took to increase capacity but no, we aren't going to lock down, they'd be pummelled from all sides with accusations that they were heartless, cruel monsters who cared only about money.
Sure, for the people on the receiving end it doesn't seem nice but the people making these decisions and pushing for them are all insulated from the effects by government power. No government health officials are getting pay cuts this year.
Also, public health policies have to track with population density.
This would be a massive encroachment on freedom in rural Texas or somewhere of that nature, but is a reasonable ask in the most populous city in the country.
They are leaving because of high prices caused by factors that are just as present in cities in Texas.
They're bringing their money and jobs with them, so they'll bring some of those higher prices too.
It's supply and demand, not liberal or conservative policies.
Texas conservative suburb-dwellers don't want higher density housing either. They especially don't want lower income folks near them! Look at how litle public transit exists, because such things would let the poor people get closer to their little burb.
Why are so many people falling for this "hey, look, we have lower prices, therefore we have better policies" talking point? Been there, done that. Lower prices are because I wouldn't pay as much to live there, that's not higher desirability.
In Palo Alto, not a single new house was built in the 1970s.
>It's supply and demand, not liberal or conservative policies.
Do you not understand policies influence supply and demand? What do you think happens to supply after zoning laws and rent control are passed?
I'd argue that one should step out of their tech bubble and experience the awesome cultures that already exist within the Bay.
I found CA’s laws to be quite reasonable; I was told all variety of stories about guns being taken from my home when I told people I was moving out. Weird stuff.
I think CA is highly demonized and I don’t really get it, even as someone originally from a very conservative (and also evangelical Christian) background/area.
I actually live in a very ethnically diverse area that’s about 50/50 red and blue, and right near the ocean in SoCal. Love the diversity in this state!
And yeah, I think being a transplant really helps; it’s easier to realize just how unique the climate and culture truly are. And that applies to any other state where one is a transplant to: I think a big part of this conversation that’s missing is the whole “grass is greener” effect. CA has more population than anywhere else, so we have the most natives by definition (or at least close enough that my point stands - I know the birth rate is below the national median here, but I’d suspect the population outweighs that effect). It’s only in leaving the Midwest that I appreciated some things I overlooked there, but none of those were in the areas of personal freedom (e.g. my city had an amazing food scene and I didn’t know how much I’d miss the unique spirit of that scene).
I do think people make it into this “competition” almost, which is a really odd reflex to me, considering this country has freedom of movement and you can just hit up any of 100s of sites to find a place with the right balance of laws for your lifestyle, costs, diversity, etc.
It’s the furthest from a zero-sum game, in other words, and that argumentative spirit seems like it could be easily replaced with a cooperative one.
Makes me want to start a national real estate/moving consulting company where it’s all focused on finding the perfect place for your specific interests and price point, but I digress
At my last job I was open about my Christianity. I haven’t really had a chance to do that at my current job because of COVID. At my current job though I do talk about the fact that I own a gun in the context of recreation, and at my last job I defended the second amendment in a lunch conversation, but I haven’t really run into an opportunity to espouse a commitment to proactive self defense in a work context… I do talk about self defense with friends though, some of whom strongly oppose the second amendment. My current friends are to my knowledge entirely not Christian.
It's definitely possible to be tasteful and silent when sitting on a Zoom call as people voice strong views in support of XYZ, but it's another thing to wonder if your working relationships are at risk if you voice the opposite, and the majority of media sponsored by SV money sets up the discourse to make that view look foolish which triplicates the amount of work you need to do to defend it.
At the same time it's possible that this is just an issue of a vocal minority of companies controlling the majority of impressions. Since you seem to have had more positive experiences (which I wouldn't expect), I should let you have the floor.
(Last question, if you don't mind: what denomination?)
Yeah, at my last job people definitely were more vocal about political issues. That’s actually how my religion came up. Now everything is work from home and over video, and people at my new job are also more heads-down. I’d certainly say that people have misconceptions about Christianity or might paint Christians with broad strokes in discussions. But I haven’t found people to be rude after I try to explain my stances, even if they disagree, unless they are not great people to work with in the first place :)
But I don’t think that’s anywhere near as intolerant as for example racism I’ve experienced, which is why the claim that the Bay Area is more intolerant irks me.
I’m a Presbyterian and consider myself to be pretty hardline theologically. TULIP and all that.
EDIT: I would definitely expect different reactions if I said inflammatory things to coworkers like “you’re going to hell!”, or to people against the second amendment “hope you don’t miss your children when the oligarchs enslave them because you didn’t have a gun!” But I think communicating while disagreeing without resorting to vitriol is also just a core part of being an engineer. Maybe those things are true but they’re not really productive ways to engage people.
Essentially, "tolerance" has been redefined as a term to essentially just mean "liberalism"; whenever you hear someone suggesting that one "be tolerant", you can just mentally replace that with "be liberal". The term is leveled at folks like yourself, who are deemed intolerant and illiberal for having and trying to perpetuate a different value set.
If taken to the utmost extreme, which admittedly few people actually do, this boils down to excluding tolerance of _actually_ different beliefs and ways of life; only tolerance of different looking liberals from different backgrounds is actually included. Different cultures are tolerated as long as they're far away and out of sight and mind.
The irony of all of this is completely lost on them, of course; they don't think about it like this at all. They truly believe themselves to be tolerant, good people, even as they do this!
Most of them are actually trying to be good people, too; if they had been raised in your household they would have grown up to be good Christians, if they had been raised in India they'd be trying to be good Hindus, and so forth. They were raised under the aegis of liberalism and are doing their best to stand up for its own moral principles.
The big problem is that they're incapable of seeing that same kind of goodness in people like you, preferring to boil you down to a reductionist caricature. This same problem rears its head in Christians who don't see the goodness in others, as well; they'd do well to remove the log from their own eye, and so on.
Stepping back from this, I for one find generalized "tolerance" to be a fairly useless mechanism to espouse, anyway. Like any right-thinking person, I have my own moral code of what I believe to be right and wrong, based on philosophies ranging from Christianity to the best atheist thinkers to a variety of Eastern ideas. I'm not going to start believing an action is right when someone else does it that would be wrong if I did it - for a system of morality to make any sense and have any actual purpose it has to attempt to be objective and independent.
Importantly, it only applies to the actions of individuals, not to aggregated cultures, races, or other intersectional groups. When someone commits an immoral act, the context of their identity is only important so much that it might explain their motivations; it does not excuse their actions, unless they're perhaps someone who should not have their own power of attorney, so to speak.
I think for me it seems more like Google is just very much against people speaking up about anything.
I also agree with your comments about how people think they are being tolerant while they are actually being intolerant, but from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly. I feel like I’ve had worse experiences with this outside of CA, and I can’t see CA as being particularly intolerant this way. I appreciate you writing back though.
If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places I’d be particularly interested to hear them.
Perhaps you're right; certainly I would cleave off Google's private interests (shutting up people who damage their business prospects) from Google's idealized public position (good, diverse, modern liberal values, a trusted source of information, etc). Few people know what their management _really_ thinks or talks about, but we do know their public position well.
Consider this, at least: when firing James Damore, it was absolutely not necessary or expected for them to say anything about how this shouldn't impact efforts to continue to make sure white males are represented in the workplace - quite the contrary.
> from my personal experience I can’t really ascribe this to either liberals or conservatives particularly.
If you reread my post, hopefully it should be clear that I actually did ascribe this behaviour to everyone. The issue in CA is that, at least in urban areas, the liberal value set is the norm, and is enforced as such, much as Christianity would have been enforced a century ago in many cities. For those implicitly doing the enforcement, ranging from thought leaders to city politicians to moms posting on Facebook, it's just the water they swim in; virtue is on a single axis and like most good people they want to swim upstream. It's not "particularly intolerant" in the grand scheme of things, compared to other such cultural centers throughout history, but it is particularly intolerant of anything outside of postmodern American liberalism today, and is perhaps (outside of maybe NYC) the biggest enclave of such thought in the world.
> If you have personal experiences with intolerance in CA being worse than other places
CA and the Hollywood->SF corridor in particular export their value set to the entire world, never mind just America. The intolerance for free speech, conservative or third position values that we see on social media today stems from this. It's not enough to enforce it within their own cities, rather it seems that they need to export it in the form of regulations and propaganda that continually escalates in intensity over time.
It's not far from the proselytizing behaviour that religion has had forever; memetically speaking, it's actually entirely logical that any successful cultural set of values and ideas would have to propagate itself via word and deed in order to survive and grow generationally. In many ways, liberalism is just a third-rate religion; it may have some improvements in select places over the traditional value set that it replaces, but has lost the ability to truly create communities somehow in the process.
Is the implication here that they all have the same ideologies?
An analogy from my own experience: in my youth I was raised in a third world country, but within a community of international expats who worked for the local NGO. They came from countries as diverse as America, Germany, India, China, and what is now South Sudan. What could this ethnic smorgasbord possibly have in common? Answer: a belief in, and commitment to, international cooperation in science. This ideology is what drove the composition of the community.
No, they didn't. Some moved here by choice, others had no choice but to move where opportunities are, and many were born here as a consequence of their parents being here.
The latter point is of particular note. It is not at all uncommon for first-generation Americans to be torn between their parent's ideologies, values, and culture, and those of the rest of the population. The result is a unique perspective, or put another way, "diversity of thought" regarding many issues.
Anyway, I appreciate the conversation.
So in the academic sense sure you can say this is a good thing but now you're scapegoating the emotional integrity of families or the people within them for these conflicts. As far as the "diversity of thought" these experiences taught me... I resolve these conflicts by trying to seek concepts that are not tied to any culture or dissolve cultural distinctions, and draw power from that. That's a form of convergence, not divergence. I know some other multiethnic kids that just pick and choose whether they are e.g. German or Chinese when they are either both or neither.
Honest question, have you ever lived in the Bay Area? It’s an extremely segregated region. It frequently dictates where people live because there is a huge cultural clash. It isn’t little neighborhoods that segregate - it’s entire cities...
Anyway, I don’t think there is much diversity in thought here. There’s plenty of controversy nonsense. I had to see the ladies with signs out in front of the planned parenthood everyday when I still commuted. QAnon rallies are a thing. So forth and so on. It’s not some leftist paradise.
I’d say the thing it lacks is leftism. It’s got a radical amount of neoliberal capitalism on all sides because so many people here are obsessed with money, prestige, and power. Kinda gets old. Ain’t no one looking for a more traditional means of happiness, lol.
The obvious low hanging bad-policy fruit in California is Prop 13 though.
Make sure you can afford the few % more you’ll pay in taxes and you’ll be just fine! It was negligible compared to my Midwest home state’s taxes; I was genuinely surprised by that after hearing so much negativity about the place and it’s laws.
Come visit sometime, there’s a place for everyone here and housing will snap back after our pandemic precautions phase out.
If this is how to fail at policy making, more places should try failing.
The last straw off camels back was San Jose banning gas powered stoves. WTF really ? Lucky for me I was under contract for a new house before that. Now I have the house and its prices have gone up suddenly. I feel sorry for sods who will end up buying my house for 5% premium for the pleasure of owning a gas stove, the sort of thing that is kind of free almost everywhere else. Good luck saving the planet with these antics.
I made this point about not voting for the same policies that caused people to leave California in the Oracle exodus story and got downvoted to death.
Besides high housing demand and concentrated wealth, what contributed to the way Silicon Valley is today that has anything to do with public schooling?
If the parents value fiscal conservatism and traditional values, they'll pull their kids out of government schools and teach them themselves. This will also strengthen the family bonds, weakening the power of the state to make such bad calls.
There is one major area for tech people where Texas may prove a nasty surprise to employees: non-compete agreements. For large employers this may be a bonus though as they can keep wages low by stifling competition. Texas does limit non-compete agreements to some degree, but it seems they can still be a serious problem.