Slavery about 250 years, give or take Voting rights, some still don’t have them. Just like prop 13, maybe fair maybe not but certainly legal.

you may be right, dave. i’m still trying to wrap my head around it.

What has happened is that the GSE’s now recognize capital gains/losses as ordinary income/losses. While the issue of the moment is about losses, it eventually can result in a tax increase as corp tax income rates are much higher than cap gain rates. You may remember the recent battle over hedge funds declaring their profits as cap gains rather than income. Fannie et al are essentially bowing to the tax treatment that the hedge funders fought.

There are a host of shady tax breaks out there, ethanol for one, but the one you cite here is not the egregious example that you think it is.

Read a few of these comments. Amazing that so many people feel as strongly about this.

http://angryrenter.com/view_all.php

While folks here are piddling about this and that and waiting for tonite’s television shows…. your federal gov’t is busy giving MASSIVE tax breaks to corporations… http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=ajhyK67twLAw&refer=us

Fair? hardly. such is such.

My feelings as to why it hasn’t been repealed yet is because not enough of the people who were around that passed it and subsequently became the largest percentage age group of homeowners in the Bay Area have kicked the bucket yet. There’s a reason why the average age in Alameda and other Bay Area cities keeps getting older and older ( Alameda’s avg age is now almost 48 years old)That laws like these have helped lock out future generations isn’t a mystery.

I have no doubt that Prop 13’s days are numbered. But in the meantime, we can agree to disagree, and that’s perfectly ok.

But the mental gymanstics they go through to justify it are at times quite amusing.

Fair? Come on edvard prop 13 was passed fairly, your calling it unfair is no more than your own personal feeling. Do you not believe in the initiative process? Was it the tyranny of the minority or the will of the people who spoke in 78? If it’s really unfair why hasn’t it been overturned by another initiative or an exulted member of the judicial system?

What was really unfair was the confiscatory rate that property taxes were being raised back then. At least there are a few middle class property owners still around. To blame your middle class neighbors for the current artificially high real estate prices is specious at best.