Californians finally start to sour on higher taxes

For decades, local voters seemed eager to approve almost any tax or bond measure put in front of them. But 2020 showed that perhaps the limit has been reached: voters are shouting down new, onerous taxes, as Dan Walters explains in CalMatters.

Proposition 15 would have been the largest tax increase in California history and its defeat last month was, by any definition, a huge setback for its sponsors, primarily public employee unions.

They had been yearning for decades to crack Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot measure that limits property taxes, and convinced themselves that singling out commercial property for new taxes would be a winner, especially in a high turnout presidential election.

After Proposition 15 was defeated, its advocates tried to place a positive spin on the outcome, hinting that they would try again to persuade voters to pass new taxes of some kind on someone or something. However, the notion that Californians really want to raise taxes was destroyed last week in a new poll from the UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

The poll, conducted just before the election, found that by 53% to 19%, voters still support Proposition 13, which explains, in large measure, why Proposition 15 failed so badly. The opposition campaign’s own polling obviously found the same sentiment and used it effectively to warn voters that its passage would be only the first step toward repealing the 42-year-old property tax limit.

Thus, while California voters gave Democrat Joe Biden a nearly 2-to-1 victory over Republican President Donald Trump, they were also disinclined to accept pleas from other Democratic politicians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, for higher taxes.

More importantly, voters’ sour attitude about taxation isn’t confined to Proposition 13 and property taxes.

“In addition, the poll found that an historically large proportion of voters (81%) now feels the level of state and local taxes paid by the average Californian is high, while just 19% consider taxes in the state to below or about right,” poll director Mark DiCamillo said in his analysis.

Read the whole thing here.

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