r/technology • u/marketrent • Aug 16 '26

Society Bernie Sanders calls out Sergey Brin for spending over $100 million to defeat California’s billionaire tax — ‘If California passes its one-time 5% wealth tax, Brin would owe $14 billion and still be worth $270 billion’

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/bernie-sanders-calls-sergey-brin-120113695.html
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u/pita4912 Aug 16 '26

It’s a prop that locks in property taxes at the time of sale. So you have people with $10mil houses they paid $120k for in the 70s paying taxes as if the property is only worth $150,000. It’s rent control for homeowners in CA. Sounds good, disastrously bad in practice.

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u/Oceanbreeze871 Aug 16 '26

Oh yea get rid of that one for sure

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u/fattytuna96 Aug 16 '26

It prevents retirees from losing their homes. The intent is good but the result has been lower tax revenue for CA and an artificially inflated housing market (if prop 13 was repealed CA real estate will take a hit). The alternative is something similar to Texas where you get priced out of your home even after it’s paid off as the value increases exponentially over time.

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u/Hautamaki Aug 16 '26

Yeah retirees had it tough like 70 years ago, today they are by far and away the wealthiest people in the world and govt's can't touch that wealth because they got a bunch of benefits and protections 70 years ago and now they vote way too much to ever see those benefits repealed. Meanwhile young people can't move out, can't get decent jobs, can't date and make families and have children, but won't somebody think of the poor retirees who used to suffer in poverty in the great depression literally 90 years ago!

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u/WinonasChainsaw Aug 16 '26

No it incentivized retirees to not downsize which is why actual families can’t find reasonably priced home

And the alternative is we build more housing and it’s actually affordable

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u/eirexe Aug 16 '26

Retirees shouldn't have to downsize if they don't want to, the housing problem can be solved without fucking anyone over, we're perfectly capable of it.

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u/WinonasChainsaw Aug 16 '26

Well we shouldn’t be expected to subsidize their retirement and pay 5x the rent we should bc someone with overinflated property refused to sell

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u/Outlulz Aug 17 '26

Everyone else has to pay these fucking taxes, why not them? They can rent instead if they don't want to.

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u/Outlulz Aug 17 '26

Ok? Maybe it is more important that we are able to build affordable, high density housing so that more working people and their families in younger generations can have homes rather than cater to a minority of retired people sitting on large lots in single family homes.

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u/loofawah Aug 17 '26

Texas has a version of Prop 13 tied to age "Over-65 property tax exemption" which makes sense. Prop 13 primarily benefits the rich who can buy a house when they are young and lock in their rate.

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u/MattinglyBaseball Aug 16 '26

Sounds good until you realize how horrible the wage and net worth discrepancy is now. It will force many out of their primary residence and allow the billionaires and PE to buy up more houses and raise taxes on even new home buyers until they are priced out as well. They don’t care if the taxes increase, they are just going to raise the rent to account for it anyways. Unless you like being forced out of your neighborhood because people around you suddenly decided to pay double what you paid a year ago. The more reasonable take/first step is to either repeal it for anything beyond primary residence or to add protections for those who cannot afford the sudden increase based on income or other factors.

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u/Peetypeet5000 Aug 16 '26

They wouldn't be able to raise the price of housing so much if we actually built more housing. Prop 13 takes away homeowners incentive to allow more housing to be built.

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u/ErFarinn Aug 16 '26

Imagine that, politicians beholden to the people that go out and vote. Kinda wish the young people would do so as well.

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u/Hautamaki Aug 16 '26

Tbh that doesn't even sound good at all, what a horrible idea lol

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u/jrzalman Aug 16 '26

Say you buy a house at 500k. Ok, you can swing the 7k in property taxes. Three years later your house if valued at 1M. So while your mortgage payment is the same, your salary hasn't kept up with inflation and now your property tax bill is 14k. Time keeps progressing, property values keep spiking.

Eventually, without Prop 13, many people can't afford to live in the houses they own - especially if they dare to retire - because property tax runs away with property values. This was judged a bad outcome by voters and so we have Prop 13 which caps property tax increases at 1-2% per year. It has unintended consequences to be sure but it does have its reasons for existing.

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u/BlgMastic Aug 16 '26

That’s not how property taxes work at all…

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u/_hephaestus Aug 16 '26

Given that the value of their property went up by 500k in that time by virtue of doing nothing, I don’t get the sympathy. Would it be nice to retire in that house? Sure. But that seems like a nice to have in a time when housing woes are universal. Catering to those who have profited is insane here.

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u/air_and_space92 Aug 17 '26

Some people think of a home as a place to live in rather than an investment. Crazy right?? Why should I be forced out of a community where my kids go to school just because Google or some tech company with a speculative product opened a campus and their employees came in swinging bags of cash at closing.

I've lived in LA, rented, and worked in aerospace. Google opened a satellite office down the street and rent went up by $1k a month upon next lease. Hell no did my salary match that. Now try that with a house and property tax?? I don't want the extra $500k my home appreciated in that example because I don't want to move. I don't want to retire early and move to another country. I WANT AND HAD A HOME I broke my back to afford and now because tech fucks or a nepo baby paid cash my family gets fucked?? No way.

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u/jrzalman Aug 17 '26

Property values going up is only of value if you are looking to move. If you own an expensive house in California you've kind of won and aren't looking to move. If you are looking to just live in a house and raise a family having your property tax constantly going up with no end in sight is a huge pain in the ass which is why we all got together and capped the increases.

We are not all house flippers out here, many folks just want to live in the house they bought and not go broke because PE and speculators have driven up the price of everything.

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u/Hautamaki Aug 16 '26

I wonder why your house suddenly doubles in value in three years? Maybe it's partly because you refuse to let anyone else build any more homes nearby, so your own house becomes geometrically more valuable? Perhaps paying higher taxes on the geometric increase of the value of your home is a small price to pay. Otherwise, sure, sell your house, realize a 100% profit margin on 3 year turn around, and then listen to all the world's tiniest violins playing for your pity party.

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u/jrzalman Aug 16 '26

Maybe it's partly because you refuse to let anyone else build any more homes nearby, so your own house becomes geometrically more valuable?

Lol, this is California, there is something already built everywhere. There are no open lots to build more houses. Sure you could tear down existing structures and build high density skyrises or something but our infrastructure is already maxed out and that just makes everybody's life shittier. It might surprise you to know there is no God given right to live in California and we have no obligation to ruin our neighborhoods so you can afford to live here.

And, sure, you can sell your house and realize (and be taxed on) those gains but then you have nowhere to live because everything has gone up around it so you are essentially having to move away anyway.

It's always so easy to tell when non-Californians talk about California, lol.

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u/Hautamaki Aug 16 '26

True, I'm not a Californian, but I did live in Vancouver in the 90s to 2000s and saw many people including my own family members realize 100+% profits on their home purchases from around 2010-2020, but rather than piss and moan about the higher taxes and whatnot, they just sold, moved to the Okanagan, and retired young. Now I live in Calgary and yeah, I see many people pissing moaning about people coming to live here too; our population has gone from 1.2 million to 2 million in about a decade. Yes there's strain on the infrastructure. Yes property taxes keep going up. No, I don't bitch about it. I just encourage all policy makers to build more homes, and for the most part Calgary is actually pretty good about doing that, for the good of all. Just as there's no god given right to move to California or Vancouver or Calgary, there's no god given right to prevent anyone else from doing so either, nor is there a god given right to prevent the obvious economic consequences of that. Pretending there is and trying to make policy to that effect is what is highly distortionary and self-destructive in the long run.

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u/jrzalman Aug 16 '26

Yeah, see, that's the thing. We don't want to move, California is the goal not a step in getting to the goal. The people that live here aren't trying to flip and run away, this is the final destination. So we've crafted an environment which allows people to stay in their homes and are willing to live with whatever unintended consequences.

Everyone here knows someone living the Texas horror story (they sold to move to Texas to get a huge house with a yard (!) and after a bit realized they were stuck in Texas but prices have increased to the point where they can't move back) and we are all dedicated to that not being us.

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u/motes-of-light Aug 16 '26

Right, this is so people who aren't fantastically wealthy aren't forced to sell their homes because they can't afford the taxes. One of the few things keeping San Francisco a marginally real city where actual people live.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26

[deleted]

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u/loopernova Aug 16 '26

No one is forcing you to sell your property. The local government does not raise your taxes. It typically stays the same flat rate. Taxes are a part of cost of living, if you didn’t plan to be able to pay for your cost of living in retirement you can make a better choice now and extract cash flow from your equity.

Your suggestion is equivalent to saying we shouldn’t tax people higher than the cost basis of their stock equity that they own fair and square.

Charging taxes at fair market value keeps value of homes more affordable and subsequently the taxes stay lower.

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26

[deleted]

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u/loopernova Aug 17 '26

If your income increases, causing you to pay more income taxes, it does not mean the government increased the tax rates. If you spend more, causing you to pay more in sales tax, it doesn't mean the government increased the sales tax rates. The same thing is happening with your home. The government is assessing the value of your home, it does not arbitrarily decide its value. The value is based on real actual market data of real buyers and sellers.

If you buy a home in a neighborhood because you think it's a good location, within your price range in that moment, and expect the equity you build to increase in value, you can't then complain that your taxes on the property are going up. You get all the rewards of the gains but don't want to pay the cost of them. You should have planned for your taxes at the time of your purchase knowing you will owe it every year, and knowing it will go up continuously because you wouldn't live in a neighborhood that is not desirable.

You absolutely can capitalize on property values without selling it. And you can capitalize on it by selling it as well, reap the benefits of the increasing value. Charging taxes at fair market value keeps the value of homes more affordable by increasing the liquidity of the market, which keeps the tax bill lower too.

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u/Big-Dudu-77 Aug 16 '26

That’s an extreme example. Many homes that are worth $10 mil has been sold or remodeled at one point.

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u/Existing_Style8558 Aug 16 '26

Many also haven’t.