Since California voters approved Proposition 13 in

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Voters Hold the Key: Lock-in, Mobility, and the Portability of Property Tax Exemptions

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By Ron Cheung (au); Chris Cunningham (au)
Year: 2009
Pages: 38
Binding Paperback

Product Code: 1437928765

Description

Since California voters approved Proposition 13 in 1978, 15 states have enacted caps on the annual growth in assessed property values. These laws often impose a great burden on municipal finances and create horizontal inequity among homeowners. Why do voters choose to limit local government in this way? Reasons may include controlling the power of special interests, addressing agency failures of government officials (the "Leviathan" hypothesis), or preserving the impact of a current but fleeting antitax political alignment. Yet research has found that voters' perception of a limitation's fiscal consequences do not match reality, questioning the rationality of voter behavior. To counter this position, another strand of literature argues that support for tax limitations is driven not by perceptions of government inefficiency but by reasonable expectations of who will ultimately bear the tax limitation's burden. This paper explores this view by exploiting the differential tax treatment generated by assessment caps in the context of a recent, novel referendum in Florida. The authors examine voter support for a 2008 constitutional amendment that included a unique provision making the existing assessment cap portable within the state. Testing the hypothesis that voters understood the mobility consequences of tax limitations and the net burden of the cap, the authors find that high potential tax savings and high expected mobility rates result in higher support for portability. They also find that the degree of racial segregation, the presence of nonresidential tax bases, and the share of migrants from out of state all contribute to support for the amendment. Results suggest that voters were as concerned with reducing their own tax share at the expense of other property owners as they were with curtailing local expenditures. Figures.

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