Amazon Pushes Hard to Kill a California Sales Tax - NYTimes.com.

Another example of the lengths that California has forced itself to go to in order to subsidize its long-time landholders’ privilege of paying property taxes that are based on 1976 valuations plus a maximum 2% increase each year, and a 1% ceiling on the property tax.

Their sales tax is 8% or 9% – not quite as bad as Chicago or a few parts of Alabama – but if we’re going to talk about job-killing taxes, shouldn’t this be on the list?

And instead of removing the mote from their own eye, they go after a vendor who arguably offers their residents good prices and good service! (The Democrats say they’ve stopped shopping at Amazon; I assume the Republicans never did? And I assume that their tax filings will support that.)

Interesting that no one is standing up for the interests of ordinary California folks, including the 50% or so who do not own their own homes and thus do not benefit from Proposition 13. (No, tenants do not benefit: rents are market rents, and few if any landlords lower their rents just because the state has been cutting them a break on their property taxes. They pocket the difference.)

In Delaware and a few other smart states, there is no sales tax. I suspect Amazon does quite well in those states, too, because they offer selection, prompt service and good prices.

It is time to end Proposition 13. Not tinker with it, not prune a couple of its shoots, not nibble at its leaves. Just end it. Assess all the real estate in the state at its market value, valuing the land first, and treating the existing buildings as the residual between the total value of the package and the value of the underlying land.

Value all the land – Disney’s, and the country clubs, and the studios, and the churches and nonprofits and the hospitals and universities and the docks, and the railroads, and the shopping centers and the central business districts, the waterfront land, the subdivisions – all of it at its real value, recognizing that it is way off the figures you’ve have gotten a few years ago. Add that up, and you’ll find a very significant figure. (Add up the buildings, too, if you like, though that will turn out to be a much smaller figure in total.)

Now look at the costs of providing all the services that California and its counties and municipalities provide.

Divide those costs of services by the total land value. Most likely you’d find that the result would be such that the economic rent of the land would be sufficient to cover the cost of the provision of those services.

Now it could well be that if the members of the country clubs had to pay their communities the rental value of the large well-located plots of land, they might find that they didn’t like the game quite as well; as long as the less-wealth are subsidizing them, we’ll never know. And large landholders banking land for the future – their future benefit, that is – might decide to get into a business other than land speculation, if we stopped land speculation from being profitable busy-ness.