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A cautionary tale about tax cuts

California cut property taxes in the 1970s. It didn’t go so well.

Americans are getting crankier about paying taxes.

Most people don’t enjoy paying Uncle Sam, but for much of the 2000s and 2010s, a sizable percentage of Americans thought that the amount of federal taxes they paid was “about right,” according to Gallup. But recently, the share saying their taxes were “too high” has been climbing; last year, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they pay too much.

Call it the Great American Tax Revolt, or maybe the Third American Revolution. Whatever we label this anti-tax wave, its effects are already rippling out across the country. Republicans in red states are slashing property taxes, or threatening to eliminate them entirely. Even some Democratic lawmakers are proposing massive tax cuts to be paid for with tax increases on only the very richest.

All of this reminds Isaac Martin, a professor of urban studies at University of California San Diego, of the battle over Proposition 13: a 1978 California ballot measure that capped property taxes statewide, setting off a chain of fiscal and social consequences that the state is still grappling with.

“I think the history of California really teaches us that you can want your government for free, but you can’t get it for free,” Martin told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

King and Martin talked about the history of property tax in America, the story of Prop 13, and what California’s experience suggests about where the rest of the country may be headed.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What was going on with taxes in the 1970s?

There was what we call now the property tax revolt, a major grassroots movement of protest against local property taxes. It was a nationwide thing. It happened in communities all around the US, but people really remember the events in California because Californians at that time, in 1978, amended their constitution to limit the property tax. And that tax limitation, which they called Proposition 13, then became national........

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