> It seems to be suggesting that older Californians need to downsize and live small after they retire and don’t have to enjoy all the decades of working hard to

> It seems to be suggesting that older Californians need to downsize and live small after they retire and don’t have to enjoy all the decades of working hard to pay mortgages so that the state can gain more taxes? And so that scarce resources can be efficiently utilized. It is broadly agreed among economists that the best taxes are those that encourage people making inefficient use of scarce resources to sell them to people who will make more efficient use of them. Generally the best way to do this is to levy a tax proportional to the value of the scarce resource in question. This is why a land-value tax is so strongly favored by economists. Property taxes are a tax on the negative externality of underutilization of resources, because someone who derives more use from the resource (close to work, close to schools, space to raise a family) will be more willing to spend money at a specific rate to continue owning the resource than someone who derives less use from it. > How is it a subsidy? They receive a tax break as long as they retain ownership of the property. Their continued ownership of the property is being subsidized. Tax incentives are a common method of distributing subsides. Consider the tax incentives associated with mortgages, retirement accounts, and college education funds. > Retired people should ‘move’ away and die someplace else because the taxes are necessary? Scarce resources are scarce, and their efficient utilization should be encouraged rather than discouraged by government policy. Markets are a crude but effective means of determining value. If a retired couple values continued ownership of a property as much as a younger couple looking to start a family values that property, then they will have equal willingness to pay the associated property tax. > Why would anyone want to own property if this becomes the norm? There is no incentive to own property usually bought on mortgages and interest rates. Are you asking why people would want to own property if property taxes existed? Property taxes are pretty common, and unsurprisingly people continue to own property even when subject to property taxes, because they derive more value each year from continuing to own the property than they pay in tax. And when that stops being the case, they sell the property.