By Jon Coupal – July 6, 2023
We have officially filed the Repeal the Death Tax initiative with the Attorney General’s office and the public comment period is open! You can tell the Attorney General, “I support Initiative 23-0005.”
This important initiative will restore the ability of parents to transfer their home and a limited amount of other property to their children without any change to the property tax bill. It will also restore the same rights for grandparents if the children’s parents are deceased. As you know, these constitutional rights that Californians had for decades were taken away by Proposition 19, which passed narrowly in 2020. Voters were not told that Prop. 19, in addition to protecting seniors and wildfire victims, was also the largest property tax increase in California history.
The Repeal the Death Tax initiative will restore the rights that were lost but will not change the other parts of Prop. 19. It will be retroactive, meaning people whose property was reassessed for a parent-child transfer will be able to get their property’s original trended base-year value back again, as if the reassessment had not taken place.
Repeal the Death Tax is now Initiative Number 23-0005. The title and summary will be released on approximately August 21, after which signature collection will begin. The Attorney General’s office will accept public comments about the Repeal the Death Tax initiative through July 17, 2023. If you’d like to submit a public comment about the initiative, you can simply say that you support Initiative 23-0005, or you can tell your own story about why the Repeal the Death Tax initiative is so important to protect California families from unaffordable tax increases when a parent passes away.
Some general guidelines about making public comments: It’s always most effective to be polite (public comments are a public record), and to tell your story in your own words. You can be very brief if you choose. It’s helpful just to say, “I support Initiative 23-0005.”
Click here to submit a public comment: https://oag.ca.gov/node/add/initiative-comment/568094
If you’d like to read the initiative, you can see it on the Attorney General’s website at this link: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/23-0005%20%28Death%20Tax%29.pdf
For more information and downloadable flyers, please visit our website at www.RepealTheDeathTax.com.
The HJTA team is working right now on the campaign to launch the signature collection effort, and we’ll have much more to tell you in the coming weeks. We appreciate everything you’re doing to spread the word that the petitions are coming in August. If you’d like to support the campaign with a donation, that will help us buy more advertising to ensure that we get the signatures we need as fast as we can. Click here to donate online: https://www.efundraisingconnections.com/c/RepealtheDeathTax/
Jon Coupal is President of Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association
