For the last 30 years, perhaps the most enduring California canard is that "Proposition 13 gutted our local governments." Every imaginable failing by local government has, at some point, been blamed on Prop. 13.

Indeed, it has always been my somewhat facetious contention that, if the voters hadn't passed Prop. 13, local politicians and bureaucrats would have. After all, Prop. 13 has been the widely accepted alibi politicians trot out time and time again to explain their ongoing failure to manage their budgets and properly deliver the fundamental government services for which we pay.

Local politicians do have one legitimate beef about property taxes - the state is confiscating a large chunk of this revenue. But that is not the fault of Prop. 13. This revenue shift is what the local politicos should be screaming to Sacramento about.

The core contention by the big spenders is that we don't pay enough property taxes - that Prop. 13 destroyed the tax base for local government. These whiners cleverly omit the actual historical figures - because the data destroy their argument. Consider San Diego County's property tax history.

In the year prior to Prop. 13 taking effect (1977), San Diego County property owners paid $638.6 million in property tax. The 1978 property tax revenues, which had soared 20 percent in just the previous two years, dropped back dramatically to $353.4 million to meet Prop. 13's 1 percent of appraised value limitation. Since then, property tax revenues have climbed rapidly. Within six years, property tax revenues exceeded pre-Prop. 13 levels.

This past fiscal year (ending in June 2007), total county property taxes are $4.123 billion, almost 6.5 times more than we paid the year prior to Prop. 13, and almost 12 times more than the first year Prop. 13 took effect. Even after adjusting for the county's population increase and inflation, the property tax revenue today is higher than before Prop. 13 was implemented.

Surprisingly, when a housing slump hits, property tax revenue continues to rise, as sold property is revalued upward. In this past year's slump, property tax revenue jumped another 10.9 percent. It would take many years of dropping prices before real estate revenue actually would start to decrease year to year.

Sadly, one can be confident that, even if we had paid all that extra property tax, the spendthrift politicians would still be telling us that we need to pay even higher taxes. Typically, politicians spend all they can lay their hands on and then plead government poverty.

Poverty? In the last 10 years, San Diego County real estate property tax revenue has risen more than 133 percent. In addition, our area's local building "fees" (in essence, extortion charges levied to get permission to build - fees ultimately paid by the property buyers) are now among the highest in the nation.

Add to that increase the rapid growth of other forms of local government revenue (especially sales tax rate increases and mushrooming water/sewer charges), and it is apparent that San Diego area politicians do not have a revenue problem - they have a spending problem.

- Richard Rider, chairman of San Diego Tax Fighters, is a freelance columnist for the North County Times.