Around this time last month, I was minding my own business doing whatever it is that I do when someone sent along what can generously be called a news story about some Bay Area groups whining about Proposition 13.

Run-of-the-mill stuff, I know.

The piece, which was published over at the San Jose Mercury News website on March 12, came with the loaded headline, “Prop. 13 offers higher tax breaks for California homeowners in White neighborhoods.”

After an audible groan, I jumped right in, read the news story and jumped over to the report itself, titled, “Burdens and Benefits: Investigating Prop. 13’s unequal impacts in Oakland,” because that’s what I get paid to do.

I’ll cut to the chase: I found the underlying report quite dumb — a perception aided by the fact that the report refers to Latinos as “Latinx” — and wrote a quick response to it online. You can find it with the headline, “Tax hikers reach new low in search for reasons to repeal Proposition 13,” published March 15.

I’m only writing about this in print now because the same news story, with some changes, was published on the website of this newspaper on April 15.

The report at hand was produced by the Tax Fairness Project and the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association.

The report breaks down neighborhoods in Oakland by whichever racial group was the majority and compared what the average homeowner in those neighborhoods pay in property taxes compared to what they would pay in taxes if Proposition 13 were repealed and their property taxes were based on their market rate. Then they took the difference to calculate what the average homeowner saves in taxes.

Unsurprisingly, homeowners are saving a lot of money thanks to Proposition 13.

The report notes that homeowners in majority Latino neighborhoods save an average of $3,098 per year in property taxes thanks to Proposition 13 compared to if they had to pay taxes based on the current market rate. Likewise, homeowners in majority Black neighborhoods save $4,587 per year and homeowners living in majority Asian neighborhoods save $5,338.

One might think that this would be a good thing. People are saving money. That’s good, right?

But, of course, here comes the race-baiting: homeowners living in — cue the sinister music — majority White neighborhoods save an average of $9,631 per year.

Readers of this are supposed to be all mad and feel racial resentment.

People living in majority Latino neighborhoods are supposed to be mad at the “injustice” of not saving as much money in property taxes as people living in majority Black and Asian neighborhoods, and people living in majority Black neighborhoods are supposed to be resentful of people living in majority Asian and — cue sinister music — White neighborhoods and all three are supposed to be resentful of — cue sinister music — people living in majority White neighborhoods.

“Low-income households may be getting a far smaller subsidy, but it’s a subsidy nonetheless,” the news story begrudgingly concedes, using the word “subsidy” when all that’s really happening is that homeowners are keeping more of their own money.

If one follows the logic of the report, Prop. 13 is racist and evil and bad and unfair and unjust and inequitable and therefore, in the name of being good and not-evil and fair and just and equitable, Asian, Black and Latino homeowners should lose their Proposition 13 protections so they can pay thousands of dollars more in taxes per year.

This is even more ironic considering that the report itself states, “Black and [Latino] homeowners are also likely to pay higher proportions of their income in property taxes.”

So they really just want to punish the people they’re pretending to care about.

Brilliant. Utterly brilliant.

The report then pivots to lamenting about how all this money being saved by people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds deprives Oakland City Hall of $400 million per year, which gives up the real point of calls to repeal Prop. 13: giving politicians more money so they can give away more money to special interests.

“If Oakland were able to collect this missing money, the city could invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the public goods and services that would most help Oakland’s lower-income residents,” the report claims.

What amuses me about this is that Oakland’s city government is, objectively, an absolute dud.

“Oakland’s elected officials have repeatedly made financial decisions that left the city with a debt burden of $2.4 billion,” noted watchdog group Truth in Accounting earlier this year. “That burden came to $17,200 for every city taxpayer. Oakland’s financial problems stem mostly from unfunded retirement obligations that have accumulated over the years. The city had set aside only 66 cents for every dollar of promised pension benefits and 12 cents for every dollar of promised retiree health care benefits.”

Truth in Accounting ranked Oakland near the bottom (No. 64 out of 75 cities) in its assessment of fiscal health.

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It doesn’t help that Oakland’s mayor is Libby Schaaf, whose most notable moment in leadership was her “courageous” stand against what she thought were racist nooses in a park, but which a local Black man actually said was just workout equipment he and other community members used. Schaaf dismissed this, saying “intentions don’t matter” and calling for a hate crimes investigation.

Yeah, I wouldn’t trust the folks in Oakland City Hall with the money they have right now.

So these lefty race-baiters are stirring up all this racial resentment so they can punish Black and Latino homeowners with even higher taxes so incompetent city governments like the one in Oakland can waste a ton of money.

Welcome to the left’s vision for California.

Yeah, I’ll pass on that, thanks.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected].