Sound and Fury over Taxes
That sound roaring out of the West --what was it? A California earthquake? A Pacific tidal wave threatening to sweep across the country? Literally, it was neither; figuratively, it was both. That angry noise was the sound of a middle class tax revolt erupting, and its tremors are shaking public officials from Sacramento to Washington, D.C. Suddenly all kinds of candidates in election year 1978 are joining the chorus of seductive antitax sentiment, assailing high taxes, inflation and government spending.
The full significance of the revolt--and it is nothing less than that--was made plain by the magnitude of the victory won by proponents of California's now famous, or infamous, Proposition 13: 4.2 million voters supported the measure, overwhelming by nearly 2 to 1 the 2.3 million who refused to go along. It was as though millions of the state's taxpayers had thrown open their windows like the fed-up characters in the movie Network and shouted in thunderous unison: "I'm mad as hell--and I'm not going to take it any more!"
What the nation's most populous state last week refused to accept was the soaring, inflation-fueled rise in its property taxes. In the most radical slash in property taxes since Depression days, Californians voted themselves a 57% cut--more than $7 billion--in the levy that hurts them most, the tax on the rising value of their homes. Ignoring warnings that schools may not be able to educate, libraries may close and crime rates may climb, the voters further decreed that any local tax hereafter may increase no more than 2% a year--substantially less than the anticipated hikes in the cost of living. California was the epicenter of the tax-quake, but there were Richter Scale readings nearly everywhere. On the same Tuesday that Proposition 13 swept to victory, taxpayers in Ohio turned down 86 of 139 school tax levies, including emergency outlays designed to save public schools in Cleveland and Columbus from bankruptcy. Conservative candidates for the U.S. Senate won victories in Iowa and New Jersey by campaigning hard for tax cuts. Twenty-three state legislatures have called for an unprecedented constitutional convention to weigh an amendment requiring the Federal Government to operate on a balanced budget. Limits on state and local spending have been enacted in three states (Colorado, New Jersey and Tennessee), and efforts to clamp on similar lids are under way in 19 others. And Howard Jarvis, the crusty curmudgeon who spearheaded the California tax revolt, has already been asked to carry his crusade to 40 states.
He will get a warm welcome. Tax foes elsewhere are smoldering in anger and frustration--not only at the ever bigger bites being taken out of their pocketbooks but also at what they see as more waste and fewer services from government.
"The people are up in arms," said Illinois Republican State Representative Don Totten. "They're telling government to stop and get out of our lives." Said Democratic Congressman Jim Jones of Oklahoma, who is trying to shepherd a $15 billion tax-cut program through the House: "Those middle-income folks at $10,000 to $30,000 are on the verge of revolt. They want tax relief--and they want it now. They've been forced to become two-earner families, and are still being hit with the triple whammies of higher Social Security, inflation pushing them into higher income-tax brackets, and those property taxes. They feel put upon." Commenting on Proposition 13, Florida's Democratic Congressman Sam Gibbons declared: "It's one of the healthiest things that's happened in a long time. I thought California was the most overbloated state government I'd ever seen, and the Federal Government is overstuffed and can stand a lot of trimming down too."
As they worried about the possible impact of the landslide vote in California, even critics of the antitax movement expressed some sympathy for the psychology motivating the drive. "There's a tremendous paranoia sweeping the country," observed Amo DeBernardis, president of Oregon's multicampus, property-tax-supported Portland Community College. "People feel helpless about the way their government is headed, and this is the only way they can fight."
Yet the fact that Californians wielded a meat ax as they cut into taxes bothered many advocates of more moderate efforts to put limitations on government spending. Liberal Economist Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, noted in the Wall Street Journal last week: "Clearly, governments the country over need to be brought to book, they need to deliver more per dollar of tax, and they need to deliver excess tax dollars back to the taxpayer. But all of that can be readily granted without committing fiscal hara-kiri." To John Petersen, an official of the Municipal Finance Officers Association, a group that views virtually any tax cut as a form of harakiri, Proposition 13 is "a Frankenstein, a green hulk emerging from the swamps of the West."
The 75-year-old father of Proposition 13, basking in his first victory in a lifetime of attacking free-spending public officials, is no Frankenstein, but is a self-defined "pain in the ass. You gotta be to get these people to listen to you."
On election evening, Howard Jarvis denied that he was vengeful. "Tonight was a victory against money, the politicians, the government," said the gruff, tireless campaigner as he sagged into an easy chair in an eleventh-floor suite at Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel. "Government simply must be limited. Excessive taxation leads to either bankruptcy or dictatorship."
As Jarvis portrayed it, his goal was to relieve the government-inflicted sufferings of taxpayers. Said he: "We have seen the trauma of high taxes on older people. The deteriorating state of mind. The disease. The ulcers. When elderly people get those tax bills on their meager homes that demand another $1,500 a year, they get a cloud over their heads. Many of them give up the spirit and quietly die. One woman had a heart attack in front of me back in 1962 right in the assessor's office. That means something to me. Even the Russians don't do that, run people out of their homes for no reason. It is a goddamned crime. It is grand-felony theft."
Jarvis is a wealthy retired industrialist who does not see his antitax drive as a matter of self-interest. "Hell, I can pay whatever my property taxes are," he said. "I'll just write a check. But others, especially young couples who can't buy a place of their own, cannot do that." That kind of pitch, partly true and partly flimflam, has made Jarvis a national folk hero to millions of beleaguered taxpayers.
All but overshadowed by Jarvis' celebrity has been the other sponsor of Proposition 13, retired Real Estate Man Paul Gann, 66, who heads People's Advocate, a Sacramento-area antitax lobby. Scoffs a Jarvis aide: "We thought we needed the 150,000 votes his group could deliver in petition signatures. We alone got a million names and we didn't need him at all."
In the wake of what he wrought, Jarvis left pain as well as tax relief. California officials faced some brutal choices as they scrambled to figure out how to live with budgets now scheduled to shrink significantly with the beginning of the new fiscal year on July 1, when Proposition 13 takes effect (unless one of the five court challenges that have already been made proves successful).
State Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy predicts that 75,000 local employees will be fired statewide out of a total of 1.2 million, plus an additional 76,000 federally funded employees. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley proposed layoffs of 8,300 city employees (out of 49,349), including 1,600 cops. More than half will be trainees recently hired under the Federal Government's CETA (for Comprehensive Employment Training Act), which is aimed at helping unskilled, unemployed people, many of whom are black.
San Francisco Mayor George Moscone was studying a worst-case budget: the $84.9 million to operate city buses, trolleys and cable cars would be more than halved, the street-cleaning fund would drop from $783,000 to $90,000, and the city's human rights commission (scheduled to spend $332,101) would get no money at all. Even so, Moscone said: "I don't take a doomsday approach to how this city is going to react to crisis. We've been through earthquakes, don't ya know?" An anonymous poet was less optimistic, leaving this ditty taped to the door of San Francisco's city hall:
City hall is filled with gloom
As civil servants wait their
doom,
For the voters have spoken on
Jarvis-Gann
And left many of us for the
garbage cann.
The degree to which the tax-quake produces the chaos forecast by its opponents is now the problem of California's ambitious Governor Jerry Brown. Indeed, his re-election prospects and future White House hopes may well rest on how he handles the highly complex crisis. Brown, who only last March warned that Proposition 13 would replace "one monster with another," had pushed a more modest Proposition 8 instead. It would have rolled back property taxes by about 30% for homeowners and tied state and local spending to rises in personal income. But as 13 picked up unstoppable momentum, Brown performed a pirouette that would have dazzled Diaghilev. By election night, as 13 rolled up its huge majority and 8 lost, 53% to 47%, the Governor was almost sounding as if the Jarvis-Gann proposal had been his own idea.
In a subdued Los Angeles Hilton ballroom, where only 200 turned out for what was billed as a "Democratic election celebration," Brown dwelt but briefly on his easy primary victory over token opposition (he rolled up a 79% vote to 4% for his closest challenger). What was really on his mind was Proposition 13. Said Brown: "We have our marching orders from the people. This is the strongest expression of the democratic process in a decade." He promised to implement 13 "in the most human, sensitive way I can"--and without raising state taxes to bail out the newly stricken local units of government. But, he admitted, "things will never be the same."
The Governor's turnabout amused his opponents, among them Attorney General Evelle Younger. He will take on Brown in November, having roundly defeated three other Republicans to win the G.O.P. nomination. Said Younger: "I swear he sounded just like Howard Jarvis."
Whether 13 will really hurt Brown remains in doubt. While the property-tax rebellion was largely led by advocates of keeping government as limited and as close to the people as possible, the impact of 13 may be precisely the opposite. It will give Brown and the legislature in Sacramento virtual life-or-death power over the state's 4,500 local special districts (including fire, hospital, mosquito control, irrigation), 1,120 school districts, 415 cities and 58 counties. Predicted University of California Professor David Shulman: "Local government will appear as the supplicant at the court of the Governor."
But Economist Otto Eckstein sees a different and more beneficial effect--"a rapid growth in the private sector and a decline in the public sector." He adds: "The results are good in terms of changing things around. The voters in California have slowed down the growth of government. This will force the public sector to become more efficient, which is hard for it to do."
In any case, local districts looked eagerly toward Sacramento as they awaited word on just how hard the tax revolt would hit them. As Brown moved to draft a master plan, some of his aides thought they saw in his eyes the same sort of glint that was there in the days when he beat Jimmy Carter in five straight 1976 primaries. Said one Brown aide: "I haven't seen the adrenaline flowing like this since the early days of his political career."
Brown's first move was to freeze hiring of new state employees (12,000 a year) except in emergencies. He said he would soon propose ways to save another $300 million. He suggested that any such saving be added to the surplus in state revenues, expected to amount to $5.3 billion by the end of the fiscal year, and applied to help fill the property-tax void. He proposed that $4 billion be promptly allocated to local districts and $1 billion be kept in a reserve loan fund for emergencies.
The state legislators seem likely to give Brown what he seeks--and let him take the heat. Still, there was some grumbling. One diner in the capitol cafeteria suggested that "we stuff Howard Jarvis and mount him on the capitol dome." Bitterly, Democratic State Senator Alfred Alquist proposed turning all the surplus state funds over to taxpayers in a one-shot cash rebate and giving nothing to local districts. Said he: "It will do a lot of harm, but if it's the will of the people, we should do it."
There is some evidence, however, that the impact of 13 may not be as dire as its critics had claimed. Because of various state and federal programs, many local governments in California do not rely solely on the property tax for income. They have been spending some $33.9 billion a year and real estate taxes account for just $12.4 billion of that. Proposition 13, which rolls back property taxes to 1% of market value (they average about 3.2% now), will reduce revenues from this tax by $7 billion. But that represents only 20.7% of all local funds. However, sizable federal grants may be lost because no local matching money will be available.
On the other hand, the average homeowner will lose a big chunk of his federal income tax deduction because of the lowered property tax. Uncle Sam is expected to gain some $2.3 billion from Californians as a result. And since the California income tax is tied to the federal tax, the state will pick up some 300 million unexpected dollars.
Analysts for the state legislature estimate that the total actual property tax cut may be nearer $6.4 billion than $7 billion--and of this, homeowners will get a collective saving of only $2.3 billion. The rest will go to owners of rented residential property ($1.2 billion) and commercial and industrial property ($2.9 billion). The state's ten largest utilities and railroads alone will benefit by $400 million next year; in addition, Standard Oil figures to benefit by $13.1 million and Lockheed by $9.5 million.
Whatever the disappointments California taxpayers may meet when Proposition 13 goes into effect, their overwhelming support of the measure sends a powerful message to Washington, and there is some evidence that Washington is beginning to take heed. In what a Capitol Hill observer calls "one of the legislative surprises of the year," Wisconsin's Republican Congressman William Steiger has mustered astonishing support for a proposal to cut the capital-gains tax from a maximum rate of 49% to 25%. Though the Administration dismisses it as a "fat cat" proposal, Steiger's measure has won endorsement from 61 Senators and, in the name of job creation, from none other than AFL-CIO Leader George Meany. Steiger had been talking of settling for a new ceiling of 35%, but in the wake of Proposition 13, he may well revert to his original demand for 25%.
The voters' tax-cut message places the President in something of a bind. If he cuts taxes heavily without slashing spending, he risks adding to inflation. He has already modified a proposed $25 billion income tax cut, and a shaky deal seemed to be shaping up on Capitol Hill last week for a less inflationary $15 billion reduction. Even so, the projected federal deficit would still be $53 billion, give or take a few billion, and the President declared last week: "Someone has got to hold the line on the budget, and I am determined to do so." To show that he means business, he is talking of a fiscal 1980 budget that would trim the deficit further, to $37.5 billion, and would include virtually no new spending.
The tax revolt has been largely stimulated by inflation, which pushes taxpayers into higher income tax brackets and boosts the value of taxable property. But if the choice is between lowering taxes and fighting inflation, what then? A new poll for TIME taken by Yankelovich, Skelly and White shows a spectacular rise in concern over inflation. Fully 66% of Americans rank "inflation, high prices and the economy" as their chief worries; seven months ago, only 39% did so. By contrast, a mere 14% said they were concerned about high taxes and tax reform.
The TIME poll also yielded a surprising statistic that reflected the furor over Proposition 13. While 48% of those questioned voiced serious concern about keeping their houses, only 29% expressed comparable apprehension about keeping their jobs. In California, Jerry Brown noted a similar phenomenon: many policemen and firemen, he told Washington Star Columnist Mary McGrory, said to him that they would rather lose their jobs than their homes; thus they voted for Proposition 13 to get their property taxes down and will take their chances on a post-13 cutback. As an emotional political issue, the combined anxiety about inflation and taxes far eclipses such controversial foreign policy matters as the Panama Canal treaties, U.S. jet sales to the Middle East and Soviet-American relations.
The California rebellion is already stirring partisan passions in Washington. Any Republican candidate who does not understand the potential of the tax revolt, said Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker last week, "is a political idiot." Kansas Republican Senator Robert Dole promptly introduced a proposed constitutional amendment that would require the Federal Government to operate on a balanced budget each year. Many economists doubt, however, that putting Washington into that sort of straitjacket would be wise--or possible.
Nonetheless, supporters of a similar constitutional amendment that would require a balanced federal budget and a phased elimination of the national debt over 25 years are making impressive headway. Sponsored by the 45,000-member National Taxpayers Union, this move calls for the assembling of a national convention to amend the Constitution (a procedure never yet successfully pursued). Yet 23 state legislatures have already called for a meeting, and approval by only eleven more is needed. The convention would be empowered to propose constitutional amendments, which would then have to be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures.
Amending the Constitution is a long-term and difficult task. New York Republican Congressman Jack Kemp and Delaware Republican Senator William Roth propose a quicker fix--a bill that would reduce federal income taxes by 30% over three years, regardless of the impact on the budget. The Kemp-Roth proposal is rooted in the theories of University of Southern California Economist Arthur Laffer, who argues that while a cut in the tax rate may reduce revenues in the short run, the long-range result is to increase them. His reasoning: lower taxes mean greater incentive to work, which in turn means a broader tax base. The economist is the creator of the Laffer Curve, which demonstrates that once tax rates climb above a certain point, incentive is destroyed, output is stifled and a society begins to decline.
Though liberal economists dismiss the curve as a laugher, Laffer's ideas have gained attention on the Hill. Kemp and Roth have picked up more than 150 co-sponsors in Congress, and their legislation has been endorsed by the Republican National Committee. It was also strongly supported by conservative Jeffrey K. Bell in his campaign for the G.O.P. senatorial nomination from New Jersey. Bell maintains that his emphasis on cutting taxes was crucial to his upset victory over veteran Senator Clifford Case.
Another approach has been adopted by the California-based National Tax-Limitation Committee. Its aim is to place ceilings on the spending powers of the states by amending their constitutions. This drive has been successful in Tennessee, where 65% of the voters approved it last March. Once the dust settles, if it does, from Proposition 13, the Tax-Limitation Committee will introduce an amendment in the California legislature aimed at tying state spending increases to the growth in average personal income. "We are not quixotic," contends Sacramento Lawyer Lewis Uhler, president of the committee. "We see overall tax limitation as the power of the people to shape our society and our destiny. This is going to be a long, tough, no-nonsense battle."
The taxpayer revolt has, in fact, taken a variety of forms. Other examples:
OHIO. Twice in the space of 60 days Cleveland voters rejected a hike in property taxes that would have rescued its 113,000-student public school system from bankruptcy. The margin last Tuesday was 3 to 1, an increase over the 2 to 1 April vote against the levy, which would have increased the average homeowner's tax by $86.63. As a result, there may be no money to reopen Cleveland's schools after the summer recess. The vote also reflected opposition to court-ordered busing, scheduled to go into effect next fall to correct racial imbalances, and the high-handed manner in which Federal Judge Frank J. Battisti has, in effect, taken over management of the school system. Paul Briggs, Cleveland's respected veteran school superintendent, was so stripped of power by the court that he resigned his post.
OREGON. A virtual carbon copy of Jarvis-Gann has been picking up initiative signatures and now has a good chance to make the ballot in November. It would limit the property tax to 1 1/2% of market value, which would decrease the average homeowner's tax tab by one-third. "The measure could be very difficult to defeat," warns Robert Ridgley, recently retired chairman of the Portland public school board. He fears that the "effect on schools would be devastating." Supporters of the proposal blame the state legislature for its failure to curtail the property tax long ago. Says State Representative Al Shaw: "The legislature's attitude has been to sit tight and wait for things to blow over. Things won't blow over this time."
COLORADO. Two petition drives are under way for the November ballot. One proposal would limit increases in state and local government spending to the growth in living costs. The other would limit taxes on owner-occupied homes to either 2.5% of market value or 5% of family income, whichever is lower--giving half the homeowners in Colorado a tax cut of up to 30%. Public officials in the state scoff at the Jarvis-Gann approach. "Most screwball ideas seem to start in California," said one. But another was secretly delighted at the passage of Proposition 13. "California will be in one hell of a mess," he predicts, "and maybe some of our legislators will take notice and cut back on spending here."
ARIZONA. Partly to prevent a Proposition 13-style proposal from getting onto the November ballot, the Arizona legislature has called for a special session to overhaul its state tax structure. Contends State Representative Stan Akers, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee: "There is a general feeling of 'I've had too damned much' among people who want high taxes to come to a screeching halt. I wouldn't blame them if they wanted something like the Jarvis amendment here." The legislature may freeze property assessments at 1977 levels and re-examine assessing and taxing procedures.
MICHIGAN. A move to limit state spending won a respectable 43% vote in 1976, and is given a good chance of approval this year. State and local taxes now consume 9.7% of total personal income in Michigan, compared with 6.7% ten years ago. Viewing California's action as too drastic, Petition Leader Richard Headlee, a former director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says his goal is to seek "progressive, responsible, accountable government, which can only grow as the economy in the state grows."
MASSACHUSETTS. The plight of the average Massachusetts taxpayer is even worse than that of his California counterpart. So great is the burden that protesters call the state "Taxachusetts." The property tax averages 4.7% of market value for a variety of historic reasons. Slow to adopt modern sales and income taxes, the state has relied too heavily on the property tax. Moreover, its charitable attitude toward churches and higher education produced an unusually high proportion of tax-exempt property, especially in Boston. At the same time, liberal Massachusetts provides more services for victims of poverty and disease than do most other states. More recently, its industrial base has been declining. Massachusetts thus is in a tax dilemma, with several widely varying solutions locked in conflict.
Nor is that all. In Delaware, Republican Governor Pierre S. duPont and his Democratic Lieutenant Governor two weeks ago proposed an amendment to the state constitution requiring a three-fifths vote by the legislature to raise any taxes; their goal is to prevent "midnight raids" on taxpayers by politicians trying to make fiscal ends meet. Maryland last month put through what one lawmaker calls "the most far-reaching program of property tax relief in 200 years." Three Florida state senators have announced that they will try to get a Jarvis-type proposal on the ballot for November. In Texas, Republican Gubernatorial Nominee Bill Clements is calling for an "ironclad limitation on taxation and the growth of government spending."
Plainly, the tax-quake is not limited to California. But why did it strike with such terrific force there? Tax experts point to the fact that California still relies more heavily than most states on real estate taxes, not only to finance fire, police and schools but also for welfare, Medicare and Medicaid. Observes John Shannon, assistant director of Washington's Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations: "Most states have relieved the property tax of that welfare burden. In California, they send a small boy out to do a man's job."
The California tax, moreover, has been spiraling. The property tax in 1942 amounted to $32 for every $1,000 of personal income in the state, only 89% of the national average. By 1976 it had leaped to $63, or 142% of the national norm. Only in Alaska* and New York has the overall state and local tax burden gone higher. Nationwide, taxes of all kinds -- federal, state and local -- now account for more than one-third of the gross national product (33.5%). One measure of the explosive growth of spending at all levels of government: in 1965 the total was $205.6 billion; by 1975 it was up to $556.3 billion, growing at more than 10% a year and now hovering somewhere around three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
Many experts feel that Californians have acted unfairly in aiming all their fire at the property tax. Claims C. Lowell Harriss, a Columbia University professor of economics and consultant to the Tax Foundation Inc.: "The property tax is a better tax than people give it credit for. It's a way to capture socially created values of the locality. It's inexpensive to administer, impossible to avoid and the one tax that people can actually see working for them. I hate to see local government lose that autonomy."
Ironically, Californians became so angry at the property tax partly because the state has one of the nation's most effective systems for administering it. While assessment procedures are a scandal in many states, California's elected assessors --who act independently of all local authorities and have nothing at all to do with setting actual tax rates--have been highly efficient at keeping homes and business property tagged at actual market values. That has not, however, made them popular with taxpayers.
Appraiser Eugene Aronson, 45, who works in the office of Los Angeles County Tax Assessor Alexander Pope, has been called a "dirty Nazi" and a "dishonest Communist" while making his rounds. When he meets strangers at parties he often tells them he is an insurance salesman rather than admit his true trade.
Aronson's turf includes the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles. He knows just which blocks have the really elegant homes--and just what kind of prices they command on the market. He also knows which ones look deceptively more valuable than they are. He is an expert at determining which kind of hardwood floors, plumbing, tiling and shingles really add to the sale value of a house. "We don't care whether we raise or lower a property," says he. "We just want to give it its proper value."
State law requires California's nearly 3,000 appraisers to determine the market value of all property and list it on tax rolls by July 1. Not every home is visited every year, but when enough houses in a given neighborhood change ownership to establish a "price pattern," the whole tract is reassessed at the new value. Reassessments must be made at least once every three years. The rolls tell the county board of supervisors the total value of property available for taxing--and it is the supervisors, not the assessors, who determine how high a rate will yield the tax income they think they need.
What frustrates California taxpayers is that while the state's land boom has sent the value of their homes soaring, local officials have rarely been content to lower their tax rates so as to keep the total bite relatively stable. Instead, they have found ways to spend the extra money. A crucial example: Los Angeles County has had a stable population for ten years, yet its expenditures have ballooned during that period from $500 million a year to $1.6 billion. The result is a growing volume of taxpayer complaints about extravagance in government. Lynn Rosner, 45, and her insurance broker husband bought their "dream home" in Los Angeles for $64,000 in 1968. Their tax then was $1,800. By 1976 it was up to $3,500 and, without Proposition 13, it would have gone to $7,000. Last year, she says, "we stopped going out, we did no entertaining and bought no clothes. We can't take a vacation. We can't lead a normal life." Says Mrs. Rosner: "The more money they spend on schools, the worse the schools get."
Sarah Hyman, 43, wife of a high school teacher, agrees. The house the Hymans bought six years ago for $72,000 is now assessed at $220,000, and the tax, which was up to $4,000 last year, was slated to more than double--to $8,300. "We see waste in the school system every day," she contends. "At 15 or more high schools, there's a dean for every grade, plus a head dean for the deans. At one school they had enough money to buy six electric typewriters, so they did--even though there was only one typist. Money is allotted for summer school mainly so more teachers can have jobs. And instead of teaching remedial reading, they teach backpacking or other craftsy things."
Those kinds of complaints, fair or not, gave powerful impetus to Proposition 13. Whether Californians will regret their protest remains to be seen. Curiously, a Los Angeles Times poll after the balloting showed that 70% of those who supported 13 thought they would get by without any reduction in services. Many were interested simply in sending the government a message. The poll also showed that 22% felt the government provided too many unnecessary services. When asked which services they would be most willing to see cut, 69% said welfare.
The hapless California officials who are now moving gingerly to bow to the will of the majority cannot, however, fail to hear the clash of other voices. Indeed, there was a tinge of class conflict in the campaign for Proposition 13, with possible portents of racial trouble in the simmering summer months. By and large, homeowners from the middle and upper classes, justly aggrieved by their rising tax burden, had led the tax revolt. But worried blacks and Hispanics in California feared, with some cause, that as government turned more frugal, they would be hurt the most.
State Democratic Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, a black who represents Los Angeles' Watts district, demanded that layoffs be determined not solely by seniority but on the basis of the employees' personal needs and competence. Otherwise, she feared, minorities and women once again would be "the last hired and first fired." Warned John Mack, president of the Los Angeles urban league: "We intend to make damn sure that if garbage is going to be picked up only once a month in Watts, then it damn sure will be once a month in the San Fernando Valley."
Such conflicting claims and expectations raised broader questions about the Jarvis measure. Indeed, the entire nationwide drive to slash taxes arbitrarily and force public officials to cope with the consequences poses anew some of the most basic of political questions. At what point does the voters' laudable intention to eliminate waste and increase governmental efficiency act instead to destroy the very services a democratic society demands? Is society really expecting too much from government? If so, which services are crucial to the general welfare? Who should determine priorities (and how) within the confines of more limited public funding?
Compelled to act swiftly yet fairly, Californians must now try to answer those difficult questions as best they can. Surely the rest of the nation will be watching their performances very closely. For how California fares in the wake of Proposition 13 may well set public tax and spending patterns for many years to come.
*The Alaska homeowner is not nearly as hard-pressed as statistics suggest because the state's heavy tax burden is borne largely by oil and gas companies, which pay high taxes and royalties for exploration, drilling and production.
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