California's Proposition One

...In the past the difference has been made up by regular tax increases...

...The fact remains, however, that evidence for the latter assertion is even flimsier than for the first and consists, by and large, of Soviet assurances complemented with Western wishful thinking...

...The complexity of the initiative is clear from its additional provisions, which included: --A requirement that any changes in the state tax structure required a two-thirds vote of the legislature (instead of the present requirement of a simple majority...

...Their unhappiness with certain specific government programs is intense, and so they regularly vote down specific appropriations for certain specific uses (e.g., school bends...

...The reductions would have continued until either fiscal year 1989-1990, or tmtil the percentage reached 7 percent, whichever occurred first...

...Pretty tricky, that...

...The decision was for the legislature to make...

...Until that point, changes in the formula could only be made by a majority vote of the people at a statewide election--by the same process by which it was hoped Proposition One would gain its initial approval...

...As a Nobel Prize winning author, Solzhenitsyn is, at least for the time being, protected from reprisals by his international reputation, although it should be emphasized that he has also antagonized a number of influential Westerners...

...Congressman Joe Waggonner's (DLa...

...The hope was, in the moment of truth, that in our hearts we would know it was right...

...The same hope reappeared during the campaign for Proposition One...

...This means, ultimately, they will acquiesce generally in the right of government to deploy their (our) resources, and to tax--and will loathe taking any action that seems to limit government's ability to act in this general way...

...For most people, God is not dead...

...But more important, the tax reductions mandated by Proposition One were still to be determined entirely by the legislature...

...I do not think so...

...Unfortunately, the initiative's complexity made impossible a clear public discussion of the essential issues...

...The most recent unpleasant reminder of this fact, one viewed with fury in Moscow and with not a little annoyance in many Western capitals, is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a 600 page compilation of data on the Soviet system of police terror and network of concentration camps...

...Post is supposed to be a "watchdog" of state government spending, but is in fact employed by the Democratic legislature to agitate for bigger and bigger state budgets...

...Unhappily, that simple objective became buried in a multitude of subsidiary provisions, which made the proposition a monster of complexity...

...There are historical reasons...

...This was a right the task force sought to guarantee for all time, by writing it into the state constitution...

...Others, as already stated, voted against the initiative because they thought it would increase their property taxes...

...On the other hand, the public interest in having that program is diffused...

...In fact, the opposition responded to the proposal--there is no delicate way to put it--hysterically...

...Why do they continue party registrations of nearly two Democrats for every one Republican...

...Especially for those on the receiving end of state revenues, the news that the gravy train might not stop here anymore was not received lightly by those who had ridden it for years...

...Democrat John Murtha defeated Republican Harry Fox by a slim margin of 220 votes...

...This compares with only thirteen announced retirements by House Democrats...

...It was this '~nidden vote" that would turn the tide on election day in Goldwater's favor...

...At that point, the legislature could by two-thirds vote terminate further reductions in the limitation...

...After all, voters always have the Post Office and the public school system to set them right...

...139 do not...

...If the rate of increase continues, it has been estimated that the state budget will grow from 1973's $9.3 billion to $47 billion by 1989...

...And problems of circumstance...

...Nixon's end may, indeed, be near, but as one Washington official recently observed, it is not yet in sight...

...Returning to Professor Niskanen's statement, the major objective of Proposition One was "to transfer one power from state officials to the voters--the power to determine the maximum state tax revenues...

...The problem, as certain social criics have warned us since the French Revolution, is a problem of lost authority...

...He has merely moved to Washington...

...A Field Poll conducted just before the election revealed that although a majority were going to vote "no," 69 percent of them opposed Proposition one because they thought it would increase their taxes...

...Still, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago deals primarily with the terror of the Stalin era and contains little information that was totally unknown before, and is thus somewhat ~lnerable to charges of being dated...

...Although it is a Democratic district Nixon won it in 1968 and 1972 and it sent the late Republican John Saylor to Congress for thirteen terms...

...Occasionally, the "Jews" were good Orthodox Christians and, their passports notwithstanding, had no intention of going to Israel...

...Nonetheless, anyone reading only the two PSA statements would have come away hope]essly confused...

...Nearly all contained some information that was new, and also much data that was readily available earlier, but was simply not believed...

...In 1930, 15 percent of personal income in the United States went to support government at all levels...

...The problem is: if God is dead, what to do...

...the committee But Chairman Rodino is an attempt at bipartisan conciliation first appointed John Doar as Chief Counsel (a "Republican" who is registered as an Independent and who has, reportedly, never voted for a Republican in his life...

...Although it is generally the Democrats who support impeachment and the Republicans who do not, the issue is just not that clear cut...

...Maurice F r i e d b e r g Solzhenitsvn and the Soviet Dissenters . / WE MAY, EVERY" ~ often, f i n d o u r s e l v e s eyeball to eyeball with the Soviet military machb,,~, a ~';tuation most recently witnessed in the Middle East, though not limited to that area...

...It was not an issue on which levity was permitted...

...The other, Sinyavsky, a brilliant writer and literary theoretician, recently arrived in Paris...

...One friend, high in Republican circles, several days before the election predicted that many people, unwilling publicly to support the initiative, nevertheless in the privacy of the voting booth would vote for it...

...Many Republicans are concerned that the upcoming election will be turned into a referendum on Nixon's ability to govern, and political analyst Kevin Phillips has given estimates of up to fifty House seat losses for the GOP...

...A one-time credit of 20 percent on 1973 state personal income taxes, to take care of the $829 million surplus expected in 1972-1973...

...The same survey also revealed that 89 favor resignation...

...A property tax-rate limitation for cities, counties, and special districts, with changes permitted only by a majority vote of the people...

...Why are there not more Ronald Reagans in statehouses across the country, working to reduce the size of government...

...But I am not convinced...

...The pessimists, on the other hand, wonder how marketable a constitutional expenditure limitation can be in any form...

...As Yevgeni Yevtushenko warned a few years ago, while still something of a nonconformist Soviet poet, Stalin's heirs can be found throughout Russia...

...The argument failed to point out that California's sales tax is very progressive, exempting both food and housing...

...Proposition One was defeated by a margin of 55 to 45 percent--a margin not significantly different from the balance of Democrats to Republicans in Congress over the past twenty years...

...It's worth their while to spend a great deal of energy on it...

...But when the verdict was in and the people had spoken their piece, Proposition One went down by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent...

...If the Democratic legislature does not go along, as seems likely, another campaign for signatures in the spring will likely return the issue to the voting booth...

...The argument simply missed the point...

...After the defeat of Proposition One, there is reason to wonder if the growing encroachments of public power on individual freedom can ever be reduced...

...Still, even the account already pubfished is refutation enough of the sham of de-stalinization...

...But until we discover new legitimate sources of values and structure, we cannot be surprised if people demand more and more government, even as they continue to reject various bond issues and to vilify for incompetence and unresponsiveness the people they continue to elect...

...Approximately two years ago the Soviet authorities finally succeeded in suppressing that group's illegal journal, the Chronicle of Current Events, a remarkable typewritten publication that had for a period of nearly four years dispassionately and without editorial comment recorded 12 The Alternative April 1974...

...The Post-Mortem A week or two before the election, I was flying from Ires Angeles to San Francisco, and I happened to read in the PSA Magazine an exchange between the governor and Speaker Moretti on Proposition One...

...The usual analysis is that the people like the programs, but don't want to pay for them...

...Most of the present Soviet leaders are themselves products of the Stalinist system, and practically all aged fifty and above now occupying top posts were the dictator's faithful lieutenants...

...Thus, for instance, he excoriated the Nobel Committee and the Swedish government for cowardly buckling under to Soviet pressures and refusing to present to him the prize in Moscow, either in his private apartment or in the Swedish Embassy...

...It informs us, for instance, that the number of Stalin's murderous accomplices actually brought to trial for their crimes did not exceed two dozen, and while the overall number of inmates in prison camps has drastically declined, the Soviet system of camps and the conditions in them have not changed very much...

...Unlike most of the other circles of Soviet dissidents, the Democratic Movement was never identified with specific ethnic or religious groups, nor were its aims linked with a particular political program...

...WCatergate" is considered the overriding factor, but Republican difficulties are compounded by the fact that sixteen incumbent GOP congressmen have already announced their intent to retire, and more retirements are expected...

...Thus, his embarrassing performance over the past couple of years did not in the least inhibit his becoming the central figure in the opposition against Proposition One...

...Pulling against this opposition to public spending is the general insecurity and anxiety that we have come to think of under the general term "alienation...

...It is clear from Post's own figures that revenues permitted under Proposition one for 1974-1975 would still have been $500 million greater than 1973-1974 revenues...

...Once again, the hidden vote never materialized...

...In the face of this situation, on September 1, 1972, Governor Reagan assembled a special task force to study the problem and recommend a solution...

...are awaiting further developments without being apologists for the Administration...

...The structure people can no longer find in family, church, and local community must be found somewhere, and for increasing numbers of people, that somewhere is government...

...Pest is fortunate that where ideology is concerned, reputation bears no relation to performance...

...The Substance The main purpose of the amendment, as Professor Niskanen indicated, was to transfer the power to determine total state tax revenues from the Legislature to the voters...

...The Alternative April 1974 11 That, I believe, was the real story underlying the defeat of Proposition One---as it has been of much recent political history...

...In many ways, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, revealing as it is, may be less significant as commentary on present conditions in the Soviet Union than two other recent books, Andrei Sinyavsky's A Vo/ce from the Choir and Anatoli Marchenko's My Testimony...

...But that distinction somehow never was made clear...

...Liberals and conservatives can be found on both sides of the fence...

...As a practical matter, government spending could not be reduced significantly by eliminating individual bad programs...

...In February 1971, Pest labeled the governor's $6.7 billion budget for 1971-1972 '~he property tax increase of 1971...

...The impression thus was given that Proposition One would have forced a reduction in state services from their 1973-1974 level by $620 million...

...The assumption was that funding would be transferred from the income tax to the sales tax, and therefore from the rich to the poor...

...The Opposition If you felt yourself becoming dizzy under the weight of detail, so did many California voters who like to consider themselves politically well-informed...

...Let the People Decide," published in Tax Expenditure Limitation by Constitutional Amendment, by The Institute of Governmental Studies, Berkeley, 1973...

...A tax shift was also prevented by other specific provisions in the proposal guarding against the shift...

...Both describe present-clay Soviet concentration camps, not Stalinist ones...

...This argument was most elegantly expressed by a stream of economists brought in to counter the authority of the governor's task force advisors...

...To redress the bias in favor of public spending, the task force created Proposition One to permit the voters to determine the maximum state tax revenues---or the total amount of public goods to be produced...

...If people are now asking of government what they got in the past from religion, it is small wonder that they are fed up with government and consider it unrespeKsive: government must seem unresponsive when people ask from it things it cannot give...

...His remark became the subject of a massive statewide advertising campaign by the opposition in the final days...

...They were all, however, in one way or another linked to the various unorganized groupings known in the West as Soviet Dissenters, most frequently to the fragment known as the Democratic Movement...

...The impression persisted that there would be massive reductions in state services, that there would be huge shifts from the state to the cities and counties-which would have to be financed out of greatly increased property taxes...

...Throughout the state opponents predicted disaster and general chaos if the initiative passed...

...The state constitution does not permit deficit spending...

...The polls conducted since the election leave doubt about what happened...

...As a result, whenever you try to take off one special program at a time, the special interest is suppressed...

...And by June the required number of signatures (5 percent of the voters) had been collected to place the issue on the November ballot...

...And this is true notwithstanding the noises they may seem to make to the contrary--and however often, on small issues, they may give us reason to hope...

...Fortunately, the situation is not as bleak as it might appear...

...Although opponents claimed the initiative would require massive cutbacks in state services, revenues were projected even at the reduced rates to maintain all state services at their 1973 levels and provide a substantial surplus besides...

...Indeed, there is no reason to be very surprised by this fact...

...Professor Friedman gave the reason for the bias as follows: ~'[W]hen you take one program itself, all of the people who have a special interest in that program land in Sacramento like a ton of bricks...

...The hope that government can and should dispense spiritual succor may explain much dissatisfaction with certain specific public programs...

...3) The tax shift argument became part of another highly political series of arguments about income redistribution...

...On the other hand, such charges may be countered with the observation that Solzhenitsyn's book only continues a pattern in the fortunes of accounts of Soviet concentration camps published in the West over the last half century...

...It is not an easy problem...

...Far from reducing state spending, Proposition one would merely have reduced allowable expansion of state spending from $1.1 billion to $500 million...

...A figure hotly contested, but all parties relied on the figures of Professor C. Lowell Harriss who made clear, however, that in California, where taxes are above the national average, total revenues--as opposed to taxe~ do approach the 44 percent estimate used by proponents...

...The expenditure limitation would have frozen state tax revenue to its 1973 percentage of state personal income (estimated to be about 8.3 percent), and would have reduced that percentage by one-tenth of one percent (0.1 percent) each year thereafter...

...The great virtue of this proposal [Proposition One] is precisely that it lumps together all of these little programs into one bigger total and thus makes it possible for the public interest that is, The Alternative April 1974 9 your interest and my interest--to be reflected, in the same strength and the same force as the separate special interest...

...Attached to them were elaborate safeguards to take care of emergencies, to guarantee that accumulating surpluses would be returned to the taxpayers by tax refunds, and safeguards that the state would not pass on to local units the cost of state-mandated programs...

...One of them, Marchenko, an ordinary worker, is still in the Soviet Union where he leads a precarious existence in and out of prisons...

...As a matter of fact, the authors of beth books were in their teens at the time of Stalin's death...

...Sinyavsky's unexpected arrival was not an isolated case...

...and 126 declined to comment...

...In 1950, the figure was 32 percent, and in 1973 it had grown to 44.7 percent in California...

...The famous novelist's account is carried to 1956, but a postscript, and Solzhenitsyn's other pronouncements, suggest that it may well be followed by a sequel...

...The Republican counsel for the House impeachment inquiry, Albert Jenner, in a "conciliatory" gesture also modified his statement that the President could be held responsible for the actions of his subordinates (even if he did not know about them) and added, only if he (Nixon) specifically authorized them...

...And that figure found its way, via the Legislative Analyst's office, onto the November ballot...

...Interest is also reportedly growing around the country, and similar measures are being considered in about a dozen other states...

...It would be a mistake, I think, to assume the very able Moretti does not read...

...182 are undecided, and 74 declined to comment...

...Each time, the assumption was that most people were fed up with government and wanted less of it...

...From Moretti's critique of the initiative, one would have to conclude either that he does not read, or that he was engaging, as the governor charged, in a campaign of "falsehood and distortion...

...Most important, of course, the proponents believed that a majority of the people agreed with them...

...48 are undecided...

...The amendment was first submitted to the legislature, but anticipating legislative opposition, in March 1973 the governor announced his intention to seek voter approval of the amendment through the initiative process...

...His books, published in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, were once firmly disowned by the Soviet authorities as concoctions produced by embittered antiSoviet ~migr~s---until their author was identified in 1965 and sentenced to prison...

...Recently they have become less reticent about identifying themselves as such, and the label of Stalinism is now once again regarded by many Soviet Communists as a badge of honor...

...implies that later generations will be less wise in making the decision as between the public and private sectors of the economy than the present one...

...And many supporters of Proposition One are hopeful it may be resurrected in a more marketable form next November...

...Political observers, however, will not have to wait until November to test their theories...

...The opposition used the complexity brilliantly, and by election day the confusion was almost total...

...yet the Administration in Washington as well as its most persistent moralizing critic Senator Fkflbright both solemnly assure us that the Cold War is dead and we had better cultivate the fragrant flower of ddtente...

...19721973 showed an $800 million surplus...

...As the old authorities and communities lose their ability to provide the personal structure people need, fear of uncertainty and of the future can only grow...

...In the fall campaign over Proposition One, reported expenses were about $1.3 million for each side...

...But in at least four separate civil lawsuits, the Proposition proponents are claiming that the opponents used hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to finance the opposition to an issue placed on the ballot by taxpayers' signatures...

...So much for the basic provisions...

...Several bills are being prepared in the legislature to place a similar, but far simpler measure on the ballot next November...

...Impeachment Continued Impeachment, of course, still remains an issue on Capitol Hill...

...The system is producing more public goods than are desired by the consuming public...

...A. Lawrence Chickering California's Proposition One ON NOVEMBER 6, 1973, California voters had an historic opportunity to call a halt to the indefinite growth of government and to begin rolling back gradually the share of state output controlled by Sacramento...

...Most effective in opposition was the state's very partisan "nonpartisan" legislative analyst, A. Alan Post...

...Irving Kristol explored certain aspects of the problem more recently in his "Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism," The Public Interest, Spring, 1973...

...Within the maximum, there was provision for short-term adjustments...

...Honey, if that don't say it all, I don't know what does...

...He can't be dead...

...Constituent letters calling for impeachment have slackened off, but one Republican congressman (who had indicated at home that he was going to keep an open mind on the issue of impeachment until the House Judiciary Committee has concluded its inquiry) received an angry letter from a constituent complaining that any efforts in support of the President were "divisive" and "damaging" for the country...

...His Democratic colleagues would (reportedly) like to drag out the inquiry and allow it to climax just before the 1974 congressional elections--in the national interest, of course...

...In recent years, he has regularly predicted fiscal chaos if Reagan budgets were not increased...

...R~es regulating legislature approval of local government taxes (two-tmros required for local income taxes, simple majority for local sales taxes...

...The problems with the concept, however, may be more complicated than is generally supposed...

...If the special congressional election in Pennsylvania in February is any indication of the voter trend this fall Republicans had better prepare for bad times...

...Ordinarily, therefore, one would expect a massive underreporting of expenses by both sides...

...The extent of the Soviet Union's much-heralded de-Stalinization is thus about the same as Germany's de-Nazification would have been, had Hitler's-death been followed by some perfunctory disavowals of a few of his policies: a closing of the crematoria, a reduction of the size of slave labor camps, and a trial of twenty SS-men...

...The tax shift argument was phony not only because permitted revenues under the initiative would not reduce state services...

...Over the longer term, under Proposition One the state budget could have doubled in ten years and tripled in fifteen...

...But just as regularly, the state has somehow managed to get by with expenditure levels set by the governor--and often with substantial increases for various state services...

...Thus, they claimed that twenty-eight full-time staff people, in addition to the thirty-man staff of the Assembly Office of Research, in effect, were employed by California taxpayers to campaign against the initiative...

...1) The central opposition claim was that if the initiative was passed, in the words of Post's official analysis, "substantial reductions in state expenditures will be required each year...

...The best book I know on this subject is Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community, 1953...

...Somehow, the message never got across...

...Indeed, as a result of such conditioning there were people in the West who in 1956 were initially skeptical about the reliability of some of Khrushchev's revelations (none of them entirely new either) regarding Stalin's terror that were contained in his famous ~secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress...

...Because some of the men and women in that group were Jewish or of partly Jewish origin, they were often ostensibly allowed to leave as Jews...

...On other occasions, Solzhenitsyn made acid comments about those Western liberals who are willing to concede imperfections in the observance of human rights in the Soviet Union, but only on the condition that this be accompanied by a condemnation of '~Fascist regimes" in Greece, Portugal, and South Africa...

...Similar forebodings shroud the February 19 defeat of the Republican candidate for Vice President Ford's Michigan seat...

...The 1964 election results suggest that if there was ever a hidden vote, it remained well hidden...

...87 do not...

...Normal campaign practice calls for accusations of profligate spending by the opposition, in contrast to your own threadbare operation...

...There are always good explanations, and they all defy the most obvious one: that in the final analysis, the majority--perhaps the vast majority---of the American people are generally satisfied with the amount of government they are getting and paying for...

...More recently Rodino has spoken of an expeditious inquiry into the question of impeachment...

...John Kenneth Galbraith uttered the common sentiment of Professors Samuelson, Okun, and Heller as follows: "I would be opposed to any effort to freeze the level of taxation over future years...

...It is hard to say which side outspent which...

...For the pessimists (including this observer), the real question concerns the validity of a long-cherished libertarian assumption--that the mass of people are fed up with government and want less of it...

...Perhaps a more important statistic: for the last two decades total public revenues in California have been growing at a rate of 10 percent per year, while personal income has been rising only 7.5 percent a year...

...I know, I know...

...Leading the opposition were Assembly Speaker and gubernatorial candidate Bob Moretti, and the long-time C~P public relations firm of Whittaker and Baxter...

...But most important, at any time, by the same procedure as that governing Proposition One, the voters could increase or decrease the maximum...

...Thus, voters may resist specific public programs, whose effects are definite, specific, and present, but acquiesce both in the general power of government to take care of things, and in specific programs (like Social Security) that will provide security and reduce uncertainty in the future...

...Opponents also contested the $47 billion figure...

...One observer suggested that the hearings could not significantly differ from a similar series of statewide public hearings which will be held next fall to consider the qualifications of Speaker Moretti as a gubernatorial candidate...

...The opportunity was a statewide referendum-Proposition One on the ballot--which sought by constitutional amendment to limit state expenditures to their 1973level, as a percentage of state personal income, and in the future gradually to reduce that percentage, The proponents' strategy was simple: let the people vote on how much government they want--and they will vote for less than we have now...

...Advising the task force were people like Milton Friedman, Peter Drucker, Roger Freeman, James Buchanan, and others of equal distinction...

...In fact, as the constituent wrote, the issue was all but settled since a leading Jesuit in his parish had prayed for an "impeached" President for Christmas...

...Under the initiative, it was estimated that in ten years, the state income tax could have been reduced by 60 percent, or the sales tax could have been reduced by two cents---or some combination of the two...

...As suggested by its name, its aims were very modest...

...Six Republican seats, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and California, are up in special elections and the GOP (under normal circumstances) should hold on to at least four of those seats...

...The important thing, he said, was for them to vote for it...

...620 million was a reasonable estimate of the reduction in state revenues not from present levels, but from their levels without the initiative...

...After all, what about all those school bond issues that regularly get buried in what we have been taught to think of as "the taxpayer's revoltT' The question in response is too obvious to avoid: if people really want less government, why don't they elect to office people who will carry out their will...

...By and large these were limited to demands that the Soviet Union observe those democratic rights to which it is committed in theory, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the Soviet Union is a signatory, and the country's own Constitution which guarantees all Soviet citizens freedom of speech, assembly, and conscience...

...The problem is not, I suspect, that people think government can do things better and more efficiently than the private sector can do them...

...Similarly, we are assured by an incongruous coalition of industrial tycoons lusting after huge business ventures in the Soviet Union (to be financed, of course, with credits underwritten by American taxpayers) and assorted liberal Polyannas, that de-Stalinization which was set in motion nearly twenty years ago continues to make progress, and that the Soviet Union, while perhaps not yet a perfect democratic society, can at least be counted on to act rationally and with moderation...

...The problem for those concerned about the growth of government is how to develop a form of authority to recapture the consent that is vital to strong authority, but that the traditional communities and authorities have substantially lost...

...Proposition One would have established a maximum state tax (about 8.3 percent of state personal income in 1974--1975, and declining 0.1 percent in each of the years after until the percentage reached 7 percent or until fiscal year 1989-1990, whichever occurred first...

...2) The issue of whether Proposition one was a tax reduction (as the governor claimed) or a tax shift (as opponents claimed) was a confusion the opposition used to great advantage...

...Which is to say that the voters could change their minds about the total amount of public goods they wanted...

...Post's figure for 19741975, the first full year under the initiative, was a $620 million reduction in state services...

...The implication was that the legislature would be unable to find new uses for the money...

...The system is flawed, they concluded, by a bias in favor of public spending...

...A major effect of the initiative, the Assembly Office of Research argued, would be to "shift the costs of government from upper to lower income groups...

...But after the governor's 1971 welfare reform, 42 out of California's 58 counties were able to reduce their property tax rates...

...The task force concluded that the problem could not be contained by conventional means...

...The silliest argument in opposition came from Berkeley economist George Break, who found Proposition One dangerously "undemocratic...

...The general uncertaintly and insecurity can be relieved only by the general sense that the government will be there to take care of any and all contingencies...

...Each one of us saves a few cents, but for the special interests, those cents accumulate into a great many dollars...

...But there is a question whether performance alone accounts for the unhappiness...

...As Berkeley economist William Niskanen explained it: ~rhe sole objective of the proposed limit is to constrain the authority of state officials to determine the total state tax revenues" (William A. Niskanen...

...In fairness to Professor Break, I will refrain from commenting on his argument that there is something subversive to democracy in taking a power from the legislature and giving it to the people...

...In the last two years or so, parallel with the slow but steady stream of Soviet Jews leaving for Israel (a limited emigration allowed for reasons of domestic policy, and also partly to appease critics abroad, although it should be emphasized that the vast majority of applicants are not allowed to leave), there has also been a ~cond group of emigrants, very small in numbers, and therefore little noticed...

...bloc of fifty Southern Democrats, for example, show no signs of unanimity on this question...

...10 The Alternative April 1974 4) Opponents argued that the initiative would create a "straight jacket" for taxation and spending, and eliminate flexibility for responding to changing conditions...

...God Moves to Washington In 1964, a major-strategy of the Goldwater campaign was based on the hope that a substantial, but untapped number of voters had effectively withdrawn from the political process because they could, see no real difference between the two major political parties...

...Thus, over the years some of Western Europe's left-wing intellectuals systematically denounced such information as anti-Soviet slander, even when its authenticity was beyond doubt...

...A few numbers tell much of the story...

...And a thousand complicating factors...

...On so important an issue, if you are confused, you vote no...

...Proponents accused Speaker Moretti of running the opposition campaign out of the speaker's office...

...This is an increase from $9.7 billion in 1974 to $27.4 billion in 1990...

...And many Republicans, including the new Minority Leader John Rhodes (R-Ariz...

...Furthermore, having declared the issue inappropriate for Assembly action in the spring, the speaker then proceeded during the campaign to hold a series of hearings all over the state and to hear mostly hostile testimony against the initiative...

...Opponents are also accused of using the state telephone lease line and the public franking privilege to mail over a million pieces of mail, to urge people to vote against Proposition One...

...The problem was aggravated during the last week of the campaign, when the governor jokingly told a reporter that people shouldn't try to tmderstand the proposition, because he didn't understand it either...

...This...

...A coincidence...

...They argued that expenditures for many state services---especially education-were leveling off from this record high growth period...

...Whatever the case, the issue remains very much alive...

...On the issue of impeachment a recent UPI survey indicated that of the 402 congressmen surveyed 55 favor impeachment...

...Background The proponents of Proposition One felt that government had grown too large and that traditional efforts and mechanisms to halt that growth have proved hopeless...

...Which many voters undoubtedly did...

...and --Beginning in 1974, an across-the-board cut of 7 ~ percent in state personal income taxes, with low income families (incomes less than $8,000) exempted from tax altogether...