EDITORIAL
THE MESSAGE FROM CALIFORNIA The reaction to the passage two months ago by a two-to-one margin of California's Proposition 13--limiting property taxes to one percent of the property's 1975-76...
...This means, in a happy coincidence of Christian principles and democratic theory, that everyone, through the government, assumes some responsibility for the welfare of everyone else...
...THE MESSAGE FROM CALIFORNIA The reaction to the passage two months ago by a two-to-one margin of California's Proposition 13--limiting property taxes to one percent of the property's 1975-76 assessed value, holding assessment inereases to two percent a year, and restricting the legislature's ability to increase other taxes----should give the nation several things to worry about...
...But, worst of all, the broad-based support for Proposition 13 raises the fundamental social-moral question about the function of taxation in a democratic society...
...The American system since the Progressive Era and the New Deal has used taxation to help fulfill the promises of the American dream of equal opportunity for all citizens...
...First we must acknowledge that some Californians voted for Proposition 13 with a valid complaint...
...The only proper response to this attitude, which Senator George McGovern has correctly called "a degrading hedonism," is a strong moral, not pious, political leadership that confronts the real injustices in both the tax system and the economy...
...Resentment susceptible, at different times, to manipulaCommonweal: 483 tion by demagogues of every stripe: Richard Nixon's "law and order," George Wallaee's "send them a message," Howard Jarvis's vulgar appeals to public distrust of bureaucrats, and even Governor Jerry Brown's fuzzy, small-is-beautiful, lower-your-expectations attacks on big government that inadvertently helped set the atmosphere for the Proposition he first opposed then appeared to accept...
...Meanwhile, what was sold to the voters as tax relief for the little-man homeowner was actually a boon to big-business ,property owners, many of whom live outside the state, a cloak for the racism of those who thought they were voting against welfare loafers, and a blow to the weakest members of the community--old people, the disabled, those who need free health-care clinics, drug-abuse programs, free museums and libraries...
...As Michael Harrington has suggested (The New York Times, June 15, 1978), one solution would be to abolish all taxes except a radically reformed federal income tax with the federal government redistributing funds according to need...
...Finally, in some strange way, the vote may have been a symbolic rejection of the country's leadership...
...The most frightening "message" from California is that, through the opportunism of business and political leaders, the deepest principles of democratic equality may be sacrificed while, just when we are strugglin~g for some understanding of poverty both at home and in the Third World, the attention of America is focused on the swimming pool in some middle-class Californian's backyard...
...The state has an unusually high proportion of homeowners and taxes on houses have risen spectacularly in the last few years...
...Middle-income families have been paying property taxes of between $2000 and $3000 a year...
...Resentment by the dominant, relatively-well-off majority who feel bewildered and shortchanged by state and federal programs that have modestly redistributed resources and services to the disadvantaged over the past 15 years...
...But this kind of tax reform can emerge only from shared vision of what the good life is and who is meant to live it...
...4 August 1978:484...
...Nevertheless, the consequences of the vote for the national welfare are bad...
...What has been interpreted as a "taxpayers' revolt," "sending a message" to every politician in the country, seems also to be, on another level, a product of one of the populace's lower emotions--the politics of resentment...
...Also, scare tactics by the Proposition's opponents may have backfired and driven angry voters into the Proposition's camp...
...For example, a three-bedroom house assessed at $44,000 in 1972 was assessed at $91,000 in 1977...
...The tax revolt, in its gut-level expression, is a throwback to the most primitive nineteenth century individualism...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 15
