The story of the great American tax revolt

HOWARD JARVIS

with ROBERT PACK

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Times Books edition / October 1979

Berkley edition / July 1980

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Copyright © 1979 by Howard Jarvis.

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Howard Jarvis, 76, a retired home-appliance manufacturer, is an unlikely prophet. Yet in 1978, after 16 years of trying, he caught the crest of a national wave of discontent and succeeded spectacularly in selling his tax-slashing ideas...On Election Day, voters by 2 to 1 approved Proposition 13, making it one of the most important political and sociological events of the year, and transforming Jarvis into a national symbol of middle-class Americans' mounting anger with expensive government programs that yield too few benefits, big budget deficits and intrusive government regulations.

—TIME, January 1, 1979,

in naming Howard Jarvis one of

four runners-up for Man of the Year

When I was a youngster back in Utah, I used to fish. The only way to catch a fish was to put the worm on your hook, throw it in the water, and leave it there until a fish came along and took it. If you took the worm out of the water, you weren't going to get a bite. We didn't know it at the time we started this tax movement in 1962, but we were going to have to leave our worm in the water for fifteen years before we would get a bite. but when we got it, it was a big one. If somebody wants to call that timing, it's all right with me, but I don't think that's what it was at all. We didn't have some kind of omniscient genius that told us when the time would be right for 13. It was guts and persistence that did it: nothing less and nothing more.

Our first tax meeting in 1962 was held at the none of a guy who lived on Los Feliz boulevard in Los Angeles, not far from where I live on North Crescent Heights Boulevard. There's a little story in the name of that street where we met for the first time. The English translation of Los Feliz is "The Happy Ones." Paul Gann—whom I didn`t meet until many years later—lives in Carmichael, outside of Sacramento. Believe it or not, Gann lives on Los Feliz Way!

This was just a little meeting of about twenty ordinary people who were concerned about how fast property taxes were going up. They wanted to try to do something about it. There were no big wheels there. (Mike Rubino, one member, later became a city councilman in Alhambra.) Many people there were in their late fifties and sixties, just like me, and they were worried about something that has since become a lot more common: Elderly people on fixed incomes were being forced to give up the homes where they had lived for many years because they couldn't make the property-tax payments.

Up until then, I had always been on the political end of things. I knew something about taxes, but I had never had a chance to specialize in them. The people at this meeting asked me to write their bylaws, which I did. Then they wanted me to be their chairman. Originally they had wanted Mike Rubino to be chairman, but he had founded a homeowners' group in the an Gabriel Valley and was too involved in other things, so they asked me. I said I would do it just long enough to help them get on their feet.

The more I got my nose into taxes, the more it interested me. And the first thing you know, it was a full-time deal. I'm not a guy to sit around on my butt. It was either go or don't go, and I decided to go.

There were two people form that original group in addition to me who stayed in there from then all the way until now, through all the attempts and failures, through Proposition 13 and everything. The other two were Leona Magidson, our secretary-treasurer, and Jimmy Christo, our president, who deserves much of the credit. Leona's house on West Fifth Street in West Los Angeles has been our headquarters over the years. That's where everything got done, where hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail were sent out from, where we made our calls from, where we received our mail. And many nights when I would be on Ray Briems or other talk shows from midnight until dawn, I would give out her phone number, and people would be calling her all night. Then she would spend all day addressing envelopes, stamping them, and stuffing them and sealing them. Leona has really been at the center of our operation.

This is how Leona remembers those early days: "My husband had just died and about the same time my property taxes went up $500 in one year—$500 in one year! And this was fifteen years ago, when that was even more money than it is now.

"I was upset about that huge increase, so I went to my first tax meeting. I didn`t know anything about politics; I'd been a housewife and mother all my life. The most I had ever done was go to PTA meetings.

"When I first met Howard at my first meeting, the thing that came to my mind was: `God, he's smart.' I didn't know anybody like that. He seemed to know everything about taxes, although we all learned a lot more as we went along.

"All of a sudden, we had a leader. Howard knew what to say and how to say it and when to say it. He always knew what he was talking about.

"Howard Jarvis is the reason I stayed with it all these years. I just believed in him. I felt that any man who could do what he was doing for noting, I could believe in. He was the first human being I had come across politically whom I thought cared.

"How do I feel now that we've won?—I smile, because Howard has proven to me that if you stick with something long enough and you know you're right, you will succeed."

After we had gotten on our feet, the other people in the group asked me to stay on as permanent chairman. I'll take credit for this much: I made everybody take sort of a blood oath that we would never quit until we had won. I said to them, "If you want me to be the chairman of this organization, I want to tell you something: I'm not a quitter. If I come in here, we're never going to quit. If you have any idea that you're ever going to walk away, say so now. But don't vote for me unless you intend to keep at this until we win."

It was awfully hard to get people to stay together on a job like this one which took such a long time. People don't understand that it took almost two hundred years for the government to plant this tax yoke on our necks. People were impatient. They thought it could be fixed in twenty minutes. Lots of people thought that. I never thought it would be a short-term thing, but I didn't think it would take fifteen years. I thought we could accomplish something in maybe five years.

We decided on a set of principles to begin with. We still believe in the same principles, and everything we've ever done has been directed toward them.

First: property taxes in California should be fair and should be applied to all the property in California that should be taxed. We're not talking about church buildings or private schools furnishing a service that would otherwise have to be paid for by the state. Health facilities are in the same category. Nor do we think the public buildings and schools should be on the tax rolls; all you're doing is taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another.

The property owners built all the schools. They built the whole educational system. They have to pay off all the bonds because a bond issue is a first mortgage on their houses. People were getting first mortgages on their homes that they didn't know were there because the politicians passed bond issue after bond issue after bond issue, far beyond any degree of common sense in operating government. The public never approved any bond issue that I know of—unless you want to say that when we have a 30% vote and 70% stay home and 15.1% vote yes and 14.9% vote no, that that constitutes a majority to impose a forty or fifty-year mortgage on anybody who owns residential or business property in that district.

No, I don't believe that the people vote for these things. A great many people are too lazy to vote, too affable, too trusting in government. They say, "The government won't do this to us." Well, they found out a darned sight different.

In California thousands of acres are off the tax rolls because they are owned on the face by something like 64,00 tax-exempt corporations, and 18,000 charitable trusts. It's an unfair system. A pays taxes, but B doesn`t pay on the same type of property. Much of this property belongs to organizations that are listed as religions, but they're not really religions. They're just a fake to get a tax break. It's noting less and nothing more than revenue racketeering.* There are also a great many corporations retaining a tax-exempt status in California that have become multi-billion dollar, multi-layer businesses, but they never pay any tax at all. It has been a swindle for years and years.

*This statement was made three months before the People's Temple massacre in Jonestown, Guyana.

So we wanted taxes to be fair.

Second: we wanted taxes to be equal for everybody. Of course, there's no way to create equality in life, or in taxes, or in death, or in anything else. But we wanted to do our best. We felt that if two people had houses just alike, like tract houses, and the owner on the right side of the street paid $3,000 a year in taxes and the owner on the left side of the street paid $1,000 a year in taxes, they weren't being treated equally. If someone on one side of the street sold his house, all the other houses on that side went up in assessed valuation and had to pay higher property taxes, but the people across the street didn't have their taxes go up. Or, the assessor would come in and re-assess—which means raise—the houses on one side of the street one year, but he wouldn't hit the people on the other side until one, two, or three years later. We didn't think that was right.

Each year they would assess only one-fifth of the properties in each county, which meant that taxes for 20% of the property owners would go up, while taxes for the other 80% would generally remain the same. As far as we were concerned, that meant the county assessors were constantly violating the equal-protection clause of the state and federal constitutions. Nobody, but us said anything, nobody did anything, and as he value of California real estate rose the situation got progressively worse.

We felt the solution was to take one year as an arbitrary base year and then say that all property—except what was voluntarily re-assessed because it was sold—could be increased only an equal amount in assessed valuation each year. We decided that fair annual increase would be 2%, which is what we tried to get over those fifteen years and what we finally got in Proposition 13. (In Proposition 13 we used 1975-76 as the base year, because our lawyers said we had to have a base year before we started the campaign. And 1975 and 1976 were the highest years in the state`s history for assessed valuations—until 1977 and 1978 came along. We did this on sound legal advice.)

Third, and the most important thing in any American tax system: we were determined that the tax system be within the ability of the people who were taxed to pay it. In California some three or four million elderly people who years ago had bought and paid for their homes—the only asset they had—were being forced out because they couldn't pay their taxes.

We also found that the middle-class guy with a wife and two kids who takes home $1,000 a month had to pay $65,000 for a house. His taxes, insurance, and upkeep are already more than he makes. So he can`t buy the house. And when he can't buy it, nobody builds it. Then we have unemployment.

And we had in mind the young people who, because of the incredible increases in property values and taxes during the years we were trying to get taxes reduced, could not afford to buy a home. For all intents and purposes, the enormous increases in property taxes, along with the need for a down payment and the credit checking and all, priced the young couples out of the market.

All of these factors added together raised the very serious point which the politicians weren't smart enough to recognize: More and more of the residential property was in the hands of people in their fifties and older. Most of these people's incomes are going down. a great many of them are retiring on incomes of $307 a month Social Security. Others who were executives are retiring. Instead of making $35,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 a year, they're on pensions of $9.000 or $15,000 or $20,000.

So the residential-property tax base was contracting rapidly. Taxes were going up, but the incomes of many of the owners were going down. These people couldn't possibly pay more taxes.

I hope that Proposition 13 will signal the entire country so that the politicians will wake up and see what's happening. If they don't, one of these days they're going to find out that the best residential- property tax base is gone. And then we'll have a catastrophe. But politicians never think about things like this until three months after the catastrophe occurs. Then it will be too late. If too many people don't have enough money to pay their taxes, the cities and counties will all be out of money overnight—unless they foreclose on most of the property, and that won't produce very much revenue for the state for very long. If the state were to foreclose, it would take all these people out of the tax base altogether, which would be a disaster. Of course, the state or the federal government could confiscate everyone's money. They could do that anytime. But that would destroy the country, the same as if they confiscated all the property through taxes.

An oppressive legislature could drive the people to refuse to pay their taxes and to revolt with guns. We didn't want that, so we were trying to create a revolution with fountain pens, rather than with rifles, clubs, or a confrontation between the people and the government.

We tried originally to be a tax leader for the state of California, to encourage the reduction of taxes—particularly property taxes. We wanted to be a source of information for other tax organizations from various parts of California. Of course, if an organization from Santa Ana joined us, we did not go to Santa Ana and tell them what they should do—unless they had a problem and asked our advice. Then, and only then, would we actually go in there. Otherwise, we just acted as a clearinghouse of information for them and for all the other tax groups in California.

We had two kinds of memberships: $5 a year for individuals and $25 a year for organizations. even if they had 700 or 800 members, they still paid only $25 a year. We were not in business to make money out of this. We were in business to do something about high taxes, Period. I never got a nickel, Leona never got a nickel, Christo never got a nickel; nor did any other officer or director. Neither did anyone else who was associated with us. I have always felt that if somebody sent us $25 to fight taxes, they were entitled to have their $25 spent on fighting taxes, not on ripoffs for the people in the organization.

Not only did I never receive a nickel for my work, I spent about $100,000 out of my own pocket over the fifteen years. I wore out two cars driving around the state and spent thousands of dollars on motels and meals while I was traveling around and leading the drive to lower taxes. And I bought typewriters, a press to print news releases on, stamps—you name it. My wife Estelle, the loveliest lady I know, whom I met in Los Angeles in the early 1069s and married in 1965, used to say to me during the lonely years when I was working on tax reduction and most people were either ignoring me or laughing at me, "Why don't you spend our money on us? You're going out there and working yourself to death and spending our money—and most people don't appreciate it. If anything happened to you they'd walk away, just like flies from a carcass." But Estelle worked as hard as anyone, and she never meant it when she said we should quit. And when Proposition 13 came along, she organized a crew of women to gather signatures. She would pick them up in her car every day, make their lunch, and take them to a supermarket where they stood outside and got people to sign our petitions. Her crew turned in about a thousand signatures a day from September to November 1977.

I think people in most political campaigns squander 90% of their money. They throw it up in the air and hope to God it comes down in the right place. They don't know what they're doing. I've always thought the best name for politics is "organized chaos." But we watched every cent we spent. We saved our money, so we could keep trying over and over again. To give just one example: when we finally qualified for the ballot in 1977, we spent only $28,500 to get 1.5 million signatures. That is phenomenally low for an initiative campaign.

The campaign against taxes literally started with a bang for me. I was giving one of my first speeches at a high school gymnasium in San Jose when a heavy pole that held up the curtain fell down and hit my right shoulder. It broke all the bones and tore all the cartilage in my shoulder. It hurt like hell, and I was in a cast for about eight weeks. My shoulder never healed entirely. That didn't help my golf game.

From the earliest days I started writing arguments against tax increase proposals that were on the ballot. These arguments were carried in the voting pamphlet over my signature. The politicians in California have made it very difficult for an ordinary citizen to write a ballot argument. The law says a public official has the first priority to write the argument. The school board official who puts a bond issue on the ballot has the first chance to write the ballot argument against it. Naturally, he's not going to write a very strong argument against it.

The second priority for writing a ballot argument goes to a properly organized group. We didn't qualify under that provision in the first few years because we were a very loose-knit organization.

Last of all comes the citizen. When the politicians used to try to stop me, I would say, "If you do, I will file a writ in court tomorrow asking that the court order that I be allowed to write an argument. Here is the writ, all made out." Usually that would cause them to back down and let me write the argument. Nine times out of ten, if they had gone to court, they would have won. But they didn't have the brains to know it or the guts to do it. For the last ten or twelve years, I haven't had any trouble getting one of my ballot arguments accepted. I've had my name on several dozen ballot arguments, and almost all of them have resulted in the defeat of some type of tax increase.

We had meetings once a month at Leona's house on West Fifth Street in Los Angeles, starting in 1962. And we still meet often. In 1965 we decided to incorporate as the United Organizations of Taxpayers. We had tax organizations all over the state and some from outside the state affiliate with us. At one time we had a peak membership of about 120,000, but other times it would be down to 50,000 as people got discouraged and quit the tax movement.

By 1965 I was starting to be recognized as the number-one leader in the tax movement. An article in the Los Angeles Times on June 7, 1970, stated: "Jarvis in the past five years has become the chief spokesman for a large group of disgruntled California property owners who are convinced, simply, that they pay too much of the cost of government."

That same story said that my "name has become well known in the past five years before legislative committees, boards of supervisors, city councils and school boards all over California." On dozens of occasions I testified before these committees, even thought I knew most of the members weren't paying any attention to me. But I knew that anytime my remarks got reported in the press, it would give a little publicity to our cause.

I used to testify every year at the budget hearing of the Los Angeles board of Supervisors. The Los Angeles county budget is a big, thick book. I wasn't getting $50,000 a year from the city or the county to study the budget; I wasn`t getting any money at all. Of course, it was my money they were talking about spending. Most of the elected officials don't bother to read the budget themselves. They have the department heads read each section, and they take their worked for what's in it.

Each year I would go down there and pick out one or two items in the budget that I thought had too much fat. But the political operation is so rotten and has been for so long that the supervisors and the school boards don't want any testimony form the public on the budget. the law requires them to hold public hearings, but they don't want anybody to testify on the budget. They especially don't want anybody knowledgeable to testify because they never read the budget. And they don't want to sit up there and look like fools. So when I testified, they walked around and talked to each other, or they accepted phone calls. Then the chairman would say, "Your five minutes are up." The last time I was before one of those committees I said, "Well, gentlemen, budget time is here again. You've seen me here many times, much to your discomfort. Today you're not going to have to listen to me for very long (that got their attention), because all I want to day is that I think your budget hearings are just like a striptease dancer in a massage parlor. That's what the budget hearings amount to. They're a fake and a fraud, and you know it, and I know it, so good day, gentlemen." They gave a few sheepish smiles.

One year I was invited to testify before the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee, which holds the hearings on the state budget. I was allotted forty-five minutes, so I worked my head off to prepare myself. I went up to Sacramento and the whole committee was there, sitting up on these high chairs so that you were sitting down there, like a mole. I gave my testimony, and when I got through, I said I'd be very glad to answer any questions. There wasn't a sound. Not a single one of them had a question for me. I said, "Well gentlemen, I'm not so presumptuous as to think you all agree with everything I said. There ought to be some questions." There was a guy by the name of Vincent Thomas, a Democrat from San Pedro, sitting way down on the end. He'd been in the Assembly for about thirty years—since 1941. He said. "I'll tell you, Mr. Jarvis, if you want to know the truth about it. There isn't anybody on this committee who knows anything about taxes. So how are they going to ask you a question?" Just imagine. this was the committee that is responsible for studying every line in the budget. And I believe what Thomas said. I absolutely believe it.

Because I was so active in the tax movement, I became interested in the fact that a woman named Dorothy Healey was running for Los Angeles County Tax Assessor 1966. The reason for my interest was that Dorothy Healey was one of the best known Communists in the United States. She had been arrested in 1951 on charges of violating the Smith Act, and had been indicted that same year for conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. She was convicted on the Smith Act charge and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, but the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted her a new trial. Then the government dismissed the case against her. A 1959 report by the House Un-American Activities Committee described her as "chairman of the Communist Party's new Southern California District" and listed her occupation as "professional Communist."

The county assessor has access to aircraft companies and their top-secret records for purposes of assessing their property, and there are a number of large aircraft companies in Los Angeles County. It worried me very much that a well-known, admitted member of the Communist Party would have access to records like those. I didn't think Communists should be allowed to hold office for the same reason that I don't think you should give Al Capone the key to your safe-deposit box. I thought they were a dirty bunch of lousy traitors and thieves who would steal everything they could and would work against the United States, and I haven't changed my mind. They were enemies of the United States, and therefore they were my enemies.

So I filed suit in Superior Court to keep Dorothy Healey off the ballot, or at least to force her to list herself on the ballot as "Communist Party Organizer" instead of just as "organizer", which was the way she had it. I was handling my own case. She was represented by a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union. The judge who was presiding over the case ruled in her favor every chance he got. Finally I made a few remarks, and he threatened to hold me in contempt of court. The truth is, I did have contempt for his court, but he would have had a hell of a time proving it. He and I got in a big row, and I persuaded the judge in charge to take this judge off the case. I got another judge, who was a hell of a lot worse. And he ruled in favor of Dorothy Healey. That case got an awful lot of publicity. In any event, Mrs. Healey was allowed to remain on the ballot, and she got 86,149 votes. Phil Watson got reelected with 1,131,160.

Every year the members of the legislature promised the public they were going to do something about taxes next year. And when next year—the off-election year—came, the politicians did do something about taxes. They raised them.

There are two factors that determine how much property tax people pay in California: the assessed evaluation of the property is multiplied by the tax rate that is set by the city councils, the county boards of supervisors, the school districts, the water districts, the hospital districts, and the other tax jurisdictions. The assessed valuation is supposed to be equal to 25% of the market value of the property. The politicians and the bureaucrats had a little game they like to play with the poor boobs who paid the taxes: raise the appraised value one year, raise the tax rate the next. There was always the same loser in this game: the taxpayer. Then the politicians came up with a plan to give tax money back to the people who didn't pay. It was called the circuit-breaker formula. Fancy name for a swindle, isn't it?

Finally, in 1968 we got to the point where we thought we were ready to circulate petitions to get a property-tax initiative on the ballot. California had become the tenth state in the country to permit initiative and referendum, on October 10. 1911. The right of initiative and referendum originated in California with Hiram Johnson, who was governor from 1911 to 1917. He was probably the most progressive governor the state ever had. In fact, he ran for reelection in 1914 as a member of the Progressive Party, after he was originally elected as a Republican in 1910. Hiram Johnson had found out that the state legislature was pretty much a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Southern Pacific and the other railroads, which at the time had a monopoly on the state of California. They ran the state—not the people or the elected officials. The railroads bought all the candidates; they got legislation that they wanted passed and got legislation that they didn't want defeated. So Governor Johnson had succeeded in getting written into the state constitution the right of the people to petition—a legal right, not a fictitious right. Now if the people of California didn't like what the politicians are doing, they can write a law that they want enacted, and they can place it on the ballot.

That is not to say that getting an initiative on the ballot and getting it approved is an easy process. Between 1960 and 1978, there were 148 initiatives proposed in the state, but only 26 got on the ballot and only 7 were approved by a majority of the voters. So only about 5% of the initiatives that started out actually became law.

Nevertheless, if we did not have the right to petition in California, the shot that was heard around the world on June 6, 1978, never would have happened. And the people of California would still be mucked under the heels of irresponsible, unaccountable politicians. But today the shoe is on the other foot. The worm has turned.

The people in the United States—or at least some of the states*—have two basic rights, the right to vote and the right to legally petition. I think the right to petition is more important than the right to vote because the right to petition means that people can group together to stand up to the politicians and the bureaucrats. But when you vote, you go in there in solitary and vote in the booth, and that's it. I think every state and the federal government should provide the right to petition, the legislatures are making tremendous efforts to make it more difficult.

*At present, 25 states permit referenda, 22 allow initiatives, and 14 permit the recall of state officers. The right of initiative and referendum is not included in the U.S. Constitution, although there is a move to adopt an amendment granting that right.

They say that it`s a negation of representative government. That would be true if the politicians represented us. But they don`t. What we have is the facade of a representative government. Most of the legislators, state and federal, have special vested voting blocs that they pass legislation for and appropriate money for, for the simple purpose of getting themselves reelected. That's true, regardless of party. In California, for instance, 117 out of 120 state legislators received major campaign contributions from public employee unions. As far as I'm concerned, that is a cancer on free government. If the public employee unions can elect their bosses to office, the general public is screwed, blewed, and tattooed.

Don't misunderstand me; the politicians don't mind petitions, as long as they have no legal effect. As long as they mean as much as writing a letter to Santa Claus. They don't read the mail, anyway. They don't want the people to have the legal authority to take control of their government. Government controls people by putting up barriers that reduce the people's right to participate in government, so legislators generally don't like the right to petition. It frightens them, as it should, and they fight it every step of the way. As long as the people don`t have the right to petition, the politicians can sit up on their thrones and say, "We don't give a damn what the people say." They con do that because they know the people have no way of fighting back.

It's only natural that the legislature resents the initiative process, because it limits their function. It takes some of the power out of their hands. But we believe that we have a government of the people, not of elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats. They are supposed to do what the people want, not the other way around

Over the years one of the main ploys by our politicians has been to make government so complicated that people can't understand it. What the people can`t understand, they`re afraid of and walk away from. That leaves the politicians with a free hand.

The politicians certainly wanted to make the initiative process as complicated as possible in order to discourage people from trying to place initiatives on the ballot. When we first started circulating petitions, there was a requirement that in addition to the name and address of each person who signed, the petition had to have the number of the precinct they lived in. Now, how many people know their precinct number? Hardly anyone, including me. That meant that after our volunteers collected signatures, someone had to sit down with a list of precincts and fill them in. And if the precinct number was wrong, whether it was because the volunteers had put a signer in the wrong precinct or because they just made a mistake when they copied the precinct number onto the petition, the signature would be disqualified. That made it mighty difficult. I finally got the precinct requirement repealed.

On top of that, it was true back in 1968—and it still is today—that you had to obtain the signatures of 8% as many voters as the total vote for governor in the last election. In the last few elections, the turnout has generally been 6 million votes or so, which means getting about 500,000 valid signatures in order to qualify for the ballot. That's a hell of a lot of signatures. I think it's too many. I don't think you should have to get more than 5% , which would be about 300,000 valid signatures, in order to put a measure on the ballot so the people can simply vote yes or no. But I haven't been able to get that changed. Yet.

Our first petition had only 100,000 signatures or so. We didn't even come close to qualifying. You have to figure that about one-third of the signatures you gather will be invalidated for one reason or another, so you have to collect half again as many signatures as you really need to qualify. Using that rule of thumb, if you need 500,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot, you have to gather 750,000 to be sure you will wind up with enough valid ones.

After our first attempt failed, we supported a 19689 initiative that Phil Watson, the Los Angeles County tax Assessor, succeeded in qualifying for the ballot that year. The 1968 Watson initiative, which was Proposition 9 on the ballot in November, called for property taxes to be limited 1% of full market value: the same as what we tried to qualify and pass for ten years and what we ultimately used in Proposition 13.

We arrived at that 1% figure because we thought that property-related services were all that property should have to pay for. Property-related services include police, fire, garbage, streets, lights, and sewers. The 1% limit would provide about one-third more than enough money to pay for those services. We felt that property owners should not be made the goat for school, food stamps, welfare, libraries, and all the rest. Those programs should be paid for by everybody, not just by property owners.

The politicians used scare tactics. They said that Watson's Proposition 9 would cause huge cuts in vital services, the same tactic they used successfully against another Watson initiative in 1972, an initiative by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1973 and our attempts to qualify other initiatives for the ballot. In 1968 the politicians also used a second ploy that they came up with again to attack Proposition 13 in 1978. They put another measure on the ballot that offered a much smaller reduction in taxes; only $90 for the owner of a home worth $22,500.

Those politicians' tactics worked in 1968. We did all we could to help pass Proposition 9, but it received only 2,146,000 yes votes (32%) to 4,570,097 no votes (68%). And the measly measure the politicians put on the ballot passed. Big deal!

The following year I led the campaign against Propositions A, B, and C on the Los Angeles ballot. We managed to defeat all three measures, which would have cost the taxpayers $600 million if they had passed. then in March 1970, we defeated a school tax override in Los Angeles that would have cost the taxpayers $358 million. On that campaign we spent the most we ever had during a single campaign up until then: $10,800. But we started that campaign with $500 in the bank, and we finished it with $1,000. so not only were the United Organizations of Taxpayers solvent to the tune of a few hundred dollars, we took on the politicians and defeated $1 billion worth of tax increases in 1969 and 1970. The politicians had no need for all that money, and we proved it to the taxpayers.

Later on that same year, 1970, after I'd been involved in tax reduction for eight years, some of Reagan's friends urged me to run for the State Board of Equalization. I didn't particularly want the job. But it is important because the five members of the board have the responsibility of overseeing all the tax assessments and all the tax collections in the state.

At that time, Richard Nevins, a Democrat, was the representative on the board of equalization from our district, which included Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, Imperial, San Beranardino, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. That area was the stronghold of the United Organizations of Taxpayers.

In the primary in June, Nevins got 1 million votes, I got 400,000 the third highest candidate got 150,000 votes, and five others split another 400,000 votes among them. That meant that Nevins had I had to have a runoff in November.

I was listed on the ballot as a "tax reduction expert", and my campaign really got rolling. for a while, I was afraid I was going to win. I didn't want the job at all. I felt and still feel that being I office would hamstring me and keep me from speaking out against taxes the way I want to. I wound up spending like $8,000 on that campaign, and I got 1.5 million votes. But Nevins got 2 million, which was fine with me. After I was sure I had lost, Estelle and I had a little celebration. And that was my last fling in Republican politics; after that election, I dropped out.

I agreed to run for that office only so that I could have a forum to campaign for tax reduction and for Reagan, who was up for his second term. I actually used my campaign to campaign for Reagan all over the state. I would spend about six minutes talking about tax reduction and about two minutes talking about Reagan. I never campaigned for myself at all.

While I was campaigning in Santa Barbara that year I discovered the most fantastic political gimmick. I had given my speech about tax reduction and Reagan, and then I sat down. A guy in the crowd got up and said. "Mr. Jarvis, aren't you on the ballot?"

I said, "Yes, I am."

He said, "Well, you didn't say anything about it."

I answered, "The reason I didn't mention it is because I'm interested in number one in taxes and number two in Reagan. If nobody wants to vote for me for this office, they can look on the ballot and find my name, but I'm not here to ask for any votes for myself."

The entire audience stood up and cheered.

Well, from then on, I took a guy with me, and he'd to sit in the back of the hall. I'd make the same speech as the one in Santa Barbara. Then the guy I had brought with me would get up and ask the question the guy in Santa Barbara had asked me. He was a nondescript guy from Los Angeles. Anybody can go to a political meeting, you know. I paid him a few bucks and coached him a little on how to do it. It helped make my speeches more effective.

During that campaign for the board of equalization, the news media and the television stations made a big thing about how all the candidates ought to publish their financial statements. I thought it was foolish, but I published mine anyway. I even printed it on my brochures. My assets were my home in Los Angeles, which was then worth $30,000, some land in Wyoming worth $21,000, trust deeds (loans I had made that were secured by real estate)—valued at $117,250 and $54,000 in other liquid assets, such as bank accounts. I had no liabilities, so my net worth was $222,250; not a huge amount, but ten years ago, before today's ruinous inflation, the equivalent of about $500,000 today.

None of the other candidates issued their financial statements—and the hypocritical press never mentioned it. I even took particular pains to mail my financial statement and a letter to the news media explaining that I was the only candidate who had made my financial statement public. And I never got one worked out of any newspaper or radio or television station. They were just hoodwinking the public, as usual.

In our fight against taxation, we became involved against any program in the state of California that would raise taxes on property or anything else. For example, in March 1971, I filed suit against the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to prevent them from paying $100,000 to underwrite the cost of a visit to Los Angeles by the New York City Opera the previous year. I saw no reason why the taxpayers should have to bear the burden of something like that, when maybe one-tenth of one percent of the taxpayers were interested opera. But the courts didn't see it that way. My suit was dismissed on the ground that I hadn't shown that the board of supervisors didn't have the power to contribute the $100,000. Still, I was in there fighting.

In May 1971 we launched our second attempt to get a property-tax initiative on the ballot. this one was aimed at limiting taxes to 1% of the market value of the property, the same as Proposition 13 and the others we tried. There were two other important provisions in the initiative:

—It would have prohibited special assessments on real property. the politicians were putting so many special levies on the taxpayers that the bonded indebtedness of property was getting to be more than the property was worth. That was potentially catastrophic.

—It provided that all real property would be subject to taxes unless the two houses of the legislature voted for exemptions for particular categories. The vote for exemptions would have had to be by a two-thirds majority of each house. That part of the initiative reflected our growing concern about all the property belonging to phony churches and charitable institutions that was being exempted from taxes, which put a bigger burden on the homeowners.

We had no intention of denying property tax-exemption to legitimate churches, private schools, and charities. We felt confident that the legislature would grant exemptions to them, but the outfits that had no right to an exemption wouldn't be able to get a two-thirds vote in the legislature.

However, the Catholic church didn't understand that we were not trying to eliminate their tax exemption. We had until January 3, 1972 to come up with 520,806 valid signatures. Right around Christmas, just as we were coming down the home stretch, the Catholic church put out a bulletin which called our initiative "nefarious" and said it "totally disregards the benefits derived by the community from religious and private educational programs and their great contributions to the welfare of all." They didn't get our message at all, which I suppose was partly our fault.

During the campaign for that initiative I said in my speeches essentially the same thing I said later:

The government has never been helpless in getting revenue. What we are trying to do is have them get it from the most reasonable source.

In Los Angeles County alone, 400,000 people did not pay their property tax this year because they didn't have the money. They run the risk of being forced out of their homes, which I personally believe is un-American, indecent, and criminal. There is nothing more sacred than the place where a man lives.

We must have a new system—one which gets the property that ought to pay taxes back on the tax rolls.

I don't think there`s any one perfect tax law, but I think generally speaking that our amendment will help about 90% of the people in California.

Many people didn't believe us when we forecast in our literature that within the next two to three years property taxes can be expected triple, and residential foreclosures are expected to reach levels of from 300,000 to 450,000 per year in California.

This will be inevitable without realistic property-tax relief. And if the trends of welfare and school expenditures and other ill-conceived and maladministered public programs are permitted to expand under union and giveaway political pressures, as they have been at such an accelerating pace these last few year, we are headed for disaster.

It is obvious that our legislature is not capable of coming up with an intelligent property-tax-reduction bill.

One of the interesting things about that campaign was that Assemblyman Joseph Gonsalves—a Democrat who sponsored an attempt to have the legislature put a property-tax-relief measure on the ballot—was one of the leaders of the campaign against our initiative. In other words, if the politicians write a sham amendment, it's good law; but if the people write one that offers real tax relief, it's not good.

We fell about 100,000 signatures short of the number we needed to qualify for the ballot. At least that's what the politicians said. Among those politicians was Jerry Brown, who was then Secretary of State and was responsible for certifying our petitions.

Actually, the politicians had to bend the law to keep us off the ballot that time. I don't know if they did it on purpose or through sheer incompetence. We filed more than 650,000 signatures before the deadline, but then more than 200,000 of them were arbitrarily discarded by temporary help; boobs who were hired off the streets by county registrars' offices throughout the state. More than 100,000 signatures were thrown out in Los Angeles County alone, and about three-quarters of them should have been allowed. But these temporary employees who went through the petitions didn't know what they were doing. And after they refused to accept a lot of valid signatures, Brown wouldn't extend our deadline and give us a chance to submit more signatures. Another thing that hurt us that year was the requirement for precinct numbers on the petitions.

Nevertheless, we made a great showing that year and came close to getting on the ballot. And we had our moments. One time we set up a table to get signatures at the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration, where people had to go to pay their taxes. A security guard threw us out. So we went to the county counsel and got authorization to have our tables there in the Hall of Administration. And that same guard who had thrown us out before signed one of our petitions!

When we fell short with our 1% initiative in 1972, we teamed up with Phil Watson. This time he was circulating petitions calling for a ceiling of 1.75%. At the time, most property owners in the cities were paying about 3.25%. That meant that a property owner was paying over $900 a year in taxes on a house assessed at $30,000. Watson's initiative would have cut that to $540; ours would have cut it to $300.

Watson learned his lesson from 1968, when one of the arguments against him was that his initiative failed to explain how the money that Proposition 9 cut would have been made up. Now he told the voters that his initiative would cut property taxes by $2 billion a year and would require increases in sales taxes, higher taxes on liquor and tobacco, and increases in some business taxes. He made it onto the ballot again. and lost again, although he did slightly better than he had in 1968. Watson's 1972 Proposition 14 received 2,700,095 yes votes (34%), and 5,213,485 no votes (66%).

The following year, Ronald Reagan placed Proposition 1 on the ballot. Proposition 1, which Milton Friedman helped write, proposed that state spending be limited to 8.3% of personal income in the state, and that spending would then be required to decrease by 0.1% a year until it reached 7%. Neil Jacoby, who later joined with Friedman to support Proposition 13, campaigned against Proposition 1.

I was for Proposition 1; but, unfortunately, it had some very serious defects. It contained about 5,700 words, and you had to be a genius to figure out whether a yes vote or a no vote was a vote to reduce taxes, (A yes vote on Proposition 1 would have reduced taxes.) Proposition 1 lost, but it still came a lot closer than either of the Watson initiatives. The vote was 1,945,124 yes (46%), and 2,284,705 no (54%).

The outcome of the Proposition 1 election encouraged us because it did so much better than the Watson initiatives. But it was also encouraging to the politicians. They evidently felt that the defeat of three straight constitutional amendments to limit property taxes gave them carte blanche to raise the cost of state government.. State spending, which had been increasing at the rate of 3.1% per year from 1967 to 1973, climbed at the rate of 6.5% a year during the next five years—until June 6, 1978.

Jerry Brown was elected governor in November 1974. the total number of votes cast in that election was 6,248,075. Eight percent of 6,248,075 is 499,846. I'm not reciting these figures in hopes of winning a trivia contest. The magic number for us became 499,846—the number of valid signatures we needed in order to qualify a petition for the ballot.

We circulated our third petition during the first six months of 1976. this time we really came close; we got 489,348 signatures—just 10,000 less than what we needed. Watson tried again, this time with a limit of 1.5% of market value (ours was 1%). But he didn't qualify, either.

We received official notice that we had fallen short on our signature drive on August 5, 1976. On October 18, 1976, we started all over again. In order to attract publicity for that campaign, I announced in December 1976, just before the December 10 deadline for paying property taxes, that I was not going to pay my taxes. In the past I had been opposed to people's withholding their property taxes, but I finally came to the conclusion that this was the only means of bringing pressure on the legislature. As I said at the time, "The only way the people can control government is not to give the government so much of their earnings in taxes. The only way to reduce government spending is to not give the government so much money in the first place."

In California, if you refuse to pay your property taxes, the state can't do much about it for five years, except charge you a 6% penalty and interest. the tax collector stamps. "Sold to the State" on your property record, but the state can't foreclose your property until five years have passed. Anytime within those five years, you can pay your taxes, penalty, and interest, and get your record cleared. after five years, however, the state does auction off the property to satisfy the tax claim. I have until December 10, 1981, to pay the first installment for 1976-77. I fully intend to pay it instead of allowing the state to take my house, but this way I have a legal right to sue them whenever I want to. I have paid each of the two annual tax installments that have come due since the, so I skipped only one payment.

Meanwhile, I was also running for mayor of Los Angeles. A lot of stores have been written about how I was a "perennial losing candidate for office", but whoever writes those stories just doesn't understand that I didn't expect to be elected mayor, or to the U.S. Senate, or to any other office. All I was doing was using my campaign as a platform for tax reduction.

I'm not mayor of Los Angeles, so I guess that means I lost again. But I made a pretty damn good showing. Tom Bradley, the incumbent, was reelected with 287,927 votes. or 59%; Alan Robbins, a conservative Democratic member of the State Senate who, like Bradley, was very well known, was second with 136,180 votes, or 28%; and I finished third with 47,665 votes, or 10%. So Bradley got six times as many votes as I did, but Bradley outspent me by about 100 to 1, and Robbins spent about ten times as much as I did.

There was one unfortunate incident in that campaign for mayor against Bradley, who is black. My campaign manager, Fred Gage, invited Louise Day Hicks, the segregationist member of the Boston City Council, to come to Los Angeles and campaign for me. However, Gage invited Mrs. Hicks without my knowledge or consent, and I took over as my own campaign manager because of that. Gage thought she would be a ten-strike and I thought having her come in would be a disaster. I didn't want to bring in an outsider and make a racial issue out of it. I called Mrs. Hicks and told her that I didn't want her to come; and that if she came anyway, I wouldn't have anything to do with her. She never came. And the truth is that Tom Bradley and I are friends to this day, and I think he's a hell of a nice guy. I think he's a marinated politician and a big spender, and I disagree with him over that. But there are quite a few other politicians I disagree with, too.

During that campaign for mayor, a congressional committee held some hearings in Los Angeles on ways to improve the postal service. I had written them some letters about the postal service, and they invited me to testify. The hearing was out near the airport. I prepared a paper on what I thought ought to be done. I told them that to begin with, the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, and if they applied that principle to the postal service, instead of shipping mail from Los Angeles to Chicago and then back to Riverside, they might be able to save a little money. I told them that people should be required to have mail-boxes out at the street, so the postman wouldn't have to walk all the way up to the door, which would save maybe 50% of their time. I also told them I had found out there was $13 million a day in theft from the post office by postal employees, and that I though they ought to have a strict clearance procedure before they hired them, like most businesses do these days. And I told them that Saturday deliveries should be eliminated because most businesses are closed and the ones that are open and the residents can wait for mail until Monday without much inconvenience.

When I got through testifying, the head of the committee told me he thought mine was the most impressive and objective testimony they had heard in hearings all over the country. He asked me if I would like to go to Washington right away and help them with their investigation. I said, "Well, I have an application in for a job here right now. I'm running for mayor."

He said, "Anytime you want to come to Washington, we'd love to have you."

I never went, but I appreciated his invitation; and I think if they took my advice, they could go a long way toward cutting down all the waste and inefficiency in the post office and every other department of government.

The election for mayor of Los Angeles took place in April 1977. Right after that was over I started making frequent appearances on George Putnam's talk show on radio station KIEV in Los Angeles. Putnam is a conservative who was looking for a way to boost his ratings. Here is how Los Angeles Magazine described what happened in its April 1978 issue?

The petitions we had been circulating while I was running for mayor, and when I first started appearing regularly on the George Putnam show, came about as close as you can come without qualifying for the ballot. We got 498,500 signatures, just 1,400 shy of what we needed.

We were so discouraged that we didn't start another petition drive until the next day.

Over the years we had been criticized severely and frequently because we were in the petition business. so was Governor Reagan, and so was Phil Watson, and so were several others, but we had never been able to work together. That campaign that just barely failed in the first part of 1977 was a good example: in addition to the United Organizations of Taxpayers, three other groups were each circulating a tax relief petition of their own. Not only did we not qualify for the ballot, none of the others even came close. But it was obvious that if we had teamed up, we would have been able to qualify one of our petitions.

People would constantly be criticizing us for this. They would say, "Why don't all of you get together? Why can`t you put all your eggs in one basket, for God's sake? Instead of being fragmented, you could give people a chance to decide on one petition."

I thought the criticism of me and the United Organizations was unjustified because I had tried several times to work out an agreement with Phil Watson. I went to see him a number of times and reach an agreement where we would both circulate the same petitions. But we had always had a very serious barrier to our agreement I was convinced—and still am—that you cannot have a tax petition that works unless you limit both the tax rate and the arbitrary power of the assessor to increase the market value. That difference kept me and Watson apart for several years. he was a tax assessor, and no tax assessor wants to limit the market value raises because, really, the market value raise becomes the major raise. In fact, in many areas, tax rates were actually going down, but taxes were increasing rapidly because of the huge paper increases in the value of property. And, of course, if a tax assessor can't reappraise property, what does that leave for him to do?

Finally, in 1972, Watson gave up the stand he had taken, and it looked like we would get together. We made an agreement and Phil was going to have his lawyers draft our petition. Then he and I were going to get together and file the petition with the State Attorney General's office, as the law requires. For some reason or other, his attorneys were unable to get this petition written. I called him and called him and called him, but he was very hard to get. Finally I reached him in Acapulco. I had to get in touch with him while he was down there because at that point we only had five days left to file the petition if we were to meet the deadline for getting on the ballot that year. Otherwise, we would have had to wait until the next year.

When I finally got Watson in Acapulco, he said, "Why don't we let it go for a year?"

I said, "We can't do that." So we filed our own petition. We didn't make the ballot, but Watson turned around and filed one of his own, qualified for the ballot, and lost with his Proposition 14.

That created a tremendous hue and cry for us to get together, but it was four more years before we finally did. When we met to write that petition, Phil Watson had gotten hold of Paul Gann up in Carmichael and invited him to participate. Gann was head of People's Advocate, a much smaller group than the United Organizations of Taxpayers. Up until then, Gann had never been in the picture.

By then, Watson had gotten into a lot of trouble in his office, which eventually wound up with him resigning as assessor. Watson, Gann, and I worked out an agreement on every point except one—who would sign the petition. the three of us had even appeared together on Hilly Rose's talk show on KFI radio in Los Angeles and stated publicly that we had reached an agreement.

Watson suggested that he and Gann sign the petition, but I said, "No soap." I wasn't going to participate in a petition drive where the United Organizations had no authority whatsoever. they could have used our name, they could have gone out and collected money; but if my name wasn't on the petition, we wouldn't have had any say in what they were doing. Finally, I said, "My stipulation is that Watson can't sign it because his office is under serious investigation and he may be indicted. The only way in the world I will agree to it is if Watson's signature isn't on it. I will sign it and I will accept Gann's signature." That was finally agreed on.

We signed all the papers. Gann said he was going back to Sacramento-Carmichael is suburb of Sacramento—and he would file the petition. I said, "Let's mail it." and he said, "No, I'll file it." I agreed and gave them my personal check for the $200 filing fee. The next day I left for Wyoming, where I fish every year with my only child, Elaine (who lives in Phoenix and in addition to being great at fishing is a former champion skeet shooter).

I'd been up in Wyoming about a week when Estelle called me from Los Angeles and said, "There`s` some hanky panky going on."

I said, "What do you mean?"

She said, "There are rumors going around that your name is not on the petition." I called the Secretary of State and found out that they had left my name off the petition. Gann's was the only name on it. I flew back to California and filed our own petition, which we had already written. So we had a horse race. And neither Gann nor I was able to qualify a petition.

I later found out that Watson had ordered Gann to take my name off the petition. Gann admitted to me that Watson had offered to raise money for him if my name wasn't on the petition. Watson was unhappy that I was on the petition and he wasn't, because he and I had had our disagreements in the past and he blamed me for keeping him off the petition.

I had a good reason for keeping him off. I couldn't afford to have one of the signers indicted in the middle of the petition drive. I had no grudge against Gann for what had happened. I felt that Watson had taken advantage of him. Gann is susceptible to being taken advantage of; he listens to the last person who talks to him.

We received word in late April or early May of 1977 that we had missed qualifying for the ballot by 1,400 signatures. As I said before, I figured we actually needed 750,00 signatures in order to make sure we had the 499,846 valid one we had to have to get on the ballot. We had always concentrated our efforts on the eight counties from Santa Barbara to San Diego, where two-thirds of the state's population lives. I figured we could get 600,000 signatures in those eight counties. We had never had the manpower to cover the fifty counties north of Santa Barbara I thought if we could find an organization that was based up north and they could get 150,00 signatures in that part of the state and we could get 600,000 in our part of the state, we could make the ballot. So, as soon as we found out that we had missed with the first 1977 petition, I called Gann.

I said, "I`ll make a deal with you. You want to go in with me on this petition? You and I will sign it. I'll write it. Your job is to get 150,000 signatures in the fifty northern counties, and ours is to get 600,000 in Southern California." He agreed, and we were in business together.

We filed our petition with the Attorney General's office. then we had to wait about sixty days for them to write a title and a summary of twelve lines or so. That takes them two months. and the petition was virtually identical to the ones we had circulated before. they could have copied the title and summary off the earlier ones, except for maybe a word here and there. Talk about efficiency in government!

On July 6, 1977, Vance W. Raye, deputy Attorney General, notified us that we could begin circulating petitions for "PROPERTY TAX LIMITATION, INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. Limits ad valorem taxes on real property to 1% of value", and so forth. We had until December 2, 1977, to file the signatures of 499,846 registered voters with the registrars of voters in the various counties. we were off and running.

It took a lot of years to get ready for this—fifteen, to be exact—but this time we were ready. We had made a lot of mistakes during those years, but we had learned from them. When we started circulating petitions, we carried them from door to door; but we soon found out it was much more efficient to have our people at shopping centers and office buildings, where they could reach large numbers of people in a relatively short time. We learned the best approach to use on someone when you want to get their signature on a petition: "Sign this—it will help lower your taxes." That usually worked.

At the start, we really had no idea how to organize the entire state. We took it for granted that things would happen, that people knew hat to do without being trained. We found out it didn't work that way. So we trained them and we organized them.

We learned to send out three press releases a week to every tax organization in the state so that there would be a coordinated effort and everybody would know what was going on. We didn't want one group saying one thing to the press and the group in the next town saying the opposite. And all of these newsletters made our people around the state feel they were a part of something, which was very important. They had a sense of identity.

There were a thousand little things. We learned what day to mail, when was the best time to hold a press conference, who you had to contact at every newspaper and every radio and television station if you wanted to get good coverage, where you could get good printing done at a reasonable price.

For instance, we learned in the early days that the best time and place to hold a press conference is right after somebody important held one, and in the same location. If someone very prominent is going to hold a press conference at 10:00 Monday morning, you go there and hold one at 10:30. That was very successful for me. For a long time, I would wait until a senator or a governor was having a press conference and then have one right after him. If there wasn't a press conference with someone big that week, I wouldn't have a press conference that week. I would wait until there was somebody If the big guy had twenty reporters, I would have five. But five was four more than we would get if we held one on our own.

We learned what kind of mail was effective. The best piece of mail we sent out in the entire sixteen years was one during the 13 campaign that told every property owner how much his tax bill was, how much he would save on 13 in one year, and how much he'd save in five years. We'd say, "You're going to save $4,000 in five years, send us twenty-five bucks." And they did.

We learned to print enough petitions so that everybody could have one to read before they signed it. We had 700,000 petitions printed with room on each one for ten people to sign it, even though it only took 500,00 to qualify.

We learned that if you have space for ten names on a petition, your petition bearers will take five petitions, but if there is room for twenty names, they'll only take one.

Most of all, we learned more about taxes and more about the people of the state of California than the politicians or anyone else knew. In fifteen years we learned 10% about taxes, which was 9% more than anyone else knew.

By July 1977, when we started circulating the petitions for what was to become Proposition 13, several things had happened. Number one: in fifteen years we educated a lot of people around the state so that they knew something about taxes. I made hundreds and hundreds of radio and television appearances and held hundreds of press conferences during those fifteen years. I used to go on the Ray Briem show on radio station KABC in Los Angeles from midnight until dawn. About 1,200 calls would come in and Ray and I would answer about 60 questions on taxes each night. Ray said I was the hottest thing on the air for him; when I was on his show, he got the most calls. I don't know if he meant that or not. But I do know that he has twenty-four phone lines and when I make my first statement on the air all twenty-four lines light up, and when I go home at five o'clock in the morning there are still those twenty-four lights. The Briem Show was the biggest thing we had going for us over the years, and Ray Briem is the most knowledgeable broadcaster about taxes on the air. And we printed stuff by the bale and shipped it allover the state. For many years I wrote a weekly column called "The People Must Know", and sent it out to 140 publications. Many newspapers would take my stuff and use it without using my name. But that was okay with me because all I wanted to do was get my message across.

Second: all the predictions that I was making came true in spades. The people found out that what I was saying around the state all those years was true. But of course, when you`re blessed with the power of foresight, some people say you're crazy. Then when your foresight comes true, some people are mad at you because they didn't think of it themselves. Along about 1972 I began to predict that we were going to have increases of 100% or more a year in the market value of property, which really controls the amount of taxes you pay. Few people believed me. And then about 1975 we started to get 100% and 200% and 300% raises in one year. all those years few believed a word I told them—most people laughed at me—and then it all came true.

The third thing: since Watergate, I suppose, the people don't believe a Goddamned word a politician says. No matter what he says, they don't believe it. And they had good reason not to believe it.

Soon after Gann and I got together and started circulating petitions, Gann told me his little organization, People's Advocate, didn't have any money. So we had to finance People's Advocate, which we did until the petitions were turned in. We voluntarily paid People's Advocate $1,000 a week during the petition drive for three reasons: I knew they didn't have a very large organization, I knew they didn't have any money, and I knew that if he was going to go around Northern California he had to have money to buy gas and food and hotel rooms and airplane tickets and whatever. A thousand dollars a week is not really a lot of money when you think of the distances he had to travel and the phone bills and the hotel bills and the traveling 50 counties for 150 days. He earned it. He got signatures in every one of those counties. To do that he had to plow through he snow to get ten signatures in Sierra County and twenty in Alpine County. We wound up with signatures from every county in the state, all 58 of them, for the first time in history. We couldn't have done that without Paul Gann. As far as I'm concerned, we had a good relationship throughout the campaign. He did exactly what he said he would, and so did I. He said he would get 150,000 signatures, and he got about 158,000. I had no way of knowing that we would get 1.2 million in Southern California. But even if I had known that, I would have joined up with Gann anyway. It was important to have signatures from every county so that it didn't appear that this was something all those crazies and Birchers who, some think, made up 100% of the population of Southern California, were trying to put over on the rest of the state.

We immediately started getting good results with the signature drive. But a lot of people were skeptical, and they certainly had a right to be. the politicians, in particular, didn't take us seriously. After all, we'd had four petitions before, and none of them had gotten on the ballot. The amendments that had made the ballot—the two by Watson and the one by Reagan—had all lost. So there was nothing to worry about this time—right?

As the deadline for filing all the signatures approached, we went all out to get all the people who had been collecting signatures to be sure to turn them in. I said in my newspaper column:

And I bought thirty days of radio time statewide and went on the air and said:

Some of the people who wanted to reduce taxes had turned to gimmicks, without my approval. One group collected signatures from a million people who favored tax relief, put them in a brown bag, and dropped them on governor brown's desk. A gal out I the valley came up with the idea of using a tea bag as a symbol, to remind everyone of the Boston Tea Party. I thought both of those ideas were strictly one-day news items. Our job was to get people to sign petitions that had legal authority; regardless of what Governor Brown might have thought and regardless of whether we had any cliche symbols or not. We had to have the signatures. The signatures were the only thing that would wake up the politicians and the public. All this jumping up and down and picketing this and picketing that and passing out tea bags was a waste of time and effort. I never gave much credence to it. What had merit was that I was able to cross the state and get twenty women in San Jose and twenty-three in Oakland and eighteen in Pasadena and thirty in Palm Springs and eleven in Santa Monica and twelve in Culver City to go out and collect signatures every day.

The people who circulated the petitions and the ones who put their names on those 13 petitions are the ones who had the guts. They put their names on the line for the politicians and anyone else to see. The people who voted for it had a little bit of guts. But they knew that nobody would ever know how they voted. At least they had the guts to throw a silent punch against the politicians, which is more punch than they'd ever shown before. But what they did didn't compare to what the people did who circulated and signed the petitions.

You must be brave in order to be free. And our little band of ordinary, run-of-the-mill taxpayers was brave. We tackled the giant with honesty and decency and sweat and blood and tears, and we cut his head off.

Back at headquarters, many volunteers—most of them women—had been working every day since July checking every name on every petition to make sure it was valid. We didn't want to come close the way we had before and lose out because signers made a mistake when they wrote down their addresses.

About two weeks before the December 2 deadline, everything came together in a big way. All of a sudden, the signatures started pouring in. It was an avalanche. They started coming in by the truckload. We still didn't have any paid help. These volunteers were sorting through all these sacks of mail. By the deadline, 1,200,000 signatures had been counted, and there were 300,000 more that we didn't have time to count until later. Altogether, it was a total of 1,500,000: twice as many as anyone had ever collected before.

And the whole campaign had cost us only about $28,500 for printing the petitions, postage, telephones, office space, our ads, and Paul's expense money. Our success was tribute to a supreme, dedicated effort by thousands of volunteer workers. Not a penny was paid to professional petition circulators.

All of a sudden, something else had happened, too:

The politicians weren't laughing anymore.

If I were a Communist and wanted to destroy this country, I would support the Jarvis amendment.

—Pat Brown, former Governor

Proposition 13 would replace "one monster with another."

Proposition 13 creates challenges, it creates problems, but it creates an opportunity to make government in California a model for people all over the country ... A great opportunity, although it's going to be a painful and difficult process... We have our marching orders from the people. This is the strongest expression of the democratic process in a decade ... Things will never be the same.

NO, THE POLITICIANS WEREN'T laughing at us any longer. They started running scared once they saw how the signatures were rolling in. They showed what they were really like: vindictive, and usually with a yellow streak a mile wide down their backs.

I've been in politics a long time; over half a century, to be exact. And the campaign against 13 was the most hypocritical one—filled with monumental liars—that I've ever seen.

The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which I believe was the only major newspaper in the state to support us, said in a May 24, 1978 editorial that opponents of Proposition 13 had "stooped so low on a number of occasions that some of them need a hook-and-ladder to see over the curb." And Jack L. Loether, president and publisher of the Glendora Press, wrote on May 18, 1978:

How low did the opposition go? For openers, they stooped to using young children against us. one night about nine o'clock when I went to give a speech at the Long beach Hyatt House, I encountered a group of youngsters between ten and fourteen years old picketing against Proposition 13. Having children out picketing in the dark along a busy road like Pacific Coast Highway is what I call underhanded. That was about the most ruthless, coercive method I had ever seen used in politics. The school administrators and teachers had frightened the children into believing that classrooms would be eliminated and even recess would be cut because of a lack of playground equipment if Proposition 13 passed. Those children shouldn't have been used to picket. It was a disgrace. The school personnel were instigating this cruel exploitation of children for political purposes. That really infuriated me.

A similar thing happened up in Burlingame, outside of San Francisco. A note signed by the sixth-grade class at Crocker School in Hillsborough urging a vote against 13 was shoved under the windshield wipers of parked cars. That incident resulted in he Antioch Ledger running an editorial on May 10, 1978 that is one of my favorites. It said in Part:

And in Hayward, classes were shortened by one hour one day so that teachers and the administration could discuss Proposition 13. You might ask why they couldn't have a meeting and talk about 13 on their own time, instead of refusing to provide the services they're paid for. That, in fact, is exactly what the Fremont Argus did ask in a May 2, 1978 editorial which referred to the meeting as an "obvious anti-Prop. 13 rally."

Of course I can understand why school-district employees were worried that Proposition 13 might cost them their jobs. they were having pressure put on them by the school boards. on February 20 the Los Angeles School Board sent out notices to 21,000 teachers and administrators warning them that their contract might not be renewed for the 1978-79 school year. Superintendent of Schools William Johnston said the district face a deficit as high as $780 million in 1978-79 if 13 passed.

Johnston didn't bother to add that at the same time the school board was trying to scare all these people into thinking they were going to lose their jobs, the district was recruiting for teachers—not only in California, but all over the Southwest. Imagine the stir we created when we distributed thousands of reprints of advertisements with the words "TEACHERS WANTED, Los Angeles City Schools" in huge letters that appeared in the Houston Chronicle on January 29, the Phoenix Gazette on February 2, and the Dallas Morning News and the Albuquerque Journal on February 26.

On February 26 I mentioned these advertisements during a debate I had with Howard Miller, president of the Los Angeles School Board, on KNBC, Channel 4. Miller didn't comment during the show, which was taped at 2:00 p.m. on February 24. Then, on February 27, the day after the show was on the air, Miller told the press that the recruiting of new teachers had been called off before he and I taped our debate. But then the district's head of personnel said the decision to stop recruiting was made in a meeting that was held several hours after Miller and I taped our debate at KNBC. If this wasn't like the Watergate cover-up, nothing ever was. On top of that, the school officials changed their minds two weeks later and started looking for bilingual teachers again, even though the first teachers they would have had to lay off—if they had to lay any off, which they didn't—would have been minority and bilingual teachers, because they were low on the totem pole in seniority, (In March 1979, nine months after Proposition 13 won, the Los Angeles School District was again advertising in out of town papers for a wide variety of teachers in math, science, English and bilingual studies.)

And then the Browns—Jerry, Willie, and Pat got into the act. Jerry—our governor—signed a law that provided for the phase-out of California's annual tax on business inventory. Every March businesses in the state have to pay a tax on all the inventory they have in stock, which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and deprives the state of much business. Many companies locate their warehoused in Nevada or Oregon, just outside the California border, so they don't have to pay our business inventory tax. There's no question that eliminating the tax is a good idea, because it will help business, and in turn will benefit the state. The only problem with the bill Brown signed was that it provided for an end to the business inventory tax only if Proposition 13 was defeated. Talk about trying to buy votes!

Still this ploy by Jerry Brown wasn't much compared to the stunts pulled by his father and by the other Brown, Willie. In a letter dated February 16, 1978, Pat Brown, our esteemed former governor, wrote to Republicans:

"If I were a Communist and wanted to destroy this country, I would support the Jarvis amendment. Your fellow Republicans who waffle on it should be impeached."

Just in case anyone thinks I'm quoting what Pat Brown said out of context, those two sentences were the entire text of his letters, which was sent out over his signature on the stationery of his law firm. Ball, Hunt, Hart, Brown and Baerwitz, in Beverly Hills.

Pat Brown's intemperate remarks were an insult to the 1.5 million Californians who signed the tax-reform initiatives, and to the 4.3 million who voted for it in June. All of these people are loyal Americans. What Pat Brown said was a slur on the integrity and Americanism of everybody who supported the amendment, including 800,000 members of his own Democratic party who signed our petition.

Of course, nothing Pat brown did would surprise me. But that "Communist" statement showed just how dumb and just how far off his rocker he is. You've gotta be awful goddamned stupid to make remarks like that one—and like the one he made when he was running against Ronald Reagan for governor in 1966. In that campaign Pat Brown was shown on television telling a group of schoolchildren, "Remember that it was an actor who shot Lincoln." I guess that's his idea of humor. That also explains why Reagan beat Brown by a million votes, even though Brown had been governor for eight years and was the favorite.

Paul Ziffren, a brilliant guy who was a leader of the Democratic party and was a national committeeman, once told me that Pat Brown was the dumbest guy held ever seen in politics who got to hold as high an office as governor. As far as I'm concerned, Pat Brown was, is, and always will be nothing more than an opportunistic politician. And he's a pretty unattractive person to boot—which is another reason Reagan was able to beat him, because he got his puss on the tube too much. He should have lain low. The Reagan people like to think they beat Pat Brown. But the truth of it is that, for the most part, Pat Brown beat himself. And of course, as I've said many times, Pat Brown never would have gotten anywhere in politics had it not been for Earl Warren's refusal to campaign for Republicans.

What Pat Brown said was so outrageous that even the Los Angeles Times, which has always greatly preferred him to me, editorialized on March 26, 1978 that his remarks were "nonsense, and the senior brown must know it ... To suggest that Red legions are waiting to take advantage of it [Proposition 13] is plain silly."

Ironically, even the Communist Party in California was opposed to Proposition 13. When I found out the Communists were campaigning against 13, I put out a statement saying, "If Communists are against our 1% property tax reduction initiative, then it must be good for the people of California." After all, the communists were out to destroy our free-enterprise system and our democratic form of government, and would resort to every means at their disposal to accomplish their mission.

Willie Brown is a Democratic Assemblyman from San Francisco. He is chairman of the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee. He's supposed to be a real bright guy, so I'll have to assume that what he did was malicious instead of just stupid. During the campaign, Willie brown suggested that the legislature should "punish" and "reward" California cities, depending on how residents of each city voted on Proposition 13. In other words, cities where people voted against 13 would get more state money than cities where they voted for it. That was pure and simple blackmail. He made it sound like the tax money belongs to the politicians, not the taxpayers.

As the Berkeley Gazette said in a May 23, 1978 editorial headlined "An Asinine Idea From Willie Brown":

Some of the politicians never did catch on. In January 1979 it was revealed that twenty-four municipal court judges in Los Angeles had contracted with a private law firm to help them find ways to get around Proposition 13. And these judges tried to get the county to pay the legal fees by pretending that the money was spent for travel, testimony by witnesses and stationery. The count actually issued checks for $53,000 to the law firm, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, but before the law firm got around to cashing the checks, the county found out what had happened and stopped payment. Robert bush, who is assistant to Kenneth Hahn, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said that either the law firm "is going to donate this service to the judges or the judges are going to pay for it out of their own pocket." It was my news release that exposed this ripoff.

Probably the cruelest trick played on the public during the 13 campaign was a notice that was sent out by the senior citizens' division of the Franchise Tax board about a month before the election. The Franchise Tax Board collects state taxes. The notice read:

Proposition 8 was a competing tax relief measure placed on the ballot by the politicians in an attempt to defeat Proposition. It would have provided only one-fifth as much relief as Proposition 13 and for one year only.

The obvious implication of the notice was that senior citizens might lose some tax benefits if 13 passed. In fact, 13 didn't affect tax exemptions and assistance for the elderly at all. But these notices were sent to 460,00 senior citizens, many of whom didn't understand very much about taxes and as a result were scared half to death by the notice. As Mrs. K. V. Chase of Laguna Hills told the Santa Ana Register on May 12, 1978, the notice "sure sounds like manipulation to me. It sort of brings it down to, 'if you don't do this, we're going to do this to you.' It gives me the impression I won't get anything if (Prop) 13 passes. It's like a big stick being held over our heads."

In the same article, Stan Williams, a spokesman for the Tax Board, admitted that his office had received many calls from senior citizens who thought the notice meant they would have to pay higher taxes if 13 passed. "In hindsight, we could have added that the current program would remain in effect" whether 13 passed or not, said Williams.

In a May 18, 1978 editorial about the notice from the Franchise Tax Board, the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot said:

The campaign against 13 was marked repeatedly by the technique of the Big Lie. The lies actually began about two weeks before the signatures had to be handed in, when the politicians put out the word that we already had more signatures than we needed, so we didn't need more people to sign the petitions. That, of course, was false.

Once we had qualified for the ballot, the politicians and bureaucrats turned to substantive issues and used lie after lie after lie after lie.

Lie Number One: They said the reason we had launched our campaign was because of the state surplus.

The fact is that we wanted to reduce taxes, property taxes, and all other taxes, whether the state had a surplus or not. That was our mission back in 1962, and it never changed. Back in those days, there was no surplus because Pat Brown spent every penny he could get his mitts on. As recently as 1975, when Jerry Brown succeeded Reagan, the surplus was "only" $$500 million. The surplus mushroomed under Jerry Brown, who refused to spend the money, which was a pretty good idea, but who also wouldn't return the surplus to the people, where it belonged. For that matter, they even lied about the size of the surplus. The opposition said the surplus was $1 or $2 billion; I said it was $6 or $7 billion. It turned out I was right.

Lie Number Two: Proposition 13 was intended to benefit the owners of apartment buildings, based on the fact that I am executive director of the Apartment Association of Los Angeles County.

The fact is that I didn't join the apartment association until ten years after I first got involved in the tax movement in 1962. The United Organizations of Taxpayers and I had already tried to qualify two initiatives for the ballot before I went to work for the apartment association.

I never discuss 13 anybody in the apartment business before I decided to try to reduce property taxes. While we were in the process of gathering signatures in 1977, the members of the apartment association asked if I would like them to put some money in the campaign, and I said no. I told them that if they gave us money it would hurt us, because then people would truthfully be able to say that were connected with the apartment owners in this. After we qualified for the ballot, they offered us money again, and we accepted.

The story that I represented the landlords and that they were the prime beneficiaries of Proposition 13 was a monumental lie. They were not the prime beneficiaries. Every business and every property owner in California got the same property-tax reduction that the apartment owners got. If the apartment owners reduced their rents because of 13, it was obligatory upon the May Company and the Bank of America and the title companies and the lawyers to reduce their charges, too.

The landlords are not solely responsible for high rents, and they should not be singled out for returning their 13 savings to the consumer. Apartment owners make less profit than the television industry. And, as in the television business and the newspaper business and the oil business and the shipping business, there are a certain number of lousy, no-good stinkers in the apartment business. But they're no worse than anybody else.

However, I've always thought that apartment owners were performing as great a service for the public as nay other industry. There are 11.5 million tenants in California. If the apartment owners didn't build and maintain those buildings, where in the hell would those people live? They line in an apartment only because it's the cheapest place for them—the only place they can afford, in most cases. If we didn't have the guys who invest in apartments, Los Angeles would look like Tijuana. Except that Los Angeles is so big that you wouldn't be able to miss it.

I've felt for many years that rent raises are caused by politicians, not by landlords. The unnecessary, stupid laws they pass without any regard for common sense are forcing the rents up. The taxes are forcing the rents up. the minimum wage forces rents up. Having to pay workmen's compensation insurance forces rents up. The zoning ordinances force rents up. The high interest rates, which are largely the fault of the politicians, force the rents up. The high cost of the plumber and the carpenter and the bricklayer forces rents up.

What we're seeing is that the price of everything is being force up by the politicians—food prices, clothing, gasoline, medical costs, everything. Dr. Michael DeBakey, the famous Houston hear specialist, told me that the cost of medical care is forced up 35% because of unnecessary government regulations that have to be followed and reports the government requires people in medicine to fill out.

I think the fact that so many people are forced to live in apartments is bad for the country. The solution is more building, but the politicians have made it impossible to build. People don't have as much interest in keeping an eye on government and politicians when they rent, instead of owning their own home.

It's rough out there. Whether you're a plumber or a lawyer or a petition gatherer, life is rough outside. I think one of the great strengths of the United States for many years was that when a guy got through with a rough day at work, he went home and, by god, his home was his castle. He could shut the door and thumb his nose at the whole damned world and have sixteen hours of saying, "Go to hell, buster." That makes him an independent American citizen. But if you're living under the threat of eviction, or raises in rent beyond your income, or in an apartment so noisy that you can hear the plumbing in the next apartment and the one on top, I don't think that's conductive to the most freedom.

I'd like to see everybody be able to own their own house. The country is a hell of a lot more important than the landlords. See, I'm head of the landlords' association. But I am the most different head of the landlords' association you will find. I'm the head of the landlords association because they needed me and not because I needed them. And they know that.

When I agreed to go to work for the apartment association, they were floundering. They were losing $1,500 a month. they owed $40,000 in open accounts that were past due. They owed a $26,000 mortgage on their building. when they asked me to take the job, I didn't want it, and I told them I didn't want it. I finally agreed to take it on one condition: that I would make the decision. I told them, "I know you have a corporation. I know you have a board of directors. But if I take this job, I'm going to make the decisions. Now, if you want me to take the job, you put that in writing." they did, and then I said. "Now that I've got that, I'm going to give you something writing. It's my resignation. And anytime you don't like any decision I make, all you need to do is accept my resignation. Other than that, you can't do a damned thing. Until you decide to accept my resignation, I'm running the show."

They asked me how much salary I wanted, and I told them they couldn't afford to pay any. I told them that offering to pay me when they had no money and were deeply in debt was a dream. I said, "I'll decide in what salary I want when I'm ready, and if you don't like it, you accept my letter of resignation." I didn't take any salary at all for two years, and then I decided on $1,700 a month.

I also got them out of debt. I told them, "I'm not going to run any association that owes overdue bills. You might as well understand that. If I go in there, the day a bill comes in, we send out a check. Not the next day. And if you're not agreeable to that, I don't want any part of this."

When I went in there, they had 1,100 members. Now they have 5,000 out of about 64,000 apartment owners in Los Angeles. It's the biggest association of apartment owners in the United States. Each member has an average of 11 units, and the association represents the owners of more than 50,000 apartment units.

I started a new thing in the apartment industry called, "Tenants Are Customers." I used the illustration that if my wife spends $200 a month at Bullock's, they treat her like the Queen of the May, I told the landlords that if someone is paying them $200 a month, they ought to treat them good, too. It works. Unfortunately, some apartment owners don't know enough about running a business, and they're the ones that give the apartment industry a bad name. Most of them had no business experience, no public relations experience. They had been a machinist or a bricklayer or a carpenter or a farmer or a clerk, and they had no experience in selling or servicing a customer. So they don't know how to do it very well. It's a sad thing. I try to teach them. for about four years before Proposition 13, I held a meeting every Saturday morning and taught classes in business operations for landlords. We had about 200 owners every month, and close to 10,000 over the course of four years.

During the time I've been working for apartment owners, I've persuaded the state legislature to kill a rent-control bill that would have doomed the California apartment industry like it did in New York, and I persuaded the Los Angeles City Council to kill a proposed earthquake ordinance that would have required the demolition of 14,000 brick buildings and put 100,000 tenants out of their apartments. I also got the city council to vote against an ordinance that would have required the installation of new locks whenever an apartment is rented to a new tenant, as well as an ordinance that would have ended free municipal rubbish collection for all apartment houses containing more than four units. The owners were already paying for rubbish collection in their property taxes.

So I think I've done a good job for the apartment business. But the apartment business in California is so rough that if somebody wanted to give me an apartment house, I wouldn't take it. And I think I know what I'm talking about, because I know as much about the apartment business as anyone in California. Out of all the guys I know in the apartment business, there's only one who makes big money. He owns about 250 units in the Wilshire district and makes about 18% on his cash flow. Most other owners would be better off if they just put their money in the bank.

I think the apartment business is just too tough. Most apartment owners work like dogs, around the clock, seven days a week, including Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. And they don't get a nickel for their labor. the apartment-house owner is like a slave—the only guy left in the United States that is still in involuntary servitude. And if they decide to sell, the capital gins tax wipes out any legitimate profit they might have made. but the politicians have made the word "landlord" sound like the word "Mafia."

During the campaign for Proposition 13, I had several debates with Leo McCarthy, the Speaker of the Assembly. He is generally considered to be the most powerful politician in California, except for the governor. And McCarthy was not too bright. You see, all these politicians think they are so big, they're not used to having people come out and hit 'em on the nose. A few people feint with a left at 'em but they make sure they don't hit 'em. But I come out swinging. I hit McCarthy right on the beak every time we got together. Right off the bat I would hit him with a right cross.

One time he and I were having a televised debate—I think it was on Channel 4, the NBC station in San Francisco—when McCarthy said I was being paid by the Apartment Association of Los Angeles. He said it was obvious that I wrote this amendment for them and for me, and not for anybody else.

I said, "I'll tell you, the Speaker seems to think there's something tainted about my affiliation with the Apartment Association. I just want to tell the Speaker, because he doesn't seem to know, this is the fifth amendment I've proposed. I proposed two before I ever became affiliated with the apartment industry. I never discussed the present amendment with anybody in the apartment industry. It was none of their business. This is the United organizations' amendment, not the Apartment Association's."

Then I said, "Now that we"ve got that straight, I'll tell you about some real dirty money. every year McCarthy gets tens of thousands of dollars form the public employee unions, and this source of campaign money is a terminal cancer on this state." Then I held up a sheet of paper showing that 117 of the 120 members of the legislature take this money, and that McCarthy gets nearly half of his campaign funds—$50,000 or more every election—from the public employee unions. I said, "He got it before he was elected. They bought him and they own him. But I worked for my money, and nobody tells me how to spend it."

You know what he said? "I don't use any of the money myself. I give it to other candidates." Which is largely true. He gives it to other Democrats and buys their votes for himself. That's how he got them to elect him Speaker.

I said to him, "You mean you launder it, like Watergate?" That was one politician who was damn glad to get off the air that night.

Lie Number Three: The opposition tried to get people to believe that under Proposition 13 the market value of a piece of property that declined in value because of fire, flood, earthquake, or other disaster, or because the neighborhood deteriorated could not be reduced. It has always been the law of the state of California and it still is the law of the state of California that if something damages your property, the county assessor has the authority to reduce the market value. Proposition 13 made no change in that law whatsoever. All Proposition 13 says is that the assessor cannot raise the market value more than 2% in one year. And the assessor doesn't even have to raise the value 2%, assuming the value does not increase. The 2% is not a minimum, it's a maximum.

Lie Number Four: The politicians said that because business owns two thirds of the privately owned property in California, Proposition 13 would give a new windfall to business. The important word is new. That is a lie, because for mire than fifty years the state constitution has required that residential and business property be appraised, assessed and taxed on exactly the same basis: the tax rate multiplied by the assessed value, which is equal to 25% of the fair market price.

Proposition 13 did not touch that formula, which is still in effect. So if Proposition 13 gave a windfall to business, it's the same old windfall the politicians have been giving to business for over half a century.

It was strictly a desperation tactic to try to inflame the majority of people who don't own businesses into voting against 13 by claiming it was intended to benefit business. Then the opposition had to swallow that stuff real hard when the Bank of America and a number of other big businesses came out against 13. This wasn't for business, this was for everybody. And business got the same benefits from 13 as everybody else.

Besides, the people who made that argument don't understand that business doesn't pay any taxes. All business does is collect the taxes from the consumer and pass them along to the government. Let me repeat: business doesn't pay a penny in such taxes. For instance, if the sales tax is five cents on the dollar, a store sells a $1 item for $1.05, and passes the nickel on to the state. When I tell people that, most of them give me a blank stare. But it happens to be true. Don't take my word for it; ask Milton Friedman, who is probably the most respected economist in the country.

This was really a contest between the maximum political con artists and the public. The maximum political hot air artists like to tell the public. "We'll raise the tax on business, but we won't raise your taxes." The only thing that happens when they raise taxes on business is that it raises all consumer prices. The guy who buys the stuff pays the taxes, but the politician points his finger at the May Company or the Ford Motor Company and says, "Look what they did—they robbed you!" It's a hell of a big scam. You know, I found out that on my Thunderbird, for which I paid $8,000, the total of all the taxes levied by all the different government agencies came to $4,500. Ford didn't get a penny of that. If it wasn't for the taxes, I would have paid $3,500 for the car.

Lie Number Five: Along the same lines, some critics said that if the intent of 13 was to lower the taxes on residential property, then 13 should have dealt only with residential property. We didn't try to do that because, based on the best legal advice available, we felt that such a law would be unconstitutional. You can't discriminate for or against one class of property. Besides, we wanted to give a tax break to business as well as to everybody else. The people in California who hire other people are in business. We were losing dozens of companies and thousands of jobs every year because business taxes were too high. And the property tax was one main reason.

Lie Number Six: According to its opponents, 13 gave a to business because residential property is sold more often than business property. When a parcel of property is the new market value to be the purchase price.

My response to that argument is that when they said business doesn't turn over as fast as residential property, they always used the illustration of the Telephone Company buildings and Bank of America buildings. But 90% of the business in California is small business in small buildings. It's the stores along Pico Boulevard and Market Street. They are small businesses, and they turn over as fast as residential property, if not faster.

Lie Number Seven: The politicians said 13 was unfair because it increased the taxes on properties that were sold, but not on properties that didn't change hands.

It is true under 13 that if you have two houses side by side that are appraised at $50,00 each and somebody comes along and decides to pay $80,000 for one of them, his market valuation goes from $50,000 to $80,000 and he pays 60% more in property taxes than the guy next door, whose house is still appraised at $50,000.

That may sound unfair, but it really isn't. The man who pays $80,000 for the house does so voluntarily. He sets his own price, and he sets his own taxes. Nobody else does. Take the same situation before 13 was passed. There are two $50,000 houses next to each other. Someone comes along and buys one of them for $80,000. That raises the taxes on similar properties for miles around to $80,000, whether they like it or not. And that is what is really unfair.

What we did cured 99 and 99/100% of this thieving system in God's green world that you can have a perfect system as long as you have a property tax at all. The constitution of the state of California says that property shall be taxed at its market value. The market value of a steak or a pair of shoes or an automobile or a house is what someone is willing to pay for it. The whole property tax system is tied to market value. Under 13, the guy that pays $80,000 for the house makes his own market value. He controls his own decision, he decides what the price of his house is going to be, and he decides what his taxes are going to be.

Lie Number Eight: One of the most outrageous tactics the opposition used against us was to claim that the entire state of California would virtually come to a halt if 13 passed. Here are a few examples of what they said:

—In February, when there was a lot of hysteria about the Hillside Strangler case, Assistant Los Angeles Police Chief Louis Sporrer said that if 13 won, the police department would have to eliminate the major-crimes unit, which had been in charge of investigating the Hillside Strangler. He was obviously implying that the police would give up the Hillside Strangler investigation if 13 passed. That was just as obviously false.

—The Los Angeles County employees distributed a newsletter with a great big headline: "Grim Outlook if Prop. 13 Passes." Harry Hufford, the county's chief administrative officer and personnel director, was quoted as saying, "We would have to lay off 20,000 county employees from our work force of 76,500."

The newsletter also claimed that passage of Proposition 13 would result in an "end of all paramedic rescue service and the closing of at least half the district's fire stations"; the removal of "70% of street lights"; and the "closure of 45 of the 93 libraries."

On top of that, they said that if 13 passed, "Eventually the whole [sewer] system would fail and sewer service would not be available for approximately two million County residents."

You know what that argument amounted to? The stuff that flows in the sewers!

—San Francisco Mayor George Moscone proposed a budget that he said would not allow pay raises for most city employees. The head of his Social Services Department, Edwin Sarsfield, said that most of the 1,500 employees in the Social Services area would lose their jobs and "The mayor will declare a state of emergency" if 13 passes.

—The Municipal City Council tried to scare residents of that town by adopting a budget that called for several new taxes to make up for the losses that 13 allegedly would have caused. They would not admit that 13 would leave them more than enough money to provide essential services, and that people who voted for 13 wanted lower taxes, not the same amount of taxes in different forms.

—One of the most callous tricks of all was the release of a "study" by the UCLA Graduate School of Management which claimed that passage of 13 would result in the loss of 451,300 jobs around the state, and that the state unemployment rate would nearly double to over 10%.

The truth was that the politicians have the power to use a public institution like UCLA for their own ends. they got a bunch of punk students that knew about as much about economics as a mud turtle and had them concoct a phony report. They thought that would have some effect on the electorate, over the knowledgeable word of such renowned economists as Neil Jacoby, Milton Friedman, and Arthur Laffer. that report fell flat on its butt. The only thing it did was bolster the politicians and the bureaucrats and the schoolteachers into the false impression that they were accomplishing something, I think it actually produced a backlash and won us many votes.

New West Magazine hit the nail right on the head when it wrote on July 17, 1978, shortly after 13 passed:

—The opposition ran ads and cartoons that said things like, "If your house catches fire, call Howard Jarvis. If you need a cop to protect you, call Howard Jarvis."

—Wilson Riles, the State Superintendent of Public Schools, said that Proposition 13 "would do nothing short of destroying education in California." He also said, "I have a headache occasionally, but you don't solve that by chopping off one's head, and that is the Jarvis approach."

In fact, the situation in California before 13 was a little more serious than a headache. And the "Jarvis approach" was a little less drastic than "chopping off one's head", although I can think of a lot of heads I'd like to chop, and Rile's is right at the top of my list.

—The opposition also referred to 13 as "the meat-ax approach." The real meat-ax approach was forcing elderly people to leave their homes because they couldn't pay the taxes.

—The worst offender, of course, was my good friend Leo T. McCarthy, From the time we qualified 13 for the ballot he was saying things like 13 would "strip cities of services such as police and parks" and would "destroy the school systems of the state. He also referred to Proposition 13 as "financial disaster." But in a debate he and I had on April 26, six weeks before the election, on television station KNXT in Los Angeles, I forced the Speaker to admit that 13 would not cause the schools to close or to curtail essential services, because the state constitution requires the legislature to provide funds for public schools.

In my debates with McCarthy and the other politicians around the state, I had the facts cold on taxes, and they didn't. I annihilated them. Maybe that's why, shortly after 13 won, the strain of fighting 13 and then having to find ways of getting by with less money caused McCarthy to have an allergic reaction to some almonds he had eaten. He wound up in the hospital. It was probably just nervous exhaustion. Since McCarthy was forty-eight and I was seventy-four and going strong, I took that as another omen that I was fighting for and winning the good fight.

McCarthy and the other politicians got what they deserved, considering the kind of campaign they ran against 13. If they could have laid off a paraplegic with one eye and half his nose gone, they would have done it and blamed it on 13, so the Los Angeles Times could put the guy's picture on the front page.

Lie Number Nine: When the politicians saw that people weren't buying their arguments against 13, they tried to snow people into believing that 13 would be struck down by the courts if it passed. Judge Bruce Sumner of Orange County even filed suit during the campaign. He alleged that 13 violated the state constitution because it dealt with more than one subject. What Sumner did was not a surprise to me—he used to be in the Assembly.

Sumner's argument was absolutely false, and he didn't get anywhere with it. Proposition 13 dealt with just one topic: property taxes. Besides, what Sumner and the others who pretended that 13 was unconstitutional overlooked was that we had gone through a long legal process to make certain that 13 did meet all the requirements of the law and the constitution. Every time we wrote an amendment, we submitted it to leading constitutional lawyers who were not affiliated with the United Organizations, and got their opinion. Next we would present it to the California Legislative Council, a group of lawyers whose principal job is writing laws for members of the legislature and who check the language and content of proposed amendments. They always said our amendments were valid, and we consider them to be the second highest legal authority in California, after the state Supreme Court. In addition, before an amendment can be offered to the people for their signatures on petitions, the Attorney general and the State Finance Director study it for its legality and financial effect, and the Attorney General writes the title and a brief description. So we had gone through each of those steps several times over the years, and we had no doubts about the constitutionality of 13.

In a February 15 1978 editorial, the Redland Daily Facts did an excellent job of pointing our what Sumner was trying to pull on us:

There didn't seem to be any limit to which the tax gougers would not go in order to defeat any measure that would help the people who pay the taxes. When they realized they weren't scoring points with their attacks on 13, they started attacking me personally.

On March 14, 1978, less than three months before the vote on 13, I was arrested in Venture County on a trumped-up charge of drunk driving. I had just left the home of my friends Al and Marcia Green.

There was a tax rally in Ventura, with about 1,500 people there. Before the meeting, Estelle and I had dinner and one drink with the Greens. After the meeting we went back to the Greens' house. There were a lot of people there who wanted to meet me. I had two or three cups of coffee, which I later found out contained kahlua. I didn't know it at the time.

Finally, along about midnight, Estelle and I had to leave. We didn't want to be rude, but I had to be in Oceanside at 8:00 the next morning, and that meant we had to leave Los Angeles about 6:00.

I was driving on 101 toward Los Angeles. I had the car in cruise at 55 miles an hour and we were listening to the radio and talking. It was darker than hell. about twenty minutes after we left Ventura, a car suddenly came up behind us. It seemed to be going awfully fast. It didn't have any place lights o or anything. Through the campaign, I had received threats on my life and from time to time some off-duty Los Angeles police acted as bodyguards for me. These police often drove me places because they didn't think I should be out driving by myself. They told me if I did have to be out without them and a car came up behind me real fast, I should try changing lanes and speed to see if they were following me. But in no event should I stop.

I tried changing lanes and going faster and slower that night, but that car stayed right behind me. Finally it pulled p beside us and put on the police light. We were glad it was the police—we had really been frightened.

I got out of the car in the pitch-black. I have arteriosclerosis, and after I've been sitting for a while, I don't walk so well for a few minutes. I stumbled a bit on the side of the road and had to grab onto the car door. The highway patrolman saw me do that and said he wanted to see my driver's license. Estelle is always afraid I'll lose my wallet, so she sews my back pocket to make it smaller, and I had trouble getting my wallet out. Then I dropped it. The cop said, "I think you're drunk"

I volunteered to take a breath test, and the police decided to take me to the station. They asked Estelle if she could drive and told her to follow us. Then they took off at 100 miles an hour, and there was no way Estelle could keep up. She had no idea where the police station was, and she drove halfway to Los Angeles before she could find someone to give her directions. It took her an hour and a half before she got to the station.

When I got to the police station, the officers gave me the breath test. After a few minutes they told me I had passed it and they said I could go. But then one officer told me that maybe I should take a blood test, too, "for my own protection." I told him I saw no reason to take another test, since I had already passed the breath test and been told I could leave. But then I got to thinking that if I didn't play along, there would be newspaper headlines saying, "Jarvis picked up for drunk driving; refuses to take blood test." So I told them to go ahead and give me the blood test too. I told them I take an anticoagulant for my blood, but they said a doctor would administer the test and he would understand. They took me over to Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks for the blood test, and it was immediately obvious to me that the guy administering it was not a doctor because he didn't even know hot to get the needle into me.

Several weeks later, I was notified that they were going to prosecute me for drunk driving, based on the results of the blood test. The way I found out was interesting, too: some wire-service reporters called me and told me.

It wasn't until after 13 passed that we had the trial. When my attorney, Trevor Grimm, who also represents the apartment association, went in for a conference with the presiding judge, the judge said to the assistant D.A. who had been assigned to prosecute the case, "What in the hell are you guys prosecuting this case for? You have absolutely no case. All you're going to do is cost the county $25,000."

The assistant D.A. said, "I was ordered from up above to bring this case to trial."

Ordinarily, a case like this takes about thirty minutes. This case took five days. And in the end I got acquitted, and all they did was cost the county $25,000, just like the judge had predicted.

I had good reason to be jumpy the night that highway patrol car followed me in such suspicious fashion before they pulled me over. I received several threats during the campaign. All of the threats were referred to the police and the FBI. One call that I remember in particular came one night when I was home. A young guy who sounded like he was on dope said, "You son of a bitch, we're going to cut your goddamned throat." and I got a few letters and cards that said, "We're going to blow up your home" or "We're going to blow up your car."

I'm a lot more worried about the guy that doesn't call than I am about the one who calls and says he's going to do this or that. But Estelle and some of my friends and the police who were guarding me got the jitters. I got the jitters a little bit myself. I had heavy steel mesh put over the windows of our house at a cost of $1,000 so no one could throw anything through the windows. I had an alarm put on my car, but the police told me that for a bomb like that they had to make a connection to the ground somewhere so that when you move the car it kicks off the switch. So, instead of taking four pushups on the bedroom floor, I take my four pushups next to the car every morning. I try my best to watch where I'm going, I don't get out of the car on a dark street anymore. I'm a whole lot more careful about locking the car. I won't stop for somebody unless I know him personally.

I try to be as careful as I can, but if somebody really wants to get you, there's not much you can do about it. If they couldn't protect Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and George Wallace and Martin Luther King, someone could get me, too. And I'm still in the phone book. I've had a listed number since I moved into the house in 1941 and I'm not going to change that now. I don't have anything to hide and I've never turned away anybody who wanted to talk to me. Besides, all they have to do is go down to the county recorder's office and they can get your address. And if anybody walks into my office and says they want to see me, I say. "Okay, come on in."

Still, ever since the campaign, my life had been curtailed somewhat. I know that somebody might want to get me. I'm not frightened, it's not constantly on my mink, but I am aware of it. And for sever weeks during the campaign, I had to hire around-the-clock bodyguards, which cost about $5,000. I'm not accusing the opposition of any of these tactics, but I think my arrest was politically motivated, and if I was driving in an unusual way before the police stopped, it's because I was afraid of who they might be, and because I was following the instruction my security people and given me.

THE ANTI-13 POLITICIANS

Fortunately for us, the politicians who were against 13 were not a very bright lot. They could have lowered taxes voluntarily and returned the $7 billion surplus to the taxpayers, which would have avoided the need for 13. but they were too dumb to do that. Dumb is not exactly the right word—because they're not dumb at all. They play dumb when it comes to looking out for the themselves. They were willing to sacrifice the county to feather their own nests. Their big objective is to keep people's noses out of government. They don't want any interference. That goes for everyone from the board of supervisors and the city council all the way up to president. They want Joe Doakes to stay over on his side of the fence—they don't want to hear from him at all. Proposition 13 has not changed that yet, but every day that goes by is going to change it more.

The other side could have argued, had they had the courage, that property should pay for other than property-related services. I think they would have lost anyway. But at least it would have been a legitimate argument, instead of all the phony ones they used. And the tactics they used backfired on them.

Almost everything they did played right into our hands. The San Diego City Council voted to raise their own salaries by 53%, from $17,000 to $26,000 to $30,000. This occurred about three months before the election, and you can imagine the effect it had on the voters. the council couldn't have done a better job for us if we had asked them to help us. Even the San Diego Union, which was crusading against us, pointed out on March 6, 1978:

In fairness to Pete Wilson, I should say that he didn't ask for the raise; in fact, he was opposed to it. He was one of the few astute politicians, even though he wasn't for 13. Way back in January, five months before the 13 election, Wilson predicted that the public employee unions would wage an extensive campaign against us, but that the voters, who were fed up with high taxes, would approve 13 anyway. Wilson has done a hell of a job as mayor of San Diego. It's too bad he didn't get on 13. He might have been the strongest candidate for governor the Republicans could have fielded.

Similarly, two months before the June election, the Conejo School Board up in Ventura County voted to extend the contract of the district superintendent for two years, at $45,000 a year. This was at a time when this current contract still had more than a year and a half to run. When some taxpayers asked the board if the extension was legal, the board said of course it was, so why should the taxpayers question their judgment? When the taxpayers asked the board's attorney for a legal opinion, he said that he was attorney for the board, not for the public, and any ruling he might make would be given to the school board, not to the public. All of this prompted the Thousand Oaks Chronicle to write in an April 3, 1978 editorial:

Our campaign was rolling along, and then Alexander Pope and Kenneth Hahn got into the act. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors had forced Phil Watson to retire from his job as Los Angeles County Assessor in October 1977. I was never satisfied that the charges were proven against Phil, but the board members made life so difficult for him that his only choice was to resign.

I applied for his job, although I knew there wasn't a chance in a million that the supervisors would appoint me. I just wanted to stir things up, although if they had named me I think my knowledge of taxes would have enabled me to do a good job. Actually, I was supporting Frank Hill, an old friend of mine.

The board of supervisors finally narrowed it down to Hill and Alexander Pope. Then Hill said he was for 13, and that decided the supervisors. They wanted a puppet assessor who they could control, in spite of the California law and constitution. So they picked Pope, who was totally unqualified for the job and knew absolutely nothing about assessment practices, which are very complicated.

Pope took office in February and immediately got in trouble when he said that many parcels of property were going to have assessed valuations 50% or 100% higher than they'd had the previous year. But he refused to send out the new tax notices as soon as they were prepared so that people could find out who was getting hit with the huge increases, even though many other counties were sending them out early. Then the board of supervisors ordered Pope to send out the assessment notices by June 1, five days before the election on 13, and a month earlier than they had to be sent out under the law.

When the public wasn't appeased by the prospect of receiving assessment notices on June 1, Kenneth Hahn, the most powerful member of the board of supervisors, took matters into his own hands. He railroaded the board into pressuring Pope to rescind the increases on 500,000 homes and 200,000 commercial properties and to restore their assessed valuations to the 1977 level. That's when the public caught on that the politicians were playing politics with their taxes. You see, first the politicians said they couldn't live with the assessment rollbacks that Proposition 13 would force. But when the polls realized that 13 was going to pass anyway, they rolled back the assessments themselves, in hopes that that would defuse the support for 13. Of course, if they had succeeded in defeating 13, they could have put the increased assessments back into effect as soon as June 6 passed.

Pope, a bumbler at best, put some water on the 13 wheel and helped make it turn. I don't think his action was decisive, because we had 60% of the vote anyway, but it didn't hurt. I think it was very helpful to 13 to have a totally inept guy in the Los Angeles assessor's office. of course, there are 57 other counties in the state, but in Los Angeles County, partly because of Pope's incompetence, we got better than a 2-to-i yes vote and a 700,000 vote plurality on 13.

The bigwigs in labor and business went all out to defeat 13. They all tried to outdo one another in issuing doomsday prophecies about what passage of 13 would mean. Maybe they believed what they wee saying, but the people they were trying to influence sure as hell didn't.

In view of all the scare stores about 13 would cause huge cuts in public services such as fire departments and result in layoffs of most of the firefighters and other public workers, you would expect the firefighters to have been adamantly opposed to 13, wouldn't you? But that wasn't the case at all. Shortly before the election, leaders of Local 112 of the United Fire fighters of Los Angeles, AFL-CIO, polled the membership. The result as 353 in favor of Proposition 13 and 184 opposed. And yet all the stories said these would be the first people to lose their jobs if 13 passed.

Similarly, the rank-and-file membership of a union in the private sector, UAW Local 216, put out a newsletter stating: "Prop. 13 will reduce your property tax by 60%" and urging all the members to "Save Your Home—Vote Yes on Prop. 13 June 6th!"

And the state board of the California Chamber of Commerce took a stand against 13. But a majority of the 8,000 members—most of whom owned small businesses, unlike the members of the board—announced in May that they were supporting 13.

On election day itself, according to Newsweek (June 26, 1978), "One analysis showed that 43% of government workers in California voted for Proposition 13—even though some of them were bound to lose their jobs."

According to my information, about 30% of the state public employees voted for 13, even though they knew that if it passed, some of them might lose their jobs. I think that's a very striking example of how concerned people had become about what's happening to this country. They understood that if they had a job but couldn't afford to pay their property taxes, they would lose their home anyway. I think they were very bright to understand that. For many people, their only real asset is their home. And to have the government levy an absolutely confiscatory tax on their house, and for them then to foreclose people's homes for taxes, I think, is a high crime and misdemeanor on the part of government. I'd like to impeach them all for that. We have impeached people for less.

So the fat-cats mounted a very tough campaign against us. Unfortunately for them, they didn't understand what people were thinking at all. The average guy—a plumber or a carpenter—he's had it pretty good in the United States and he's got himself a $60,000 home. Now he could see the taxes killing him.

· · ·

When you stop to consider what we were up against, it's a miracle that 13 won at all, much less by a margin of almost 2 to

Labor: The AFL-CIO, the California Teachers Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the California State Employees Association, the Los Angeles City Employees Union--Local 347, the Los Angeles County Employees Association, the California Fire Services Coalition, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Business: Bank of America, Atlantic Richfield, the Southerners, the California PTA, the Commission on Aging, the League of California Cities, and—oh, yes—the Democratic Party leaders.

Political groups: Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the California PTA, the Commission on Aging, the League of California Cities, and—oh, yes—the Democratic Party leaders.

The press: Every major newspaper in California except the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and most of the smaller newspapers in the state.

The politicians: About 90% of the members of the legislature, the county boards of supervisors, city councils, school boards, water districts, and hospital districts. Also, every present or former governor named Edmund G. Brown.

The fact that we had hardly any endorsements from large groups like the other side had was partly by design. To the best of my knowledge, the only organization of a comparable size that supported 13 was the State farm Bureau. The Republican Party didn't take a stand on 13, but I told them I didn't want their endorsement. I'm not saying they would have endorsed us anyway. Proposition 13 was such a popular cause that, given their past performance, they probably would have been too stupid to support 13 even if we had asked them to. I also asked the real estate associations and the landlords not to endorse 13, although I do know that individually, most of them were for it.

When I told these groups I didn't want their endorsements, they couldn't believe it. Everyone had been kowtowing to them for years to get endorsements. Well, not me. If we had had their official endorsements we could have lost. If the Republicans had endorsed it, for example, we might have lost most of the Democratic vote. And we couldn't have won without the Democrats. In California, 56% of the registered voters are Democrats, 35% are Republicans, 85 decline to state a party, and the other 1% belong to the minor parties. If the Republicans, who make up only one third of the state's voter, had endorsed 13, it would have become a Republican issue. That would have been the kiss of death. And if the relators or the landlords had endorsed 13, it would have been even worse. That would have given validity to the claim that those groups were intended to be the beneficiaries.

The heavy hitters didn't just come out against 13; they put up a lot of money to beat us, too. Some of the larger donations that were pumped into the "no on 1311 campaign were $100,000 from the California Teachers Association; $30.000 from the Los Angeles County Employees Association; $25,000 each form the California State Employees Association, the Association of California School Administrators, Bank of America, Atlantic Richfield, Southern California Edison and the Pacific Lighting Corporation; $20,000 each from the Los Angeles City and County School Employees and California Federated Teachers, and $15,000 each from the

Our largest donation was $16,000 from the apartment association. Unlike the opposition, we had thousands and thousands of individuals, many of them retired, who gave us $100 or $50 or $20 or $10. We filled up a couple of telephone-booksized reports listing all of our donors.

Actually, a number of people in a position to know told me that the Bank of America and the other big corporations that came out against 13 wanted to support it. but Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy let them know that if they didn't oppose 13, the legislature would find a way to punish them. I think he meant it, and I think the giant companies believed him too, and they knuckled under.

The citizenry thumbed its nose at government because of burdensome taxes, and Howard Jarvis and his Proposition 13 were prophetic.

—Anthony Lewis in the The New York Times, after Proposition 13 passed

Anybody who was in the U.S. on the day when California passed Proposition 13 last June and at the time of the

Defying the counsel of politicians, labor leaders and economists, a damn-it-all 65 per cent of the voters backed a proposal to slash their own property taxes—and made tax revolt the new gut issue in American politics...The California tax revolt had raced the middle-class pulse of the country as feverishly as anything since the invention of the station wagon.

FOUR WEEKS BEFORE THE 13 election, on May 9, 1978, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner—which, as I said, was the only major newspaper on our side editorially—accused its crosstown rival, the Los Angeles Times, of shifting from "animosity to hysteria" in its campaign against 13. I think the Herald Examiner editorial was, if anything, too charitable toward the Times.

In some ways, the press campaign against 13 was ludicrous. On May 11, 1978, the Chula Vista Star News called 13 a "con game" that "was generated by apartment house landlords, who saw a way to save themselves a bundle by capitalizing on dissatisfaction of homeowners over property tax increases." Just to show how well that newspaper understood what was going in, they said in the same editorial, "Paul Jarvis, co-author of this abomination, makes his money by running an association of apartment house landlords." This was less than four weeks before the election, when I had become one of the more famous people in the country. I wonder what Howard Gann did for a living.

In an editorial a week later, on May 17, the Monterey Peninsula Herald said the public had "been so outrageously deluded by a pair of slick Southern California real estate operators." They were 0-for-2 in their description of Paul and me. First, neither one of us owned any California real estate except for our own homes, so that hardly qualifies us as "slick real estate operators." Second, Paul lives in a suburb of Sacramento, which the Monterey Peninsula Herald might want to know is not in Southern California.

In April the student newspaper, the Clarion, at Granite Hills High School in San Diego wrote that Paul and I owned huge amounts of real estate in California, and that each one of us would make millions of dollars if 13 passed. Gann and I responded by slapping the kid who wrote the story and the school district with a libel

suit for $800,000. Some people criticized us for making such a big deal over something as insignificant as a high school paper. But we were tired of the teachers and school administrators using the students as a front for their own campaign against 13. And the father of the student who wrote that story happened to be the principal of another high school in San Diego. After the Clarion printed a retraction of the story, we dropped our suit.

New West wrote on February 27, 1978: All you really need to know about the property tax initiative on the June ballot is that Howard Jarvis, the 75-year old [sic] sponsor of the proposition, is also the paid director of an association of apartment house owners in Los Angeles." And all you have to know about the guy who wrote that story, Ed Salzman, is that he's a hack journalist who is editor of a rag called California Journal, which, like Salzman, is based in Sacramento and is written by the political establishment about the political establishment and for the political establishment.

Some of the publications in California were so ignorant about taxes, politics, and the law that they should have been banned from writing about 13—if for no other reason than to protect themselves from being laughed at. The San Jose Mercury was misrepresenting fact after fact after fact. I was concerned because I had a lot of support in the San Jose area, and I didn't want people who were in favor of 13 to believe any inaccuracies the Mercury editors might print because of a lack of understanding of the facts, and change their votes.

I got an appointment with the paper's editorial board. There was a long table with a bunch of "journalists" around it. I laid out the whole picture and went through it from soup to nuts. The publisher, a young fellow named Tony Ridder, who got to where he is on the basis of inheritance rather than brains or ability, was disagreeing with every word I said. He even questioned the legality of the amendment.

I told them 13 had originally been presented for its legality to the California Council, which had approved it. Someone at the table asked, "What is the California Legislative Council?" I said, "Does anybody here know who the California Legislative Council is?" No one did. So I explained that it's a group of lawyers who write all the legislation in Sacramento. Assemblymen don't write the bills, the governor doesn't write the bills—the legislative Council writes the bills. And I explained how you can submit a proposed constitutional amendment to the Legislative Council for an opinion as to its legality, and that it is the most authoritative group in the state except for the Supreme Court.

A little later in the meeting, I got into a discussion of the California tax system. I told them it was based on a mythical formula called the comparable sales ratio formula. Somebody asked, "What's that?" Nobody knew what it was.

I leaned back in my chair and I said, "Gentlemen, you've got this big building and this well-established newspaper. But I might as well tell you now, if no one here knows what the California Legislative Council is and if nobody here knows what the comparable sales ratio formula is, this paper doesn't have the right to print one damned word about my amendment or about taxation. Not a word. My advice to you is before you print

anything else, you hire somebody who knows something, because obviously none of you do."

Sometimes the newspaper criticism of 13 was so heavy-handed that I think it helped us more than it hurt us. The San Diego Union ran an editorial on March 31, 1978 saying things like:

The most important thing to know about the San Diego Union is that they also have a young guy as publisher, and he was just as ignorant and uninformed about taxes a as Ridder at the San Jose Mercury. Also, I guess nobody at the Union ever heard that Abraham Lincoln supposedly drafted the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope and on scraps of paper.

In terms of bias on the part of the press against 13, the Los Angeles Times was in a category of its own. I think "hysterical" is too soft a word to describe the editorials by the Times on 13. Here are some examples:

On April 30 the Times had a long editorial in which it repeated as fact the claims by the opposition that

I repeat: the Times reprinted those lies as if they were fact. There was no disclaimer, no introductory words, such as: "Foes of Proposition 13 say that 'Los Angeles County would eliminate all of the Fire Department's paramedic units,'" and so forth.

That same editorial from which I just quoted had the following statement in italics:

"Vote Yes on Proposition 13 and send a message to tens of thousands of teachers, librarians, firefighters, paramedics, police officers, sanitation workers and public-health specialists that you can safely dispense with their services."

That is what I call an inflammatory lie. And that is why I meant it when I said that if the Times could have dug up a crippled government worker who was going to be laid off because of 13, they would have printed his picture on the front page, along with a bold-faced caption like "JARVIS VICTIM!!!" Bold-faced print for bold-faced lies, italicized print for italicized lies.

A Times editorial on May 28, just nine days before the election, stated that "The destructive effect that Jarvis-Gann would have on the public and social institutions of California is not [justified] .... We oppose Proposition 13, with its elusive promise of even greater tax relief, because it would do violence to the spirit and quality of life in California and to our prospects for enriching it."

At one point during its savage crusade against 13, the Times switched from reprinting lies by other people to purposely making distortions on its own. In an editorial on May 7 headlined "Deceit on the Schools," the Times quoted from the state constitution as follows: "There shall be apportioned to each school district in each fiscal year... $120 per pupil is average daily attendance in the district during the next preceding fiscal year."

The Times went on to say: "That limit is the state's only (italics theirs) constitutional obligation to the districts.... Nothing in the Constitution requires the state to enlarge its present contribution of $120 per pupil if there is a decline in local (italics theirs) revenues for the schools, as there would be under Proposition 13."

The Times was trying to accuse Proposition 13 of potentially crippling the schools. They were attempting to make the point that we were lying when we cited the constitutional requirement that the state provide funds to the school districts as proof that 13 would not have such drastic effects on the needed school programs.

Let's talk about lies. Let's provide the three words between "year" and "$120" in the state constitution that the Times chose to leave out and replace with three dots. the three missing words are "not less than!"

What the constitution actually says is: "There shall be apportioned to each school district in each fiscal year not less than (italics added) $120 per pupil."

The Times' premeditated omission changed the meaning of the constitutional provision it cited so that it sounded as if $120 was the maximum the state had to provide to the schools, when in fact $120 is the minimum.

April 30, May 7, and May 28, 1978, when those three editorials ran in the Los Angeles Times, have something in common: they all fell on Sunday. That's when the Times has 30% more readership than it does on weekdays. Don't think for a minute it's a coincidence that the Times picked Sundays to print its harshest criticism of 13. They wanted to make sure their lies would get the widest possible dissemination.

I want to emphasize one thing in my discussion of the Times and the way it handled Proposition 13: I'm talking about the paper's editorials, not the news coverage. The Times reporters who wrote about 13 generally wrote accurate and balanced stories. It's the same thing as what we ran into with big labor and bit business: The average working guy gave us a much fairer shake than the fat-cats did. Fortunately for us, the little guys had a thousand times as many votes as the fat-cats did.

The people who run the Times have good reason not to like me. Back in 1962 I filed suit to keep the city and county from using public funds to build the Music Center and the Performing Arts Center, which were the pet projects of Buffy Chandler, the wife of the publisher of the Times. The Music Center was put on the ballot and the people rejected it, but the board of supervisors voted to provide funds anyway, because of the Chandler family influence. Finally we dropped our suit and let them build those buildings. But they cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars a day, and only 1/2 of 1% of the people of Los Angeles ever go to the Music Center. We never should have let it be built. Why should the general public have to pay through their noses to maintain it instead of the people who actually use the center?

The suit we filed did delay construction of the two buildings. That really put a pinprick in the Times' bubble. I think they've resented it ever since. And they've opposed me ever since on everything I wanted to do in the way of tax reform or anything else, like running for office.

Then when Proposition 13 came along, the Times knew its effect would be to kill the redevelopment of downtown, which would have cost the property taxpayers of Los Angeles County $6 billion. The Times wanted to have downtown rehabilitated because that's where they're located. Not only is their plant down there, but they own dozens of parking lots in the downtown area. If downtown were fixed up and real estate prices skyrocketed, how do you think it would affect the value of all the property the Times owns? You guessed it.

I decided there is no way to justify rehabilitating the downtown area of Los Angeles at the expense of the average taxpayer for a very simple reason: Most people won't go there. The hassle is too great, the parking prices are too high—most notably in the lots the Times owns—and if they didn't have the courthouses and all the county buildings downtown, nobody would eve go there. Which wouldn't please the Times at all. If private industry can't find a way to pay for the rehabilitation of downtown Los Angeles, I think they ought to raze it and turn into a park. Why should the homeowners in Long Beach or Santa Monica or the San Fernando Valley have their property taxes raised to pay for the rehabilitation of downtown Los Angeles?

The Times couldn't tolerate me or anybody else who disagreed with them or got in the way of their schemes. It is true, though, that since the election the Times has been nicer to me. They know that when they're beat, they're beat. I think they're just like the politicians, they go with the wind. I respect them even less now that they're a little less hostile just because we won. I've never thought much of that newspaper, and I don't think much of it now. But you have to read it to see what the enemy of the people is doing. I think the Los Angeles Times is the enemy of the people.

I think the Los Angeles Times, because its major interests are not in the newspaper business, slants the news to benefit its major investments. of course, the same is true of many other large newspapers and the television networks. And then in addition, television news is mainly show business, it has little to do with the facts.

It was very tough to have 90% of the media against us. But 90% of the media had been taken in by the phony politicians. They had wallowed these great, monumental lies that had been handed out in press releases. The press didn't know anything about taxes to begin with, and didn't know much more after the campaign was over.

I don't think the press would have paid any attention to me if I hadn't finally won. God knows they ignored me for all those years. The media sort of laughed me off as a kook. They called me irresponsible, a demagogue, every ridiculous thing they could dream up. They dismissed me as a right-wing extremist. Of course, they were 100% wrong. A doctor buries his mistakes, but the Times covers up its mistakes, as does

television. And because they have the chance to publish a paper or go on the air every day, they are able to crush almost anybody, just by the sheer weight of repetition.

I think it was a miracle I was able to overcome the attacks that were made on me hundreds of times over the years by the press. But I never asked any newspaper or radio or TV station to use a story. I'd issue a press release and it was wholly up to them whether they used it or not. I contrast that with a lot of people in the United States who spend a fortune to get their names in the paper or their faces on the tube. I never spent a nickel, except for postage and running off copies of the releases, which amounted to almost nothing, I had enough people who believed in what I did and were interested in it to make it worthwhile for the press to cover me without my having to pay for it.

I also think the press finally began giving me more coverage because I never knowingly told a lie and because I answered the questions, no matter how embarrassing they were to me. I've had top reporters tell me they like to interview me although they don't agree with a lot I say, because when they leave an interview with me they get answers, and when they talk to a politician they get runarounds. One time before 1962, when I was still active in politics, Carl Greenberg and Dick Bergholz of the L.A. Times took me to lunch because I was the only guy in the Republican Party who would tell them the truth. I think that's quite a badge of honor. And Dick Bergholz and I have always disagreed politically.

I tell off the reporters when I think they're asking me a stupid question or an irrelevant one. I compare their business to everyone else's. I say they're not a privileged class. They have no right to ask me what color toilet paper I use any more than I have a right to ask them how many times they had sex last week. And when they suggest that the apartment business should be under rent control, I say, "How would you like it if you were under censorship?" That always stops them. There's this one girl, Heidi Schulman, who works for Channel 4 in Los Angeles, and she knows less about taxes than a good reporter should. But the station insisted on sending her out to cover me. So finally I told her I just wasn't going to answer any more of her questions until she went and read up and prepared herself properly. Just being pretty isn't enough for me. But I like her personally just fine, even if she doesn't know much about taxes.

There is one interesting footnote to my ongoing feud with the Chandlers and the Los Angeles Times: In 1963 the Apartment House Owners Association of Los Angeles, as it was then known, presented its first annual award for Southern California's most distinguished citizen to Buffy Chandler. She was honored "for her efforts in spearheading the drive for the new Music Center and for other cultural activities"'. Of course, that was ten years before I became affiliated with the association.

Not all of the newspapers were as hostile in their attitude toward Proposition 13 as the Times and its fellow travelers. Here is a sampling of what some of the more enlightened publications had to say:

Even the Fresno Bee, which along with its sister Bee papers in Sacramento and Modesto, was certainly no friend of 13, had this say (May 17, 1978) about the campaign against 13:

Two friends of 13 used their column to come to our support. Ronald Reagan, who signed one of our petitions, wrote in his nationally syndicated newspaper column in March, "Predictably, free spending legislators (backed by a chorus of special interests who depend on a brimful public trough) have proclaimed that the sky is falling."

After the election, Milton Friedman said in his June 19, 1978 column in Newsweek:

Government does not know how to cut. All Congress knows is how to add. The art of subtraction seems to be beyond its intellectual capacities. And the same applies, as we all know from experience, to state and local governments.

—S. I. Hayakawa, Senator, R-California

Any candidate who underestimates the potential of the tax revolt "is a political idiot."

A warning signal to those in Washington that taxpayers are tired of being overburdened.

—David Boren, Governor of Oklahoma after Proposition 13 passed

A valid expression of taxpayer rage and frustration.

—Blair Lee III, Acting Governor of

Maryland, after Proposition 13 passed

I am not an economist.

But Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer and Neil Jacoby are economists, and each one of them is widely renowned.

Milton Friedman, who taught for many years at the University of Chicago and is now a professor at Stanford University, won the Noble Peace Prize for his work in economics. In a speech before the Americanism Education League in Pasadena on February 6, 1978, Friedman declared:

In an interview with the Associated Press published in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on March 31, 1978, Friedman stated that Proposition 13 is "the best chance we have to control government spending." He also said:

Friedman also commented in an interview with Copley News Service, published in the Fremont Argus on April 18, 1978, that the most important feature of Proposition 13 might be the requirement of a two-thirds vote to increase taxes, because that would make it difficult for the legislature or local agencies to make up the tax revenues they would lose if 13 passed.

Having Friedman in our corner was a big plus. Even a small newspaper like the Marysville Appeal Democrat noted on April 29, 1978: "When an economist of Milton Friedman's status endorses the Jarvis-Gann property tax initiative, those who have scornfully dismissed the proposition as a screwball idea that would bankrupt California government are forced to give it more careful consideration."

That Copley wire story that quoted Friedman described him and Arthur Laffer as "California's two most prominent economists." Laffer is a young fellow—still under forty—who is a professor of business economics at USC. He told Copley: "Jarvis-Gann is excellent. There should be a limit on all taxes. This is a major first step."

Laffer made a study of Proposition 13 and concluded that it "would go a long way toward revitalizing California's economy." He also found that "with property taxes lower, businesses will expand their activities within the state. This expansion will create new jobs, more investment, and higher real wages. Sales, incomes and other forms of activity will expand. Sales taxes, income taxes, etc., all will rise. In addition, state outlays for social welfare will fall (unemployment compensation, rent subsidies, medical, etc.)."

I should point out that Laffer is the inventor of the Laffer Curve, an economic theory which says that if tax rates increase past the optimum level they actually result in decreased tax revenues for government, because prohibitively high taxes discourage consumer spending and business investment.

Both Friedman and Laffer also said that if Proposition 13 were to lose, it would be a signal to politicians in California and all over the rest of the country that they could raise taxes without fear of making the voters angry.

California's other leading economist, Neil Jacoby of UCLA,

B

We, the undersigned, registered, qualified electors of the State of California, residents of County [or City and County] present to the Secretary of State this petition proposing to add Article XIIIA to the Constitution, and petition that the same be submitted to the electors of the State of California for the adoption or rejection at the next succeeding general election, or at any special statewide election held prior to that general election, or as otherwise provided by law. The following is a full and correct copy of the title and text of the proposed measure.

1. Any registered voter may circulate this petition.

2. Fill in the name of the county IN WHICH YOU ARE CIRCULATING THE PETITION in section A on the back of this petition and section B above then proceed to obtain signatures. Signers MUST sign as they are registered. USE PEN.

who once served as adviser to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, was also solidly on our side. He gave a speech over in the San Fernando Valley on October 15, l977, and urged everyone to sign our petitions. He also said:

Jacoby also pointed out that according to surveys made by the Economy and Efficiency Commission of Los Angeles County, property taxes yielded $9.4 billion in California during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1977, but $5.5 billion of that—or about 60%—was spent on education and social services that benefited everyone, while $3.9 billion, or 40%, was used for property-related services.

As Jacoby said, "The property tax bill of the average California homeowner would be less than half its present amount if property taxes paid only for property-related services. This fundamental inequity in California taxation should be removed!"

In another speech at the UCLA Business Forecast Conference on March 16, 1978, Dr. Jacoby said that Proposition 13 is "The only hope we have for bringing economy, efficiency and justice to California's government. The time has come when heroic surgery is needed to excite the cancerous growth of property taxation."

I think I know as much about taxes as anyone. But the fact remains that I am still just a layman. But the words I have quoted here come from the experts. In addition to the clout they carried, I was flattered and proud to have the support of leading economists like Milton Friedman, Neil Jacoby and Arthur Laffer. In my judgment, their support proved that we were correct.

Most people don't like statistics. Nevertheless, it takes figures to show why Proposition 13 was necessary, and what applies to California applies to most other states and the federal government. I'm going to list some important statistics in this section, so anyone who doesn't like to be bothered with numbers should skip it.

—In 1950 there were 343,000 state and local government employees in California, and the population of the state was 10.5 million, or 1 employee for every 30 residents. In 1960 there were 620,000 government employees and the population was 15.5 million; 1 government employee for every 25 residents. In 1978 there were almost 1.5 million government employees, and the state population was 22 million. The ratio was 1 government worker for every 15 residents. (These figures are from the State Employment Development Department.)

—In the 1967-68 fiscal year the state budget was $5 billion. By 1977-78, 11 years later, it had tripled, to $15billion. During that same period, the consumer price index in Los Angeles rose only 64%, or one-third as much as the state budget. In only three of those years was the increase in the state budget less than the increase in the consumer price index. (Figures provided by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the State Department of Finance.)

—Between 1957 to 1977, total state tax collections increased by 874%, while the gross personal income of California residents increased by 334%, according to the Republican State Central Committee.

—From 1968 to 1977, the cost of city government in the state rose 163%, but the population rose only 14.5%. During this same period, the city of Los Angeles had a 2% drop in population and a 159% increase in spending, according to the California Chamber of Commerce.

—During the 1977-78 fiscal year, which ended less than a month after Proposition 13 passed, local governments collected $10.3 billion in property taxes, an increase of 10% over the previous year, and the assessed value of taxable real and personal property in the state was $96.3 billion, or 15% higher than the year before, according to the State Board of Equalization. In that same year, the consumer price index rose only 5.8%.

—In 1968 the average property tax on a single-family home was $326. In 1978 the average tax was $811, according to the Board of Equalization.

—During the eight years before Proposition 13 passed, the cost of food stamps in California went up from $248 million to $5.5 billion, the cost of unemployment insurance increased from $2.5 billion to $14 billion. Medicare costs rose from $6.1 billion to $21 billion, and social security costs increased from $26.7 billion to $82.4 billion.

—The average person in the United States works 2 hours and 52 minutes out of every 8-hour day to pay taxes, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. To put it another way; the average employee gives every dollar he earns from January 1 to May 11 to federal, state or local government.

—As of 1975, 81 million people in the United States were supported by taxes, while only 72 million were supported by jobs in the private sector, according to a study by the Ford Motor Co.

Those were some of the conditions that created a need for Proposition 13. Again, while the details differ, in general, most of the other states and the federal government suffer from the same conditions, to a greater or lesser degree.

It took a lot of years to get ready for this thing to happen. When it finally jelled, I was ready for it. I was keyed up for it. I knew we were going to make it this time. If felt the time was ripe. I knew as much about taxes and about California as anyone else. I felt it was my job to defend the gates at any cost.

I was ready to carry on the campaign--by myself, if necessary--in the last six months. I was on the road constantly. I even spoke two or three times on Election Day. On a typical day during the campaign, I would do a couple of interviews with the press, give a speech at lunch, cut a radio or TV spot, have dinner with the local tax leaders in whatever area I was in, and appear at an evening rally. And these appearances would be in two or three or four different cities and towns around the state. I also had to make sure the pro-13 campaign, the United organizations of Taxpayers and the Apartment Association were all being run properly.

At times I felt like a lone eagle on this. I was the political strategist, the media man, the copywriter and the janitor. I was the driver of the tractor. Bill Butcher, a partner in Butcher and Forde, the political consulting firm in Newport Beach that was guiding the campaign, said that the focus was on me, not on the campaign. and one of the leaders of the "no on 1311 campaign said they could overcome everything except my personality.

Early in the campaign, people used to get up in the audiences and say they had heard I was a kook or a nut. I would say, "Well, you know, there was a fellow named Thomas Alva Edison who ran around telling people he could take a bottle and some silk string and make a light out of it that they could read by. Everybody said this guy was nuts. And one day the people who had said Edison was nuts could sit in their chair and turn on a light and it turned out that they were the nuts, not Edison."

I also used to tell 'em. "If I'm a nut, I'm in pretty good company, because a million and a half Californians, including Ronald Reagan, signed our petitions; Milton Friedman, Neil Jacoby and Arthur Laffer are supporting 13; and Friedman even taped some TV commercials for us at no charge." Before long, people stopped referring to me as a nut.

I was hitting a responsive chord in places like Orange County, where property market values had gone up an average of 20% in 1976-77, compared with the 2% a year limit that was in Proposition 13. And up in Santa Cruz, where they had about 1,800 surfers from all over the country, aged l6 to 34. They didn't do anything but surf and draw welfare and food stamps. The guy who owned a home got hit with a huge tax increase in order to support these surfers in the style to which they had chosen to become accustomed. Why should a guy who has to support a family also have to support these bums who surf eighteen hours a day, thirty-seven days a month? I told them that after 13 passed, the sun was going to come up the next day and all the surfers were going to evaporate. We found out there was one water district in the state that had not provided any water for years, but still collected taxes, and one school district had enough money to pay for six electric typewriters, so they bought them—even though they only had one typist. But they had to spend the money so they could justify asking for a bigger budget the next year. Proposition 13 went over real well in those places and a lot of others that had similar situations.

I told the people that up until now we had given government an unlimited budget and they had still exceeded it. I told them that we didn't need to send our money to Sacramento to have it laundered and sent back to us—what was left of it, that is. And I pointed out that the state Revenue and Taxation code is now about 1,500 pages long, and every one of those pages is filled with different schemes for taking our money from us.

I reminded them how when Abraham Lincoln was on his way to Washington to take office in 1861, he made a speech in Indianapolis and he said, "It's your business, not mine", in reference to government. This has been a creed with me since I read it about fifty years ago. I also told my audiences about something a very great man in this country had said back in the 1920s. His name was Al Smith, he was governor of New York and when I say he was a great man, I'm well aware that he was a Democrat. Al Smith said, "When I have a problem as a politician, when there's something I don't understand, I always give it back to the people. They have more brains than I do. Their collective judgment is better than the collective judgment of the legislature or the governor." I wouldn't let them forget that this was their one chance to take things back in their own hands.

Proposition 13 was needed mostly because property taxes are the only form of taxes that have no relation to the ability of Someone to pay them. The three main forms of taxation are Property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes. Income taxes have a direct relation to the ability of the taxpayer to pay them. You don't pay sales taxes unless you decide voluntarily to buy something; if you can't afford the sales tax, you don't buy the item. But property taxes could amount to thousands of dollars on a house—even if the owner had little or no income. Some people would say that if the taxes on a house were that high, it meant the house was worth a hell of a lot of money and the owner ought to be able to pay the taxes. That's only half true. The house might be worth a lot of money on paper, but the guy who owned it might have been living there for forty years and might be trying to get by on Social Security. Just because his house is worth a lot of money is no reason to kick him out of his home. But that's what was happening.

Assemblyman Henry Mello—who is a Democrat—said many older people were going hungry in order to save enough money to pay their property taxes. Mello is the number-two ranking guy on the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee—the one Willie Brown is head of—and we tended to believe him when he made a statement like that that didn't really serve his own interest. Besides, we knew on our own about folks passing up meals so they could pay their property taxes. That's just plain criminal.

Hell, Jerry Brown himself went on KNBC-TV in Los Angeles on January 15, 1978, and admitted; "Where I've gone to meetings, people say, 'Why don't you tax me based on how much I make, not just take it from my house, which doesn't have any relationship to how much income I have every month?"' That's exactly the point I was trying to get across: not that incomes should be raised, but all taxes—especially property taxes—should be reduced.

One of the things I said as I campaigned around the state was that passage of Proposition 13 would result in a two-thirds reduction in the tax impounds that banks and mortgage companies collect in advance from their mortgage payers to make sure the property taxes get paid when they're due twice a year. I also said that if 13 won, there would be significant reductions in utility bills all over the state. The opposition tried to argue that I was wrong, but they never stood a chance. On the utility bills, for instance, we had letters from officials of companies like Southern California Edison, Southern California Water, and San Diego Gas and Electric saying that if 13 passed and their property taxes went down, they would lower their rates for service. And just in case any utility companies didn't lower rates voluntarily, we also had a letter from Robert Batinovich, president of the state Public Utilities Commission—which is responsible for setting utility rates—which said:

We also had a report from the H. C. Wainwright Company, a Boston firm that was established in 1868, stating that if 13 passed and property taxes were reduced, it "would lead to an estimated $75 billion increase in California personal income" during the next four years.

The Wainwright report, which was dated June 1, 1978, also said the huge increase in personal income

According to the Wainwright report, the decrease in cost of owning property if 13 won would result in more construction of homes, apartments, and commercial and industrial buildings. The net result would be "a building boom" in California.

And in an updated report three weeks after 13 passed, the Wainwright people projected that personal income in the state would increase by an estimated $110 billion during the next ten years. These reports gave proof that we were going to be successful in one of the major goals we set out to accomplish: taking the money away from the politicians and putting it back in the hands of the people.

Almost from the moment we began circulating the 13 petitions back in the summer of 1977, the politicians and bureaucrats started looking for ways to circumvent us if we won. Under their theory of taxation, a reduction in one form of taxes, such as property taxes, simply meant that they would have to find a way to raise other taxes to make up the money. They didn't understand that our goal was to cut taxes—not shift tax collections from property taxes to some other form. As early as September 26, 1977, a report prepared for Willie Brown's Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee said:

They were already assuming that we wouldn't mind their raising other taxes, just as long as property taxes were cut by the same amount. I suppose that's the kind of "reasoning" you'd expect from staff people who were hired by Willie Brown.

However, both Ronald Reagan and Senator S. I. Hayakawa understood what we were driving at. Reagan wrote in his syndicated column in March: "In Washington [and many state capitals] when the words are stripped away, 'tax reform' usually boils down to a little cut here, a little added tax there. The underlying assumption is that the cost of government can never go down, only up." And Hayakawa declared: "Government does not know how to cut. All Congress knows is how to add. The art of subtraction seems to be beyond its intellectual capacities. And the same applies, as we all know from experience, to state and local governments."

In plain English, what we were trying to accomplish was to put a fence between the hogs and the swill bucket. Virtually all of the howlers against Proposition 13 had their noses buried deeply in the public trough. They were on a gravy train provided by the taxpayers, and they wanted to ride that train at the taxpayers' expense until they reached the promised land of exorbitant pensions for the rest of their lives. They were trying to use the taxpayers' money to bankrupt the taxpayers at whose trough they were gorging themselves. Proposition 13 was intended to forge a chain around the necks of all elected officials and their coteries of bureaucrats so that they could be dragged away from the feedbag. We wanted to put the politicians and their comrades in the bureaucracy on a permanent diet that did not include large portions of the taxpayers' money.

Many years ago, Calvin Coolidge said, "Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery." And highway robbery is what the political establishment had been getting away with for many years before Proposition 13 passed. the state had taken more money from the taxpayers than we needed to operate the government. That money belonged to the taxpayers, but when they politely asked Sacramento to return their money to them, the word came down from on high that the politicians would condescend to "give" a little over a billion dollars back to its rightful owners.

Of course, the party line from Sacramento was that the state surplus was "only" a billion dollars or two. But we knew better. We knew it was more like $6 or $7 billion. One politician who did tell the truth was Jesse Unruh, a Democrat who used to be the Speaker of the assembly and is now the state treasurer. He said about six months before the election that the state surplus was $6 billion, and he was correct. That didn't surprise me a bit. During my many years in politics I had discovered that Jesse Unruh was one of the few politicians whose word was good. I should add that Unruh did not give his estimate of what the state surplus was in order to help us; he was opposed to 13.

There was also a question as to how much of a tax revenue loss Proposition 13 would cause. I said it was $5 billion. Roy Bell, Jerry Brown's finance director, said it was $7 billion. Let's use Bell's figure. That sounds like a hell of a lot to take away from government—except that they were collecting $40 billion a year, which amounted to $1,800 for every man, woman, and child in the state of California. All 22 million of them. Even if they lost $7 billion, they would still have $1,500 to spend on every resident of the state. That's enough to float this state in hundred-dollar bills. When we were able to get that point across—that 13 would still allow state and local governments to collect $1,500 a year from every person in California—we assured ourselves of a landslide victory.

We had given the politicians and bureaucrats an unlimited budget, and they had exceeded it. Now we wanted them to decide how to save money—not look for new sources of revenue. Instead of spending public funds in ways that were designed to assure their own reelection, we wanted the legislators to spend the money in ways that would best help the people. I have felt all along that even after Proposition 13, the state would have plenty of money to pay for all the necessary programs. School districts receive 47% of their revenues from property taxes. Cutting property taxes by 57% means the schools will lose 27% of their money. Similarly counties get 40% of their money from property taxes and will lose 23% of their total revenues as a result of Proposition 13. Cities get 27% of their money from property taxes, so they will lose 15%. Altogether, California state schools will have 73% as much money as they did before 13, counties will have 77% as much and cities will have 85% as much. All of them should be able to survive and provide all adequate services if they establish their priorities properly. But they're going to have to take a careful look at their budgets and say, "We can't afford to do these twenty nine things. We have to decide which seventeen of them we want to cut."

Maybe government shouldn't be doing everything it has been trying to do. Everybody agrees that one of the essential service government provides is fire protection. But during the campaign I frequently pointed out that Scottsdale, Arizona has no fire department. Instead, they contract with a private firm for fire protection. And the fire company has made many innovations in fighting fires and has received national recognition because they can put out more fires in less time and at lower cost than publicly funded fire departments can.

During the campaign, I also told my audiences about the example that was set by Puerto Rico, where they reduced personal and corporate tax rates by 5%. On one year the government went from a deficit to a balanced budget, and with more efficient government they were able to reduce the interest rates they pay on their bonds from 12% to 8%.

As I said over and over during the campaign, every appropriation bill should be put to the bottom-line test: who will benefit from this spending? If the ultimate beneficiary is the people and it involves a program they need and want, fine: the appropriation should be approved. But if the beneficiary is a narrow special interest group or the bureaucracy itself, the spending should be eliminated.

In any event, we made it possible in 13 for government officials to raise taxes—but only if they could get a two-thirds majority in favor of higher taxes. We felt that was a positive limit. Before 13 it seemed like it was a lot easier to raise taxes than it was to reduce them. Every year the legislature introduced about 5,000 bills and passed about 1,500 and the governor signed 1,300 or 1,400 of those, but not a single one of those laws gave tax relief. Proposition 13 did shut the door most of the way without making it impossible to raise taxes when necessary.

Most of the politicians and the press were wrong about 13, so it's no surprise that most of the pollsters were, too. The first time a California poll was conducted on 13 by the "impartial," "scientific" Field organization in February 1978, the result was 205 in favor of 13 and 10% opposed. The opposition had no trouble rationalizing that poll by pointing out that 70% of the voters were undecided, and that it was only natural for the people who had signed the petitions to be strongly in favor of 13, which they said distorted the poll.

In mid-March the Los Angeles Times polled 1,348 Californians of voting age and found that 35% were in favor of 13, 27% were against it, and 38% had not made up their minds. Another Field poll conducted in late March and early April was probably the most incorrect of all. According to that survey, 27% were for 13, 255 were against it, and 48% either were undecided or said they were not aware of 13. ridiculous! In the end, the California poll finally began to register accurate results. The last poll, taken a week before the election, gave 13 a lead of 57 to 34, which wasn't too far off.

The trouble with those polls is that the companies that take them, the newspapers that print them, and the politicians who believe them don't understand what the people are really thinking. They take consumer surveys in their offices that don't have any connection at all with what the general public is thinking. Either that, or else they deliberately concocted lies to influence the election. I would prefer to think that they are stupid about what the people are thinking—but I do think a lot of polls are fixed. There's a great question whether they should be allowed to be printed before elections because a lot of ignorant people who don't know anything about the issues or the candidates may—I don't say they will—but they may follow a phony poll.

And I was very concerned that the people not be misled by inaccurate polls. If newspaper reporters and other writers were fooled, that was okay. But not if the people were confused. I didn't mind a bit when a mouthpiece from the left like Richard Reeves reported in the May 23, 1978, issue of Esquire, just two weeks before the election, that "most knowledgeable Californians are predicting that the amendment will be defeated." Now Richard Reeves is based on the East Coast, and he has a certain following on the Georgetown cocktail circuit and the Upper East Side. But those "knowledgeable Californians" he mentioned were politicians who didn't want to believe what was happening. Reeves and writers like him don't know a damned thing about California, so they have to rely on politicians and other uninformed people.

Speaking of Reeves, I recently skimmed over another one of his ideas of what makes a story. He quoted Ted Kennedy as being shocked over the affluence in places like Newport Beach, while people in New England are cold and hungry. Here's Ted Kennedy, who wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth—and he never earned a dollar in his life that didn't come to him because he was Joe Kennedy's son and Jack Kennedy's brother, here he is bitching about people who live well and own yachts because they worked their tails off. But guys like Kennedy say things like that, and guys like Reeves print them. Not even the California poll was as far off as Reeves was. And by the time his story appeared, practically every "knowledgeable Californian" knew that 13 was going to win big. By then even Jerry Brown had backed off and declined to campaign against 13 because he knew what was going to happen.

When those polls were indicating that the race was close, like that one that had us ahead by only 27 to 25, I just laughed. I said these guys have got to be nuts. I knew about the people. I was out there, you see. On March 15, the day after my arrest in Ventura, I went to Oceanside, and there was something like 2,700 people there. Jerry Brown went there about the same time to campaign against 13, and he had about 200. And almost everybody who was there supported 13, after listening to me. Oceanside was a damn good cross-section: poor people, some wealthy, some military. And when I spoke, there were twice as many people there as were included in those phony polls. Hell, the Torrance Daily Breeze published a long interview with me on May 7, 1978, and I predicted in there that 13 would pass by a mile. When they asked me if I had a poll to support that, I answered, "There's no poll except mine. Everywhere I go, people overwhelmingly support Proposition 13."

I was out there and I knew how the people felt. During the campaign, I debated a school superintendent in Southern California. He said, "Why, if you pass 13, we'll have to shut the schools down." And everybody stood up and clapped. They wanted the damn schools shut down. Even Richard Reeves wrote in that Esquire article of his that Paul Priolo, the Republican leader in the Assembly, said. "Whenever I tell an audience that Jarvis will bring local government to a halt, all I see is smiling faces."

Along the same lines, a May 26, 1978 editorial in the Anaheim Bulletin said that "One fed-up-to-here character in response to the threat to close down the schools, commented: "Why wait till June 6? Why not now?" And columnist Wayne Lee wrote in the Simi Valley Enterprise Sun and News on February 1, 1978:

And we had letters, like one from Dorothy Dallas of Westchester (California), who wrote the Santa Monica Evening Outlook on February 8, 1978:

And from Norman I. Arnold, whose letter to the San Francisco Chronicle was also quoted by Milton Friedman in his column in Newsweek on April 10, 1978:

And finally from Mr. and Mrs. A. G. Isgreen of Hermosa Beach, who wrote the Hermosa Beach Easy Reader on May 25, 1978 that on May, 17, 1978, they picked up their assessment notice and learned that the market value for tax purposes on their house and two small rental homes had skyrocketed from $100,900 the previous year to $239,000; an increase of 140% in one year! The Isgreens also said: "We have lived here for thirty-six years and just retired. Proposition 13 must be passed or we will be wiped out. It's no joke!" (italics theirs)

People like Wayne Lee, Dorothy Dallas, Norman Arnold, and the Isgreens spoke much more eloquently about why 13 was needed and why it passed than all the politicians, all the rest of the press, and all the pollsters put together.

All over California—and, for that matter, all over the United States—people universally want taxes and services cut because government is providing them with services they don't want. In terms of property-related services like police, fire, streets, and sewers, there's no more service to my house today than there was when I bought it in 1941. But the taxes have gone from $200 then to $1,800 before 13 passed.

The problem is that property taxes have been used to pay for the special interests that grew up within the government, such as social workers, food-stamp recipients, aid to dependent children programs—all of these people have lobbies of their own. They are the ones who want more services—not the people who pay the bills. The taxpayers have services coming out of their ears already. They don't use all these exotic services.

If twenty-nine social workers get out there and jump up and down, that's a big headline everywhere. So the press encourages it. But if twenty-nine homeowners demonstrate to complain about paying $3,000 in taxes and getting $300 in services so they're out 2,700 bucks, they don't get a line.

DOWN THE HOME STRETCH

During the last week of the campaign when I knew we were in by about 2-to-1, I insisted on spending $180,000 for television instead of the $90,000 which we had scheduled for that final seven days. We had the money—and I thought spending it was a damn cheap gamble. I have never forgotten what happened to Tom Dewey in 1948, and I've never let up an inch in any campaign until all the ballots were in. Suppose I had decided not to spend the extra $90,000 and we had lost by 500 votes! People sent us the money to pass 13. We didn't have any right to use it any other way. Some of advisers nearly had hemorrhages when I told them I wanted to spend the extra $90,000. But I said, "I don't give a damn, I've been in this for fifteen years. People put in this money and, by God, if we let the election go by and we lose and we've still got this money, we're in trouble with those people. If we don't spend it for 13, we're in trouble even if we do win. We wouldn't be doing what we said we'd do. So I'd rather throw the $90,000 in the TV spot than put our whole operation in the delicate position of being open to accusations."

HOW SWEET IT IS!

The Proposition 13 election was on June 6, 1978. D-Day, the sixth of June. That was a significant date in 1944, and it was again in 1978. I campaigned right up until the polls closed at 8:00 that night and then went to our victory party to await the results. How sweet they were! We go 4,280,689 yes votes, or 64.8% and 2,326,167 no votes, or 35.2%. We swept every county in the state, except for San Francisco—which was to be expected; Kern which we lost by 650 votes out of 92,000 cast, and Yolo, which is just outside Sacramento. Many bureaucrats live there.

The passage of Proposition 13 made competing Proposition moot; but just for the record, Proposition 8 lost anyway. The figures on 8 were: 2,972,424 yes votes, or 47%, and 3,345,621 no votes, or 53%.

The victory of Proposition 13 and the defeat of Proposition 8 were not the only notable events of the day. My friend Jimmy Ware upset Dixon Arnett in the Republican primary for state controller. The result was Ware: 1,039,43, or 52.9%; Arnett 924,695, or 47.1%-. Arnett was a very well known guy who had represented the Redwood City area in the Assembly for eight years and was Republican whip in the Assembly. In the words of the August 5, 1978 San Francisco Chronicle, Ware's "only claim to pre-primary fame was that he was closely associated with tax reformer Howard Jarvis." And that was true. Jimmy's entire campaign was based on his getting in newspaper pictures next to me as often as possible. Ware spent $3,050 on the campaign, while Arnett spent $236,000. In other words, Arnett, who was very well known, spent 77 times as much money as Ware, who was practically an unknown! And Ware won --- just because people knew he was a friend of mine. Jimmy lost to the incumbent, Ken Cory, in November, but Ware's beating Arnett had to be just about the upset of the ages.

It was also significant that the two Republican candidates for governor who had belatedly endorsed 13, Evelle Younger and Ed Davis, finished one-two in the primary that day, while Pete Wilson and Ken Maddy, who were opposed to 13, were way back. For that matter, 13 ran way ahead of the gubernatorial candidates. We had 4.3 million yes votes, compared to 3.3 million for all the Democratic candidates for governor and 2.5 million for all the Republican candidates.

There was one more figure that meant a lot to me. A total of 6.84 million voters went to the polls on June 6: one-half million more than the number who voted in the 1976 primary. On top of that, 1976 was a presidential election year, when voter turnout traditionally is higher than in off years; and in 1976 both Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown were running for president, which increased the turnout even more than in other presidential primaries. Nevertheless, we got half a million more people to take the time and trouble to register their opinions. That was really gratifying to me. Whether they voted for 13 or not, at least 13 made them care enough to go to the polls. And two-thirds of them did vote for 13. They showed the politicians that they cared enough to vote, and the way they voted showed they wanted to take matters back into their own hands. That was the real triumph of 13.

After all, a government is supposed to be run by the people. We've developed in this country an apathetic philosophy that says: "I'm only one person. I can't do anything—why should I take my time?! The lack of interest means the people have lost faith in their elected officials. They have lost sight of the fact that if this system continues as it has, it's going to change American citizens into subjects.

What it comes down to is this: is it better or is it worse to get wide participation in the political process?

On the same day that 13 passed, a young conservative named Jeffery Bell ousted Senator Clifford Case, who was relatively liberal, in the New Jersey Republican primary. Bell, who was once an aide to Reagan, said his victory was due to "the tidal wave of tax revolt." And in Ohio, 117 of 198 school finance measures were rejected by the voters. Proposition 13 fever was catching.

At our party on election night, the band played "The Impossible Dream." And that's what it was.

Time said on June 19, 1978 that 13 was "a middle-class tax revolt." I don't think that's accurate at all. This was across the board. We got 40% of the minority and lower-income vote. We got about 60% of the vote of the middle class. We got practically all of the vote of the wealthy. When you roll up a 65% vote in a state the size of California, there's no way to say that this was an action of any particular class.

I think the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor voted for 13 because I think people from every class resented the fact that the government was stealing too much of their money. I think the general idea in California and all over the country, with rich and poor alike, is that the government is too invasive; it has too much control; it passes too many laws; it curbs too many freedoms.

I was glad that 13 had so much appeal to wealthy people. More often than not, the rich make more money because they're brighter—as far as I've observed. I believe in the capacity of the man who starts at the bottom and gets to be president of GM. He doesn't get up there because he's a dummy. I think it was Lincoln who said that you can't help the poor man by destroying the rich man. I think it's sort of a sad thing in the United States that we permit ourselves to think that the rich are enemies of the country. There are many labor leaders who are unscrupulous. There are many labor union men who cheat their employers, and there are many clerks who shoplift from the stores where they work. on balance, the rich guy is at least as good as anyone else.

I can look at myself and say, if I were wealthy, would I have voted for 13? Yes. If I were a black in Compton trying to buy a house, would I have voted for 13? Yes. If I were a carpenter siting on my butt because there wasn't enough construction to provide me with a job, would I have voted for 13? Yes, of course I would. And that's how they voted.

I guess nobody chose me to lead the parade. I guess I chose myself. If I hadn't done it, I don't think anybody else in California would have done it. Nobody. The proof of it is, on one else did it.

My taxes don't worry me. I'm worried about the guy who can't pay his taxes. That was one of the big advantages I had over anybody in politics: I had no axes to grind. I went up before an audience of 200 or 50 or 2,500 and I told 'em just what I felt. If they didn't like it, the hell with 'em. I wasn't running for a damn thing, Anybody out there that I talked to, there was nothing they could do for me. What all these people were doing—if they did what I asked them to—was helping themselves. Whatever they did, they didn't do for me, because I'm not going to get a penny out of it. All I was doing was showing them how to help themselves. But politicians are afraid to tell the truth, because they're afraid they'll lose votes. I don't care whether I lose 4 votes or 4 million. If the people were not smart enough to save their own necks after I told them how, what else could I do?

So I kept plugging away. Estelle and many of my friends wanted me to give up. I was working my tail off and spending my own money, and for most of that time all I had to show for it was a bad press. Their cartoons implied that I was thief or a nut or a fool. And so did their stories. But I have a hell of a thick skin. If the stories that appeared about me had appeared about the average guy in the street, they would have bothered the hell out of him. but they didn't bother me that much. They bothered Estelle a lot more.

I though we could win. And we proved we could. Yes, we did it.

The politicians have heard that the people are fed up. The people's mandate has been registered.

As co-author and chief spokesman for the Jarvis-Gann initiative, he helped engender one of the most dramatic tax reforms in California political history. The passage of Proposition 13 allowed many who were being driven out of their homes by spiraling property taxes to keep those residences. And it has become the watermark for tax reform nationwide. This victory, capping a decade of crusading for less government, is deserving of our highest tribute.

In the old days—that is, before 13—people in general either laughed at me and called me a nut or ignored me altogether. All of that changed , starting at 8:01 p.m. on Tuesday, June 6, 1978.

All at once I was the darling of the press and the politicians. I was swamped with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of requests for interviews from the media and with calls from politicians not just in California, but all over the country, who wanted me to meet with them, make an appearance with them, have my picture taken with them.

After all the abuse I had taken from the press, it was nice to finally get a little praise from them. Time said I was "a national folk hero" and put me on the cover of its June 19, 1978 issue. That same week, Newsweek had the Proposition 13 victory as its cover story and said the tax revolt had become "the new gut issue in American politics," and that "the California tax revolt had raced the middle-class pulse of the country as feverishly as anything since the invention of the station wagon." On July 17, 1978, Business Week decided that California had "staged the most significant tax revolt of modern times."

A couple of impartial polls showed we had struck a responsive chord nationwide, as well as in California. According to a Gallup poll conducted for Newsweek and published in its June 19 edition, 57% of Americans wanted their property taxes reduced, 30% did not want their property taxes lowered, and 13% were undecided. A nation-wide New York Times-CBS poll published on June 28 revealed that there was even greater support for Proposition 13 outside of California that there was in the state. According to that poll, 53% of California residents said they would vote for a Proposition 13-type measure, while 34% were against, but nationwide the figures were 51% for Proposition 13 and 24% against, or better than 2-to-1 in favor. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times poll showed that support for 13 continued to grow in California, from a 41 to 34 margin in April, to 52 to 35 in May, to 56 to 36 in June, to 65 to 30 in August.

A few days after the election, I received a letter that meant a lot to me. It was handwritten, dated June 8:

The letter was signed "Dick Nixon." I never expected it. I hadn't been in touch with him since about 1972. I thought it was a kind thing of him to do, having all the experience that he has had in politics, and all of his ups and downs. Later Mr. Nixon sent me an autographed copy of his memoirs, and I called him. We had a long conversation, about forty-five minutes or so, recalling our times together in politics.

A week or so after the election, Senator Hayakawa invited me to come to Washington to meet with the Republican senators, and I went. We had a long session, where a dozen or so of them asked me all about taxation and tax relief, and I told them about 13 and what I thought it meant: that the average citizen wants some relief from the burden of taxes.

Alan Cranston, the other senator from California, wanted to introduce me to the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill, and I agreed to talk to them, too. Russell Long form Louisiana, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, impressed the hell out of me. He was about the sharpest guy I met in Washington. I feel that as head of the Finance Committee, he has more power than anyone else in Washington—including the President. One thing Russell Long said that impressed me: "The federal government is totally out of control. We do not know what we are doing her. We don't have any idea how much we're spending, how much we're taking in, how many agencies we have, how many programs we have. None of us know." He said there's only one solution, and that's to write "sunset laws, so that there's a date for every federal program that says, 'expire, expire, expire"'—unless congress takes specific action to keep the program in business. I also thought Ed Muskie from Maine was a nice guy, and he said he though we were on the right track with 13.

The Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives had on one who impressed me nearly as much as Russell Long did. As far as I'm concerned, Tip O'Neill, the speaker of the House, is a run-of-the-mill political hack who has few scruples and not much of anything else to qualify him to hold power. He's a typical ward-heeler politician, a real wheeler-dealer. I don't think he was too anxious to meet me, but he didn't want to be in the position of letting it be known that some other Democrats wanted him to meet me and he refused. I do think he was pretty happy when I left—not only to see me go, but because he had learned a hell of a lot about taxes. He said. "Do you know how much you have shaken this Congress up?"

I said, "I hope so. You've gotten the first tremor, and you're going to get the real shock wave pretty soon."

Jim Wright from Texas the Majority Leader of the House, and a guy named John Brademas from Indiana, the Majority Whip—and a guy who is absolutely convinced that the Kentucky Derby is a hat—were there, and so was the rest of the House leadership. I think they understood when I got finished talking to them that this was dead serious, and they were just not going to be able to brush it off.

Evidently, Cranston or someone tried to make an appointment for me to see President Carter. I never said anything to anybody about my meeting the President. I never mentioned it, and I never intended to mention it. I thought it would have been presumptuous of me to ask to see the President.

I understand that the decision whether or not to see me presented a dilemma for the President. It shouldn't have. I think it's up to the President of the United States to do his job as he sees fit, and not the way that other people want him to. He decided not to see me, and that was fine with me. However, I would not have met with his staff unless he was there, too. the same was true of members of the Senate and the House: It was okay with me if they had people from their staffs A there when I talked to them, but I wasn't going to meet with staff members alone. I had only so many days in Washington, and I wasn't there to hold remedial classes on taxation for politician's aides. I was there to meet elected officials. Period. Elected officials are the only ones who could implement 13.

As I said, I felt President Carter should decide who he wants to meet, and I respect his decision not to meet me. If I had met him, I probably would have said, "Hello, Mr. President, I'm delighted to meet you." and I would have shut up. If he had asked me some questions, I would have answered them. But it wasn't my place to go in there and offer my opinion without having him solicit it, or to tell him what I had done or how smart I was. I wouldn't do that to the President of the United States, whether I liked him or not.

I agreed to let Senator Cranston introduce me to leading Democrats in Washington because it was to my advantage to meet as many officeholders as I could ' regardless of party, and because I have known Cranston for many years. He and I are longtime political acquaintances. we've debated each other all over the state during the last fifteen or twenty years, and, unlike some other politicians, Alan Cranston never treated me like I was a kook. He's a decent man. That doesn't mean I agree with him; politically, on most things I don't. And I think he showed a lack of guts by campaigning all out against 13 and then turning around as soon as he saw the votes come in and start saying nice things about it. I think Alan Cranston always has been a big spender and always will be a big spender. I hope someone who is more fiscally conservative knocks him off in 1980 when his term expires. If I had been in his position I would have stuck to my guns after 13 passed, continued saying how terrible it was, and taken my chances. I guess that's why I'm not in politics.

While I was in Washington, I appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 18. Imagine, Howard Jarvis from Magna, Utah, being interviewed on "Meet the Press" by bill Monroe of NBC News; Jack Nelson, the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times; Neal Pierce of the National Journal, and Martha Angel of Newspaper Enterprise Association.

One night during my visit to Washington, I went to the Lincoln Memorial. I can't describe the sense of awe I felt, looking at Abraham Lincoln lit up there in the night. I knew that in my own small way I had accomplished something important, and now here I was, in the monument to one of the greatest Americans.

It was also while I was in Washington that a little old gal from California came up to me, put her arms around me, and said, "I just want to tell you you saved me $70 a month on my property taxes, and with that $70 a month I can afford to put my son through college." I don't think very many people would know how to handle having people say things like that to them. I had never met that lady before, and I'm sure I'll never see her again, but what she said make the tears come to my eyes. I had a hard time answering her. The press and the rest of the people who don't know me like to describe me as a tough guy; a "crusty curmudgeon," as Time called me on June 19, 1978. How little they know.

As a result of Proposition 13, I met more great people—more honest-to-goodness fine people who love the country and want to help it. People who want to pay an honest amount of tax, but no more. They're not chiselers; they're not out to cheat anybody. It has been one of the inspirations of my life, and it helped make all the work, all the money and all the ridicule over the years worthwhile; there's a class of people in this country who are still honest-to-God 100% thoroughbred Americans, who don't lie to anybody, don't have any axes to grind, they don't ask anybody for anything, and they'll help you all they can if they believe in you and what you're doing.

I had some experiences after 13 passed that very few people are privileged to have. A few weeks after the election, I was in Chicago making the rounds of the talk shows. I had been on the go all day and half the night. I was tired. My voice was beginning to give out. Finally I said to the guy who was driving me around, "I've go to have a drink." It was late at night, dark and gloomy, and we weren't in a very good section of town.

My driver stopped in front of a little neighborhood bar called Claus's Bar. We walked in. There were four or five guys in there, none of them in suits or anything. There was a little guy behind the counter. I ordered a vodka and he gave it to me. He wasn't paying much attention to us. Then—all of a sudden—he looked up at me and he said, It can't be. There's no way it can be."

I said, "What are you talking about?"

He said, "You look just like a guy named Howard Jarvis, but

I thought this guy was going to jump over the bar. He immediately got every customer in the bar to come over and shake hands with me. He went upstairs and got his wife and two kids to come down and meet me. He told me all about himself—he was born in Germany and was forced to serve in the German army during World War II. He got captured and spent time in a prison camp. as soon as the war was over, he left for the United States, where he had heard there was freedom. He found freedom her, and he was as patriotic about this country as anyone I've ever met.

After a while, I laid down a $10 bill to pay for the drinks, Claus looked at me and said, "What am I going to do with that?"

I said, "What do you mean, what are you going to do with it? It's money. It's to pay for the drinks,"

Claus said, "Well, because then I'll have to pay tax on it. I've never fudged a nickel on my income tax. I can't take your money because then I'd have to pay taxes on it, and I'm not going to use your money to pay taxes.

The tipper was that later that night I told the story on a radio show in Chicago. I talked to Claus a couple of days later, and he said he had people lined up waiting to have a drink in his bar because I had been there.

I also received some official recognition that meant a lot to me. I won the Daniel Webster Award form the International Platform Association in Washington, D.C. It was given to me "for the most influential words spoken concerning our nation's most important problem: taxes and government spending."

The California State Senate Rules Committee, consisting of twelve members—both Republicans and Democrats—passed a resolution honoring Paul Gann and me for our "determination and commitment" to "the needs of California citizens. The people of this state have been heard, and through their perseverance, these needs will continue to be met in the future."

One of the most exciting things that happened to me after 13 passed was when I went to Owensboro, Kentucky, on June 24, 1978, to receive the Golden Plate award from the American Academy of Achievement. Several of these awards are given each year to "American's captains of achievement" who are "dedicated to the inspiration of youth, to raise their sights high, to excel in their endeavors."

That award put me in fast company. The other recipients for 1978 included Colonel Ulrich Wegener, who led the German military effort that resulted in the rescue of eighty-six hostages from a Lufthansa jet in Somalia; William H. Webster, the new head of the FBI; Stansfield Turner, the head of the CIA; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys; Judge Frank M. Johnson, who was nominated to be head of the FBI, but had to turn it down for health reasons; the Reverend Jesse Jackson; Gordie Howe, the hockey star; Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum; Clark Clifford; Steve Cauthen, the jockey; General Omar Bradley, and Attorney General Griffin Bell.

I never had such a thrilling time in my life. The banquet was beautiful. The quests were beautiful. Ed Asner was the emcee. It was a marvelous thing to have Edward Teller come up to me and put his arms around me and say, "Howard, you're the greatest man in the country." All in all it was just a fantastic trip, one of the highlights of my life.

Later, on January 1, 1979, Time named me one of four runners-up for the Man of the Year award. Me, along with President Carter, the new Pope, and—oh, yes, the Reverend Jim Jones. Here's how Time described what I had accomplished:

And KNX Radio, the CBS station in Los Angeles, named me their 1978 Man of the Year because I

Since 13 passed, I have crisscrossed the country again and again to lead the continuing fight for tax reduction and to talk about what we had accomplished in California and are now beginning to accomplish nationally. Just to give you an idea, here's my schedule for a few days:

August 17: I flew from Los Angeles to Fort Worth. That night I addressed a rally sponsored by the Taxpayers Association of Fort Worth, then I flew on to New York.

August 18: I held a news conference on the steps of City Hall. In the afternoon I taped interviews for radio station WOR and WABC-TV. Then I flew to Boston, and that night I appeared live on a radio show there.

August 19: I gave a newspaper interview, held a news conference at historic Faneuil Hall, and met with some people from the Boston area who are working to reduce taxes.

August 21: First thing in the morning, I appeared live on the Today Show on KBC-TV from Washington. Then I was the speaker at a Newsmakers' Breakfast at the National Press club. After that I held a news conference on the steps of the Internal Revenue Service headquarters. At lunchtime I appeared live on a local television show. Later that day, I traveled to Philadelphia.

August 22: I started the day with a live appearance on a local television show in Philadelphia. Then I held a news conference outside Independence Hall. At noon I appeared live on another television show. from there I went to the airport and flew to Pittsburgh, where I held a news conference, taped a television interview, and then that night went on a radio program.

August 23: I appeared live on a television show called "Good Morning, Pittsburgh." Then I flew to Chicago. At midday I taped a television interview and held a news conference, In the afternoon I went live on one radio show, and that night I went on another radio talk show.

August 24: That morning I made live appearances on two Chicago television stations. Then I flew to Detroit, That afternoon I had a press conference in Detroit. In the evening I addressed the Michigan Tax Assessors Conference in Cadillac, outside of Detroit.

August 25: I flew from Detroit to Seattle, held a news conference in Seattle, and finally arrived back in Los Angeles that night.

I thrive on this kind of schedule, because fighting for a cause I truly care about keeps me fired up. I love it. When I stop giving speeches and holding press conferences and going on radio and television shows I'll be dead. Until then I'm going to keep at it.

The end of the campaign also brought about the end of my relationship with Paul Gann. It was a relationship that was formed back in the summer of 1977 and had a goal from the very start: qualifying a property-tax initiative for the ballot and getting it approved. We did what we set out to do, but our partnership was to end on June 6, 1978; win, lose, or draw.

I wish that's all I had to say about the end of our partnership, but—unfortunately—it's not. Since then Gann has been quoted as saying I'm "irrational"; that I have "diarrhea of the mouth"; that I have "a very difficult problem with the English language. It's hard for him [me] to get above a two-letter word. He says III and 'me' very well," and things like that. Gann also said, "Howard tried to climb the tree all his life and never succeeded. He was an utter failure until Proposition 13."

To set the record straight, let me start with Gann's last comment: that I was an "utter failure" before Proposition 13. Unlike Gann, I was a successful businessman, and I didn't go into tax reform in a desperate attempt to find a way to earn a living. I could have bought and sold Paul Gann any day in the last half century I spent sixteen years of my life fighting for tax reduction, long before Gann knew what that meant. He was Johnny-come-lately who arrived on the scene after I and the other members of the United Organizations of Taxpayers had done all the heavy work. We would have won with or without Paul Gann. But because I invited him to join us, he was able to share in the limelight. If I had not extended that invitation to him, nobody would have ever head of Paul Gann. If we hadn't bankrolled him and carried him during the signature campaign, few would have ever heard of him.

Paul attacks me out of jealousy. Jealousy is a very sad disease. I'm sorry to say he suffers from it. I understand why he resented me all during the 13 campaign and why he does to this day, and I sympathize with him. Both of our names were on the amendment because we signed it together, although Phil Watson and I wrote it years before Paul Gann came along. I tried my best to see that Gann got his share of the publicity. three times a week during the campaign, we put out press releases with both of our names on them. After all, it was the Jarvis-Gann amendment. But sometimes the press didn't mention his name. He was a little sensitive about that, which I understood.

There were two reasons why I got 90% of the publicity for 13. First, Paul was a newcomer. I had been in it for fifteen years and he was really in it for only one year. Secondly, I have a different kind of personality than he does. He's sort of a soft, farmer-type guy, which is fine. But I'm a different kind of personality. The press centered on me because I was more controversial and more outspoken and better copy and more show business and so forth than he was. Paul naturally felt that I was getting the lion's share of publicity. He didn't seem to understand—and I didn't care if he did nor not—that I had been getting this kind of publicity for many years.

During the campaign, Paul even went so far as to issue a press release saying I had hired the firm of Butcher and Forde to get me publicity because that's what I was after. I think Gann really thought that was the truth. But it wasn't that at all. I wanted Butcher and Forde in the 13 campaign because they could raise money and they produced the finest, most effective television commercials I've seen in my life. They hired top talent. It cost us about $25,000 to produce a thirty-second commercial for television. I thought that was a little high until I looked into it and I saw what the opposition was doing for $10,000. our commercials were effective for $25,000, and theirs were lousy for $10,000.

Gann also failed to understand that butcher and Forde didn't charge us a nickel for their services—not a nickel. I met them through the campaign of State Senator John Briggs for governor in late 1977. John Briggs was one of the first major candidates to endorse 13. Butcher and Forde thought they could piggyback John Briggs on the campaign for 13—or vice versa. They could send out mailers for both John Briggs and Proposition 13 at no extra cost—except the price of paper. They were just clever enough to see the possibility. So they came to me and put the idea to me. They were talking about 3 or 4 or 5 million mailers at virtually no cost to us. I'd have been a horse's butt to have turned them down. Once Briggs dripped out of the race early in 1978, Butcher and Forde spent full-time on 13. Just for the record, what they got out of the campaign was the commissions on the broadcast time and newspaper space they bought. They got a 15% commission on every ad they placed, which is standard in the advertising business. But if I, as a private individual, had handled the ads, I would have had to pay the extra 15% to the newspapers and the radio and television stations. That's the way it works. We couldn't have saved a nickel by handling our own advertising, unless we set up a phony advertising agency, which I refused to do. But Gann never was able to grasp the fact that Butcher and Forde gave us a great deal and we didn't have to pay them at all for what they did.

Still, I want to give credit where credit is due. Paul was a full partner on 13. He was out there collecting signatures and making speeches. Whether his speeches were good or bad, he was out there making them. But the fact remains that there has to be a leader. I was the guy that sparkplugged 13.

Gann had a little different objective in this than I did. He said to me many times that he wanted us to form a major tax organization after the campaign for 13 was over. The way he had it planned, he and I would run this operation and become highly paid officials in the tax movement. I told him I couldn't do that. I told him I had established a long time ago that I was not going to be paid for my work on taxation, that nobody else in the United Organizations was going to be paid anything, and that this had to do with our credibility. If he wanted to put together an organization himself and have the members pay him that was all right with me. He and I just had different viewpoints.

I'm a little skeptical about partnerships in so-called quasi-public affairs like tax reform, because then each partner is bond by what the other partner does. If you file a financial disclosure statement with a state or federal agency and your partner louses it up, you each get blamed for it. I know what the United Organizations does with our money. I know that when we make a report every dime is in there. There is no monkey business. There are no stamps taken out and no envelopes taken out. I know that.

Besides, after June 6, I decided to go big league and try this on a national scale, at the suggestion of Butcher and Forde. I didn't see any place for Paul Gann in something of this magnitude. We never had an argument or a bad word during the 13 campaign, but I became aware of his capacities. He thinks in terms of a few thousand dollars; we think in terms of millions. Some people think big and some people think small.

Paul has a right—just like I have a right—to do whatever he wants to do and to say whatever he wants to say. We are not together now; we have not been together since 13 won, and we are never going to be together again. Since 13 passed, I haven't been on a television show with Gann. I have had television stations invite me to be on with Gann, but I turned them down. I told them they could have Gann, or they could have me; but if they were going to have Gann, I didn't want to be on the show.

In November 1978, I heard Gann had gone to the real estate people and convinced them to give him $50,000 or so to gather signatures for what he called a "Spirit of 13" initiative in California. The first part of the amendment provides that any increase in state and local government spending must be limited to the annual rise in the cost of living and the growth in state population. I can't support that because I think that having taxes and spending increase at the same rate as inflation is a big mistake. Government spending causes inflation. so if you allow spending to increase at the same rate as inflation, you're never going to curb inflation. It's like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Gann launched that petition drive with a lot of fanfare. He had hordes of realtors outside of the polling places on November 7, 1978, and he claimed they would collect enough signatures that day to qualify his initiative for the ballot. The, after the election in November, you didn't hear anything about that for months. The reason was simple; they had a real hard time getting the signatures. Finally, on March 16, 1979—more than four months after Election Day—Gann announced that he had collected about 850,000 signatures. Later it was revealed that he and his group had spent $537,194 to get those signatures compared to about $28,500 it cost us to gather 1.5 million signatures for Proposition 13. His initiative will be on the ballot in November 1979. I don't expect to be involved with it.

On September 22, 1978, while I was observing my seventy-fifth birthday by speaking to a group of taxpayers in Cleveland, received a delightful birthday present: the California Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 13 was legal. The only thing that marred their decision was a "concurring and dissenting opinion"—which is sort of like someone going into the polling booth and voting both yes and no on 13—by Chief Justice rose Bird. Bird's dissent was based on her theory that the provision in 13 which allowed higher assessed valuations on property that changed hands after March 1975 "violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution by treating identical or similarly situated property tax payers in an unfair and unequal way." That was the same old argument that had been used without success against us during the campaign. Whether Rose Bird and the other opponents of 13 want to admit it or not, there is nothing wrong with allowing a buyer to voluntarily determine his assessed valuation to tax purposes by deciding what price to pay for the house.

I expected the opposition to fight 13 in court after we won at the election, and they did. I expected the Supreme Court to rule in our favor, and they did. I wasn't even surprised that a leftist like Rose Bird—who was almost certainly Jerry Brown's worst appointment—would vote against us. But I had one hole card, just in case we had lost in court; I was going to call for a statewide revolt against paying property taxes if they had declared 13 illegal. If the court had ruled against 13, it would have been a political decision to thwart the will of the people. If the property owners had refused to pay their property taxes, the government couldn't have taken away their homes for five years. Long before then, the people who run state and local governments would have caved in if the people who voted for 13 refused to pay their property taxes.

On November 7, 1978, Jerry Brown was elected to a second term as governor of California. Brown received 3.8 million votes to 2.5 million for Attorney general Evelle Younger, who was the Republican candidate for governor. Brown's total vote and his margin of victory were both state records. Even though I am a registered Republican ad have considered myself a Republican all my life, I was one of the 3.8 million Californians who voted for Jerry Brown. It was a very difficult thing for me to do, but ultimately I felt that he would do a better job of implementing 13 than Younger would have.

I have known Jerry since he was on the Los Angeles Community College Board and was running for secretary of state back in 1970. I used to attend meetings of various boards and agencies, and that's how I met him. During that 1970 campaign, Jerry was walking from house to house, seeking votes, and he said that every other voter asked him about property taxes. One Sunday morning Estelle and I were home and Jerry called and said he wanted to talk to me about property taxes. He said, "I wonder if I could make an appointment with you to discuss them."

He said, "Well, you know how campaigns are—the sooner the better. I'll take only an hour of your time." Of course I knew it would take a lot longer than that, but that's all he thought it would take. It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and I said, "How about this morning?" He said he would be right over.

Pretty soon Jerry arrived and I said to him, "Have you had breakfast?" He said he hadn't. So Estelle fixed him breakfast. Later on she fixed us lunch, and that night she fixed dinner for us. I spent all day telling Jerry everything I knew about taxes. I didn't care whether he was a Democrat, and Pat Brown's son. I would have spent that much time with anybody running for office on either ticket.

(Brown recalls: "I met Howard because he was around local politics I went to see him that Sunday because I wanted to start an initiative to abolish property taxes for low- and moderate income homeowners. Howard didn't like that because he wanted to give tax relief to all property owners, including business. I didn't think the state could afford that.")

Brown campaigned against 13 until the last few weeks before the election, when he saw it was going to pass. Meanwhile, Younger announced in late April, about six weeks before the election, that he was going to vote for 13, but he felt he couldn't campaign for it because it would be his job to defend it if it were challenged in court. Younger said, "My present intention is to vote for Proposition 13. However, I cannot take an advocate's role concerning Proposition 13 without diminishing the effectiveness of my efforts as the state's chief law officer. I can't be both a crusader and get my job done as attorney general." In my opinion, that was a lukewarm statement at best, and Younger was Casper Milquetoast on 13.

The night 13 passed and Younger won the Republican nomination for governor, I stopped by his party at the Century Plaza. I said to Younger, "You had better get on 13, Evelle. I'll tell you what: I think you've got about an hour. If you don't come out right now, Brown's going to beat you to it." I also told Younger that night, "Inasmuch as Brown has campaigned against 13, the only chance you have in my opinion is to come out strong for 13, so you can make a campaign between yourself and Governor Brown on 13."

Younger said it sounded like a good idea, but he would have to discuss it with his campaign committee. I knew right then he wasn't going to use 13 as his issue because his committee was like all Republican committees: if you take something up with a high-level Republican group, they'll be discussing it into the next century. All my life I have observed that the Republicans never knew when they had a good issue. They have rocks in their head. On many occasions when they had a good chance to knock off a Democrat for a change, the Republicans managed to be stupid enough to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Besides that, few Republican activists had much use for me, so I knew they wouldn't want to be in a position of having Younger's victory possible be due to me and 13. I think a lot of them would rather have seen him lose—and they got their wish.

The night 13 won, Brown, who several months earlier had called it a "monster", said it presented a "great opportunity." He also said, "We have our marching orders from the people. This is the strongest expression of the democratic process in a decade. Things will never be the same."

I have always suspected that in the privacy of the voting booth, Younger voted against 13. I think he has been marinated so long in the political grease that he's against anything that cuts taxes. I think Brown probably voted against 13, too, but at least he didn't say he was for it. Besides that, I don't think brown was all that unhappy when 13 won. After all, he came to office in 1975 talking about "an era of limits", and setting an example of frugality by driving a Plymouth instead of a limousine, refusing to live in the governor's mansion, and things like that.

Right after 13, won, Newsweek quoted one of Brown's unnamed critics as saying. "Within a month, you'll think it was Brown's proposition." Sure enough, a Los Angeles Times poll conducted three weeks after the election revealed that a majority of Californians believed Brown supported 13, and that more people thought Brown backed 13 than felt that Younger had been in favor of it. People started referring to Brown as "Jerry Jarvis", which, of course, amused me quite a bit.

While I was visiting Washington shortly after 13 passe, Senator Cranston called me and told me Brown wanted to talk to me. He gave me Brown's private number. I called him, and the first thing Brown said to me was, "Do you remember that Sunday when I came over to your house?"

I said, "Sure I do, Jerry, I've thought about it many times."

"Well", he said, "I guess I missed the boat. I should have gotten on tax reduction then."

I said, "You're in a wonderful position to see to it that it's done now."

He said, "I'd like to have a couple of meetings with you at your convenience."

I said, "You're the governor—it's at your convenience." And later on we did meet a few times.

Then a little later, while I was in Chicago, Brown called me. "I just want to tell you employment in California has gone up 1 1/2% since 13 passed, unemployment has gone down 1%, and inflation is going down in California, instead of up like it is in the rest of the country." Naturally, I was very pleased to hear that.

About six weeks before the gubernatorial election in November, I said publicly that Younger had defended 13 in court, that he had defended it successfully, and that he was entitled to credit for that. I also said in speeches around the state that Governor Brown had proposed a budget that showed a decrease for the first time in seventeen years, that he had put a cap on state employees' salaries, and that he was entitled to credit for what he had done.

On October 3 I went to lunch with Younger and some of his top aides. They asked me to tape a television commercial for hi, and I did. I praised Younger for presenting "a brilliant legal brief: to the State Supreme Court, which helped persuade them to rule in favor of Proposition 13.

Meanwhile, Brown's people found out about the Younger commercial and they asked me to film one for Brown, too. And I did. In that line, I said, Brown "imposed a hiring freeze on state agencies. Then he did something really remarkable. He signed a budget which actually went down instead of up. Sure, I wrote Proposition 13, but it takes a dedicated governor to make it work." That was pretty much the script that Brown and his staff asked me to read.

When Younger and his group learned that I had made commercials for both candidates, they were furious. It created quite a little hassle, but I didn't pay much attention to it. All the Republicans started calling me and asking me why I had endorsed Brown, and Democrats were calling me and asking why I had endorsed Younger. I said to everyone who asked me about it, "You can't read, and you didn't listen to what I said. I didn't endorse either one. I never said at any time I was for either one. I never said at any I was for either one of them. I said the public was entitled to know what each one of them had done with respect to 13, and I was just telling them what Brown had done and what Younger had done. After that it's up to the voters to make up their minds."

But, as usual, a lot of Republicans didn't understand what I was doing and didn't like what I was doing. Which was their tough luck. Just like when I did the commercial for Brown, a lot of Republicans had been incensed when I met with Cranston and some of the Democrats while I was in Washington right after the election. They would say, "We sure are disappointed with you. We hear you met with Cranston and talked to Jerry Brown on the phone. That's a fine thing for a man who has pretended to be a Republican all his life. You must be a fink. A faker. What right have you got to talk to Jerry Brown or Alan Cranston? What business have you got visiting the Democratic leadership in Congress?"

To people like that, I said, "My object is to implement 13. And I have to implement it with the officers who are in power. It just so happens that brown is the only governor we have. You may not know that, but he is. And Alan Cranston is the third most powerful man in the U.S. Senate. I don't agree with Alan Cranston's politics, and I never did. I'd like to see someone else in that seat. But as long as he's in it, I'm going to work with him if he will support tax reduction and work with me. I can't implement this thing with people who are not in office." But so many conservatives are so narrow-minded and dumb that they don't understand that. I'm not for Cranston any more than I ever was.

My job is to get support for tax reduction. I'm not part of any political party when it comes to tax relief. I've always been a Republican. I'm a Republican now, but the Republican party never did anything for me.

Neither the Republican nor the Democratic party ever turns down a vote. They don't day, "You can't vote for us because you're a gangster or a whore or a pimp or a garbageman or whatever." Everybody seeks votes wherever they can find them, and that's what we're doing. I am trying to get everyone I can, including and especially elected officials, no matter which party they belong to.

I made statements for several dozen candidates in the November elections. Some of them were Republicans, some were Democrats, some were from the smaller parties, and some were running against each other. But if they were for 13, I was for them. It comes back to the same point: only elected officials can implement 13, so I had to go with the ones who said they were for 13. Reporters and other uninformed people asked me how I could be for two candidates who were running against each other, and I replied, "How can I do it? Easily and in good conscience. Both of these candidates say they favor tax reduction, and that is my target."

I used the same basis for making endorsements all over the country: how the candidate stood on 13, not what party he belonged to. If candidates committed themselves to 13, I campaigned with them or sent out a letter asking people to vote for them, or sent them contributions. If they refused to commit to 13 or if they hemmed and hawed, I did what I could to defeat them.

One example of what I did during the campaign came while I was fishing in Wyoming in September. It was just before the primary there, and both candidates for the republican nomination to the U.S. Senate came to visit me and seek my support within a few hours of each other. I made statements on behalf of each candidate. After Al Simpson won the primary, I reaffirmed my support for him. He won the Senate seat in November by a margin of 8-to-5 over the Democratic candidate, Raymond Whitaker.

In California in the November election, I campaigned for six candidates for Congress, four for seats in the State Senate, and ten candidates for the Assembly. As it happened, all twenty candidates were Republicans. sent out letters telling the voters that these candidates had endorsed the idea of 13, and that their opponents were "a threat to our Proposition 13 victory." Fourteen of the twenty candidates I campaigned for in California won.

A few days before the election in November I was home with the flu. There was a knock at the door. Estelle was out, I wasn't feeling weak, and my first inclination was not to answer it. The knocking got persistent. Finally I opened the door, and it was Jerry. He had Gray Davis, his top aide, and another staff member with him. Jerry said to me, "I just thought I'd come by and have a chat with you."

I said, "Come on in." I had my pajamas on, and I put on a robe over them. I didn't have any shoes or socks on. So I was sitting there in my pajamas and my robe and my bare feet, talking to the governor. About an hour later, Estelle came home. She was awful mad at me because I hadn't gotten dressed.

Jerry and I proceeded to discuss every aspect of 13. I told him the only surplus being discussed was the state surplus, when as a matter of fact I had information that practically every city, county, and school district in the state had a surplus. There was something like 485 cities and 1,150 school districts in this state, in addition to the 58 counties, and if my information was correct, they were hiding another $2 billion in surpluses from the taxpayers. Brown said that sounded like something he should check into, and I think he did check and found out that most of what I said was true.

I pointed out to him that because most young people had not been able to buy a home for fifteen years, the owners of residential property, not only in California, but around the country, are getting older and older and finding it more and more difficult to pay their taxes, as their fixed incomes are eroded by inflation, on top of ever-steeper taxes. I said, "You've got to understand that from now on, the property tax will never be able to pay for more than the police and fire and the lights and streets and the sewage and garbage collection. Property tax revenues will never be able to pay for more than these basic property-related needs. so you must start looking for other ways of financing schools and welfare and all the rest." Jerry said that was the first time he had ever heard the people's dilemma expressed in those terms. He got the point, and that's why I like Jerry; he's fair and has an open mind.

We discussed the size of the state surplus, how much of it should be returned to the people; how to streamline government, and everything else under the sun. For several hours we sat there talking in my living room, me in my robe and pajamas, and Jerry in a sport shirt and jeans. Pretty soon it was about 4130 in the afternoon, and a television show I had taped earlier was coming on. I said, "I want to watch this show I'm on, but you fellows don't have to stick around to see it you don't want to."

I had forgotten what I had said on the damn show when it was taped. So the show went along pretty good, but after a while, the reporter said to me, "What do you think of Jerry Brown?-

I said, "Well, I'll tell you; out there in Hollywood we used to have a horse called Hi-Ho Silver. And Hi-Ho Silver used to make circles faster than any animal that ever lived, but Governor Brown makes those circles even faster than Hi-Ho Silver did."

Jerry looked t me and he said, "Did you say that?"

He smiled at me and at Estelle, who was there, too, and he said, "Well, that's not too bad."

The last thing Jerry said to me that day before he left was, "Now, I don't want you to worry about me implementing 13. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to implement 13, both in the spirit and the letter of the law. I want you to know that. I give you my word." And, by God, I think he has been doing a good job of making 13 work. I think that everything he told me that day was the truth.

I just couldn't walk around Brown. In the final analysis, after he promised me he would do everything he could to make 13 work, which is what he had been doing for the fine months since 13 passe, and when I knew Younger did not have a commitment to 13, I had to vote for Brown. The most important guy when it comes to implementing 13 is the one who holds the office of Governor of California. If Younger had won without committing himself to 13, he wouldn't have listened to me after the election. But Brown came over for 13, so I feel I'll get more out of Brown than I would have gotten out of Younger. I still think that if Younger gets elected, I won't get nearly as far with him as I do with Jerry. I think Younger's failure to get behind 13 cost him any chance he might have had to win the election. The thing that proves my point is that Mike Curb, who was absolutely new in politics, had no political background at all and was very young besides, Curb endorsed 13 and he beat Mervyn Dymally, the incumbent, by half a million votes. There were other factors in that race, but in my opinion, 13 was what won it for Curb. Younger blew it on 13. He was dead even with Brown in the polls in June; he let Brown have 13, and he lost big.

A few nights after the November election, I was out making a speech. About ten o'clock there was a knock on the door. Dolores, Estelle's sister who lives with us, was the only one home. She went to the door, and there's Jerry. She said I would be home about eleven and Jerry said, "Tell Howard I'll be over." But he didn't come over, so I went to bed.

A few weeks later, I made up my mind I was going to hold a press conference to call on Brown to return $2 billion of the state surplus to the taxpayers in 1979. But I felt I owed it to Jerry to call him before I had the press conference. So I did, and he said to me, "Howard, I'm a little worried about returning that much. I've got to have some flexibility in case the economy turns sour."

I said, "Jerry, as strong as you've worked to implement 13 I'm not going to set your feet in cement or put you behind the eight-ball on this."

He said, "Would you please hold off your news conference until I make up my mind?"

I said, "Sure I will." He eventually wound up going for $1.2 billion. I think he's being too conservative on this, but I respect his judgment and his reasons. I also think that if the economy does as well as I think it's going to, I'll be able to talk him out of a little more of a reduction in taxes.

Jerry has certainly gotten onto lowering taxes and spending. I disagree with him on the balanced federal budget, as I'll explain later, but I think he's heading in the proper direction. It would really be interesting if he and Reagan are the nominees for president in 1980. I don't know what I'd do—I'd have a hard time opposing either of them. I think that if the Democrats don't renominate Carter, they're in a hell of a lot of trouble. When either party repudiates their president, they're going to have trouble getting the replacement elected. That's what happened with the Democrats in 1968. But if the Democrats do renominate Carter, they're in a lot of trouble. I don't know which way is more trouble. But you must remember one thing: every time the Democrats are certain to lose, the Republicans find a way to make 'em win. Every time.

[Proposition 13] is the best chance we have to control government spending.... If government has 47 billion less to spend, the public has $7 billion to spend, and will spend it more wisely.... It's in the self-interest of the people to have this pass.... I strongly support Jarvis-Gann. It does cut taxes. It does raise obstacles to further increases in government spending. And it will not have the dire consequences its opponents threaten.... If Jarvis-Gann is defeated, the legislature will be right back at its old stand...…Anything which reduces the amount of money available for government to spend is a good thing.

The sweeping victory of Proposition 13 will be heard throughout the land. The "brewing" tax revolt is no longer brewing. It is boiling over. The public refused to be bamboozled this time, as they had been so often before while watching taxes mount and governmental services deteriorate. The populace is coming to recognize that throwing government money at problems has a way of making them worse, not better.

SHORTLY AFTER 13 PASSED:

—The city of Sacramento also increased fees at its golf course, as well as charges for docking in its marina.

—The city of Arcadia increased the admission tax at Santa Anita Racetrack.

All of those things were not in keeping with what we hoped to accomplish in 13. Why should the homeowners have to pay higher property taxes to help subsidize the owners of small planes, yachts, and dogs? There's an old saying that if you have to ask the price of a big-ticket item like a yacht, you can't afford it. And if you can't pay the full share of docking fees or landing fees, you can't afford the yacht or the airplane.

Some people may criticize me for citing the higher charges for people who use Santa Barbara's swimming pools. The bleeding hearts say that swimming pools paid for with tax dollars are necessary to keep poor kids amused in the summertime. My response to anyone who raises that point is: Haven't you heard that Santa Barbara has miles and miles of beautiful public beaches? If the kids want to swim, they can go the beach for free.

And as for golfers, I've been a golfer all my life. I've always paid my own way. And I expect all the rest of the golfers to pay their own way, too. Either that, or don't play. Why should property taxes be used to keep greens fees down. It's simple—they shouldn't.

Proposition 13 was intended to cut the fat and the frills out of government. That's why I was delighted when I read in Time on June 19, 1978, right after 13 passed, that in Monrovia, over in the San Gabriel Valley, fees were being increased for classes in things like yoga, jewelry making, and "Dancercise," to the point that "the users will pay the freight." That's exactly as it should be. Anybody who wants to take classes in yoga or jewelry making is welcome to. But don't expect the homeowner to pay for it.

The more time went by, the more proof there was that Proposition 13 was working. On June 14, 1978, Governor Brown announced that he was cutting $750 million form the state budget, including half a million dollars from the $3.4 million annual budget of the California Arts Council. I can't think of a better way to save $5000,000. State Senator Bob Wilson from San Diego has been trying to abolish the use of tax funds for the support of the Arts Council, and in a letter to the Los Angeles Times on September 22, 1978, he gave some examples of tax moneys that were being wasted by the Arts Council. Wilson pointed out that the Arts Council used public funds to publish the following poem, called "the Three Stooges at a Hollywood Party." The poem, which Senator Wilson quoted in its entirety is his letter to The Times, is short, and I'd like to read the whole thing to you:

I repeat: tax dollars were spent to publish that poem, the creation of one Paul Fericano. I even prefer the Beatles to that. According to Bob Wilson, the Arts Council also gave $5,000 to a filmmaker to produce a film about the Royal Chicano Air Force; $700 to produce art performances in laundromats; $1,200 to hole an art show that consisted of submerging 77 works of art in a river, and $1,000 so that some jerk could buy himself a wet suit, a typewriter, and some wood so that he could play music to mammals under water. The Arts Council has always been one of Jerry Brown's pet projects; this is one project I do not admire him for.

But, as I said before, Brown did a lot of things to implement 13 that I did like. In August he signed into law a $1 billion cut in state taxes—the largest tax reduction in the history of the state. Most of the tax cut was in the form of lower state income taxes. Brown said the impetus for the tax cut came from 13.

Brown also had the good sense to appoint David Janssen as the state's general services director. In August Janssen asked all state employees to return pens, pencils, and other office supplies that they might have "inadvertently" taken home. He also ordered a freeze on the purchase of new cars and office furniture for the state. And when he found out that one state agency had ordered $40,000 worth of signs costing $132 apiece, he rescinded the order. Janssen declared that "Business as usual cannot continue", and estimated his rules would save the state $17 million a year. We should have more public servants like him.

Also in August, Robert Alioto (who is not related to former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto), the superintendent of schools in San Francisco, of all places, said that Proposition 13 "had a positive effect on San Francisco" schools by forcing the annual budget to be reduced from $190 million before 13 passed to $169 million. Alioto said in a speech that Proposition 13 "forced us for the first time to really tighten up our operation and to reevaluate our priorities". He said he had spent a year before 13 passed trying to talk the school board into closing down twenty-two unneeded schools. "But with the advent of Proposition 13, the board moved quickly to close nine additional schools and eighteen children's centers. "I think Alioto is one of the few enlightened school people I've ever heard of.

I hoped 13 would reduce utility bills by reducing the utility companies' property taxes. That worked, too. For example, in September, the California Water Service Company notified its customers that the state Public Utilities commission had approved the company's request for a rate reduction. "All water bills will pass through to customers the Company's property tax savings in your community", said the notice from the water company. "During the 1977-78 tax year California Water Service Company paid $3.6 million in property taxes statewide. Of this total, approximately $1.6 million is being applied to reducing Company water rates."

Contrary to what the opposition had predicted during the 13 campaign, the impact of 13 on government services was "generally minimal", according to State Finance director Richard Silberman, one of Brown's closest aides. In February 1979—eight months after 13 went into effect—Silberman said that the state had

not been hurt by 13. Furthermore, said Silberman, "I sense no mood for increased taxes at the state or local level. I don't think they are necessary; I don't think they are possible."

Other studies about the effects of 13 reached even more optimistic conclusions than Silberman's. The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that in the third quarter of 1978—covering July, August, and September, the first three months after 13 became law—California had the highest increase in personal income among all fifty states. California's increase was 5.25%, compared to an average of 3% for the entire nation. Kenneth P. Berkman, a Commerce Department economist, concluded that the huge rise in the personal income of Californians "mainly reflected the initial effects of Proposition 13. Excluding these effects, California's increase would have been 3.5%."

Furthermore, retail sales in California during the last quarter of 1978 were 13.6% higher than they were in the last three months of 1977, which economist Eric Thor, Jr. of the Bank of America attributed to "the positive aspect of Proposition 13."

A study released in May 1979 reported that 13 had had another beneficial effect by channeling needed tax dollars from high-income suburbs to the needier central cities. The author of the study, William H. Oakland, a professor of economics and public administration at Ohio State, said that 13 "should increase the equity of California taxes, among persons and political jurisdictions." Oakland, who spent five months at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco investigating 13's effects, added: "Since cities and rural areas have a larger share of the statewide property-tax base, tax [burdens] consequently would be shifted toward the suburbs", as a result of 13. "Given the poor fiscal condition of many central cities, such a shift would provide welcome relief." So much for the campaign lie that 13 would hurt poor people.

Another report revealed that while the national economy might be headed toward a recession in late 1978 and early 1979, California's was booming because of 13.

Still, as might be expected, the editorial department at the Los Angeles Times found grounds to fault us. In an editorial on September 28, 1978, the Times pointed out that the eighty-one branch libraries in Los Angeles County would henceforth be closed on Mondays. That meant the branch libraries would be open only five days a week, although nine regional libraries would still be open six days a week. The Times decided it was "distressing" that most libraries would have to close an extra day each week and that fees were up and attendance was down at museums and public gardens in the county since 13 passed. The editorial concluded:

I happen to feel it is not a hardship to have libraries closed two out of every seven days; people still have plenty of opportunity to use them. And people who visit the museums and public gardens should pay a substantial portion of what it costs to operate them. And people who visit the museums and public gardens should pay a substantial portion of what it costs to operate them.

Some of the stories out of California about 13's effect were very misleading In my travels around the country, I came across articles claiming that in California we had been forced to lay off half the police and firemen and that Proposition 13 was responsible for everything from the damage done by the fires at Malibu in the fall to the failure of the Dodgers and the Rams to win championships. I talked to the fire chief, and he admitted to me that if they had had 75,000 more men and twice as much equipment, they still wouldn't have been able to do anything about containing the Malibu fires. The problem was that the unpredictable Santa Ana winds changed direction every five minutes. I told some newspaper people back East that the next thing you know, I'll be getting the blame for causing the Santa Ana winds. I said to them, "You ought to print that now, and you'll have yourself a scoop." they got a kick out of that, but I wasn't entirely joking.

There was one development after 13 went into effect that I heartily approved of; the city administrations in Hillsborough and San Marino asked residents to voluntarily give the cities more money than they owed in taxes, and many residents in each town did donate extra money. That's basically what 13 was about: that people should pay as much to governments as they could or as they desired, but that they shouldn't be coerced into paying more than they could afford. I realize that both San Marino and Hillsborough are very wealthy communities, and most other cities and towns would not be able to get much of a voluntary contribution from their residents. But I think they established a good precedent in those two places. There's nobody—including me—who has a right to say that taxpayers shouldn't pay as much as they want to—just as long as they aren't forced to pay more than they can afford.

One of the worst scare tactics used against us during the campaign was the dire prediction—based on the phony UCLA study that Governor Brown and other politicians cited—that hordes of public employees, perhaps as many as 451,000 would be laid off if 13 passed.

Tax Revolt Digest is published in Sacramento by California Journal, which is published by, for, and about the Sacramento establishment. If any publication was consistently opposed to 13, and understandably so, it was California Journal. So it was with surprise and great pleasure that I read in the first issue of Tax Revolt Digest in November 1978, a story under the heading: "Prop, 13 Casualty Reports Much Lighter Than Predicted. "The story began: "Compared to the predictions, the Proposition 13 casualty reports are quite light. There have been no massive layoffs of public employees or drastic cutbacks in governmental services in California." Tax Revolt Digest noted that four months after 13 passed, only 19.000 employees of local governments and school districts had lost their jobs because of 13. That's less than 2% of the 1.1 million people who work for local governments and school districts in the state.

Two months later, in its January 1979 issue, Tax Revolt Digest reported that 26,412 public workers lost their jobs as a result of 13, but that 9,324 were later rehired, for a net job loss of 17,088. So even a publication that makes no bones about its unhappiness with 13 had to admit that the public employees were not hit too badly by 13.

In February 1979 Richard Silberman issued a report in which he said that 3,500 out of 300,000 state employees—or 1%—where fired because of 13, and that about 17,000 local government employees lost their jobs, another 2,000 took early retirement and 93,000 jobs were vacated through attrition and were not refilled.

All those figures reveal that before 13, state and local governments had a total work force of nearly 1.5 million. And about 20,000 of those 1.5 million employees were terminated because of 13. That amounts to 1.5%. Somehow that doesn't seem too catastrophic to me.

Anyway, what if several hundred thousand lost their jobs because of 13? The public employees—as we hear every day—are the most highly educated, the most loyal, the most industrious, the most dependable, and the most productive workers in the United States. Private industry is crying for people like that, and they all ought to be able to find a new job in about twenty minutes.

Actually, there is nothing special about public employees in my book. I don't recognize any difference between someone who is laid off by private industry and someone who is laid off by government. I don't think one is a sacred cow and the other is a piece of junk. We had something like 65,000 people laid off in California when they canceled the aerospace program and something like 54,000 laid off when the Bl bomber was cancelled. It's not at all uncommon for some private company to close down a plant in California and throw several thousand people out of work. But I've never seen one schoolteacher or one bureaucrat shedding any tears when a large number of employees in the private sector lose their jobs. My heart doesn't bleed any more for public workers who get fired than it does for employees of private business who lose their jobs; much less, in fact. I'm not saying all public workers had bad, but I think there are too many of them who never do anything. A lot of them are cynical and arrogant and give lousy service. They have no investment in their job, no responsibility, and for many of them their sole objective is to avoid doing anything until they become eligible for a pension.

And taking into account new jobs in the private sector, 13 was a real bonanza for California—again, just as I had expected. In January 1979 there were 91,000 new jobs created in the state, compared to 30,000 the previous January. Eric Thor, the Bank of America economist, listed the new jobs as another significant result of the passage of 13. By August 1, 1979, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, private employment in California had increased by 360,000 new jobs.

Big-spending politicians felt the effects of 13 for the remainder of 1978. In September, Edward J. King upset incumbent Michael Dukakis, in the Massachusetts Democratic primary for governor. Bob Short upset Congressman Donald Fraser in the Minnesota Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Both Dukakis and Fraser were identified as big spenders, and their defeats were widely attributed to Proposition 13 fever. In Oklahoma, Governor David Boren, who endorsed the Kemp-Roth tax reduction plan, won big over Ed Edmondson in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Even in Democratic primaries, 13 was proving decisive.

In November 1978 the taxpayer's revolt took its toll on five fairly liberal Democratic members of the Senate: Wendell Anderson of Minnesota; Dick Clark of Iowa; Floyd Haskell of Colorado; William Hathaway of Maine, and Thomas McIntyre of New Hampshire, all of whom were ousted from their Senate seats. Edward Brooke, a liberal Republican from Massachusetts, also lost, but that was no doubt due more to reports about his personal finances and his divorce suit than it was to 13.

There is a revolt, and it is long overdue.... I think it will be an issue that Republicans certainly are going to run on.

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.

Proposition 13 is 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.

WHEN PROPOSITION 13 PASSED, we did not win the war on taxes. With Proposition 13 we won the first major battle in the war. The war itself is continuing on three important national fronts:

First, immediately after 13 was approved, I launched the American Tax Reduction Movement, of which I am chairman. Our aim in this movement is to reduce federal taxed by $50 billion over a four-year period and to cut federal spending by $100 billion during the same period.

Second, I am trying to help angry taxpayers all over the country gain approval of tax reduction measures, either through the ballot process or by act of the state legislature, in their own states, just as we were able to do in California with Proposition 13.

Third, I am working to secure the right of initiative to attend the federal Constitution and the constitutions of the individual states that do not now permit this procedure.

The most important weapon in the war on taxes is the American Tax Reduction Movement. With offices in Los Angeles and Washington, this organization is in a position to be the focal point for all attacks on taxes.

By cutting federal taxes $50 billion over a four-year period, or $12.5 billion a year, a large amount of money will go where it should: back into the hands of the people. The major element in this reduction is an across-the-board federal-incometax reduction of 25%. Based on average figures for a family of four that uses the standard deduction on their income tax form, a worker who earns $15,000 a year will save $356 a year and $14,240 during his working lifetime under this plan: a worker with an annual income of $30,000 will save $1,352 a year and $54,080 in his lifetime, and someone who earns $50,000 a year will save $3,448 a year and $137,920 during the rest of his career. So this isn't chicken feed we're talking about: we think it will have a very meaningful effect.

In addition, income-tax brackets would be indexed to inflation, so that a raise in salary does not automatically result in a drastic increase in income taxes. As inflation rises, thereby diminishing the growth in purchasing power that a pay raise should mean, income tax brackets will reflect the changing economic conditions. The net effect will be that the taxpayer will owe less income tax than he would without tax bracketing.

These changes are very important. In 1972 the average taxpayer with a family of four had an after-tax income of $11,152. By 1977, after taking inflation into account, that same family's income had shrunk to $10,817. At a time when our nation was producing more goods and services than any nation since the dawn of time, the real income of the average American was actually declining!

Also, I want to reduce the capital gins tax from its current level of up to 40% to a flat 15%. This would free investment capital and result in increased productivity and a decline in unemployment.

Actually, if I had my way, I would eliminate the capital gins tax, instead of just cutting it to 15%. but you could never get that passed. All the liberals would yell and say, "This is a deal for the rich," which isn't true at all.

Japan and Germany, for example, have virtually no capital gains tax at all, and they have two of the strongest economies in the Western world. We don't need a capital gains tax here. We've gotten into a situation where people are so afraid of capital gains taxes that they're taking money that should go into the productive capacity of the country and putting it into tax shelters instead. Tax shelters are a coffin for money. If we can do something to make the capital gains tax more sensible, we'll get that money to go into the productive enterprise of this country. Economic experts inform me that substantially reducing the capital gains tax will create 3 to 5 million new jobs in this country. That way, our kids will have a job once they get out of school.

We've created a condition in this country where once people have made some money they're afraid to invest it in the stock market or anyplace else where it would be productive. The big thing they have gotten to because of our prohibitive tax rates is this: "We want to be damn sure we don't lose what we've got. We're not at all interested in making any more money if we can just keep what we've got." But if the capital gains tax is cut, there will be a little more spirit to gamble in order to make a profit. You can't have a capitalist economy without capital. Risk capital creates jobs. That's the name of the game.

Furthermore, reducing the capital gains tax should strengthen the U.S. dollar in the international monetary market. Don't forget; the Japanese yen and the German deutsche mark are among the strongest currencies in the world.

Speaking of Japan and Germany, a lot of people attribute our economic problems and the weakness of the dollar abroad to our dependence on foreign oil, which is becoming so expensive. There's no question that the price of the oil we have to import hurts. But Japan has to import almost all of the oil it consumes, and yet its economy and currency are in great shape. They have a huge surplus in their balance of trade.

So oil imports are not the real cause of our problems. The true cause is that the American economy has been crippled by a government that taxes too much, spends too much, and regulates too much. Since we reached our peak of individual prosperity in 1972, the average American's income, in inflated dollars, has grown 46%. And government spending has increased 77%!

The other major part of the American Tax Reduction Movement program is a $100 billion annual cut in federal spending, which will also be phased in over a four year period. by cutting spending more than we cut federal taxes, we will end deficit spending—and, in fact, have enough of a surplus each year to reduce the national debt by 2%. As of 1977, the national debt had risen to $716 billion. Interest payments alone cost U.S. taxpayers $42 billion a year. That's a hell of a burden.

And deficit spending is the single most important cause of inflation, according to Milton Friedman, Neil Jacoby, Arthur Laffer, and other leading economists. If we can stop deficit spending, we can end the devastating spiral of inflation.

On September 26, 1978, the American Tax Reform Movement purchased a half hour of television time on about 120 stations that reached practically every large and medium-sized city in the nation. During that half hour, I unveiled our program to the country. Robert Reed, the television star, was host of the show, and Neil Jacoby, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, and several typical taxpayers appeared on it with me. I think that what Simon had to say was very important.

It cost us about $700,000 to produce that show and buy the time all around the country. We took in about $1.5 million as a result of our solicitation on the show, which enabled us to give money to candidates in the November elections who supported our program, to lobby for tax reduction in Congress, and to solicit more money by mail in order to keep our program going.

We spent several thousand dollars we had received from that show to take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post. The ad appeared in the paper on October 5, 1978, the morning of the day the House of Representatives was voting whether to override a veto by President Carter of a $10.2 billion federal public-works bill. We favored Carter's veto of the bill, which was nothing more than pork-barrel legislation so that members of Congress could provide unneeded dams and other federal projects back in their districts in order to grease their own reelection. We found out that most of the water from one of the projects the bill would have financed would have gone to a single catfish farm. In another case, a project would have given benefits to only sixty-nine families, at a cost of about $1 million per family in dollars taken from the taxpayers. As we warned at the end of our ad, "If the politicians don't change, we'll change the politicians" by voting them out of office four weeks later. I'm proud to say that the attempt to override Carter's veto fell more than 50 votes short of the two-thirds majority that was needed, so we helped save taxpayers all over the country more than $10 billion. That's exactly what we're trying to accomplish in the American Tax Reduction Movement.

In addition to campaigning for specific tax cutting legislation, the American Tax Reduction Movement has two other basic components:

—A research foundation to provide information to taxpayers everywhere who want to do something about reducing their taxes.

—A political action committee that gives money to candidates who are for the same goals as we are. I don't say there won't be candidates who will stand up and swear they're for our program, then, after they get elected, vote against it. But that's the chance we have to take. The only alternative is to leave things the way they are now, and we sure can't do that.

I do think that after what we accomplished in 13 and since, reduction is going to influence every election in the next few years, from President in 1980 down to elections for governor, congressional races, legislative elections, and local elections, all over the United States.

Within a few weeks after our television special in 1978, about 150 members of Congress and the Senate said they supported our program. In January 1979 the program proposed by the American Tax Movement was introduced into Congress by Robert Dornan, a Republican from Santa Monica, and Tom Luken, a Democrat from Ohio. That legislation, known as the American Tax Reduction Act, is pending in Congress. The number of the bill is H.R. 1000.

Let me emphasize that I don't get a dime out of the money we collect in the Tax Reduction Movement, and neighbor does anyone else connected with it. In fact, a couple of guys who tried to spend some of the money we received on fancy office furniture and expensive meals are no longer part of our organization. I'm not going to misuse nay of the contributions we receive, and I'm going to see to it that no one else misuses them either. It's the same as it was during all the years we tried to reduce property taxes in California; every dime we get is going to be spent to reduce taxes, Period.

For the tax revolt, Proposition 13 was the shot heard around the nation, and, to some extent, around the world. Newsweek reported that in Colorado "little progress" was being made toward collecting 64,000 signatures needed by July 1, 1978, to qualify a property-tax-limitation initiative for the ballot--until 13 won. According to Newsweek (June 19, 1978), "The day after the Jarvis-Gann results came in, 250 people called to volunteer their help." In West Virginia, the Charleston Daily Mail asked its readers, "Would you approve abolishing a large chunk of state taxes knowing that it would mean curtailment of many public services?" The response to that poll was 552 yes votes and 38 no votes, or 94% in favor. This vote was reported in Time, June 26, 1978.

The first major test of how strong Proposition 13 sentiment was sin other states occurred five months after the Proposition 13 victory in California. Here is how efforts to curb taxation and spending fared around the country in November 1978:

Alabama: Voter approved a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot by the legislature which reduced assessment rates on commercial and residential property that the courts had ordered reappraised.

Arizona: Proposition 101, a constitutional amendment place on the ballot by the legislature to limit state spending to 7% of total personal income in the state, won.

Hawaii: Voters passed a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot by the legislature which limited state spending increases to the growth rate of the state economy and required a tax refund whenever the state has a surplus of 5% or more for two years in a row, in order to prevent the buildup of a huge state surplus like California's.

Idaho: An initiative virtually identical to 13—it limited property taxes to 1% of market value and restricted annual increases to 2%—was approved.

Illinois: An advisory referendum which was proposed by Governor James Thompson saw voters favor by a margin of more than 4-to-1 the placing of a mandatory limit on state and local taxes and spending in the state constitution.

Massachusetts: voter s authorized the legislature to establish different assessment rates for various categories of property, which overturned a court ruling that prohibited assessment of business and commercial property at a higher rate than residential. Residents unfondly refer to their state as "Taxachusetts" because the state has one of the highest combined tax rates (property, income, sales, etc.) in the nation. Although I dislike the "split-roll" method of assessment, it's better than no tax reduction at all.

Missouri: A proposal placed on the ballot by the legislature which allowed the legislature to lower property tax rates if there is a statewide reassessment of property values and to reassess property without raising taxes won 2-to-1.

Nevada: Proposition 13's clone, Question 6, was approved by a margin of f3-to-1. However, it must win again in 1980 before it can go into effect.

North Dakota: Residents voted 2-to-1 to hand themselves some income tax relief via an initiative that cut income taxes by an average of 37%.

South Dakota: voters added to the state constitution an amendment that requires a public referendum or a two-thirds vote of the legislature before taxes can be increased.

Texas: voters approved a "Tax Relief Amendment" to the state constitution that was placed on the ballot by the legislature. The amendment tied any increases in state spending to growth in the state's economy and required public hearings on tax increases of more than 3%. The margin in favor of the amendment was more than 5-to-1.

Arkansas: An initiative that exempted food and drugs from the state's 3% sales tax was rejected.

Colorado: Proposition 2, which would have limited increases in state and local spending to the rate of growth of the population and the Consumer Price Index, lost. However, a ceiling of 7% on growth of state expenditures that was adopted by the legislature in July 1977 remains in effect.

Michigan: The Tisch amendment, which was similar to 13 in cutting property taxes by 50% and limiting income taxes, was defeated. A proposal to prohibit the use of property tax revenues for financing public schools and replace the present system with a voucher system was also defeated. However, another initiative amendment that limited the growth of state and local spending was approved.

Nebraska: An initiative that would have limited local governments to a 5% increase in spending each year, unless the legislature approved exceptions by a four-fifths vote, lost.

Oregon: Voters rejected Measure 6, a Proposition 13 style initiative that would have limited property taxes to 1.5% of market value and reduced property taxes by an estimated 40%. Also defeated was Measure 11, which the legislature placed on the ballot and which would have granted tax cuts to homeowners and renters only and would have limited spending by state and local governments.

I campaigned from coast to coast for these measures in the fall of 1978, from Oregon to Massachusetts and from Michigan to Arizona. our record was pretty good: eleven wins, four losses, and a split decision in Michigan. Of the amendments that were nearly identical to 13, two won (Idaho and Nevada) and two lost (Michigan and Oregon).

The election results in November 1978 showed what a tremendous impact 13 had made. Newspapers from California to Europe were duly impressed. On November 9 the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized:

Anthony Lewis, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote:

His comments were reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 1978.

During 1978 Norman Macrae, deputy editor of the Economist of London, toured the United States and recorded his observations. According to Macrae whose comments were reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 1979:

As of November 1978, great progress had been made in the eleven states where triumphs against taxation and spending had just been registered: in California of course, and in Tennessee, where on March 7, 1978, almost 65% of the voters cast their votes in favor of a constitutional amendment that prohibited state spending to increase more rapidly than the rate of growth of the state economy and required the state to have a balanced budget. Between 1970 and March 1978, Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, Washington and Wisconsin adopted limits on taxes or spending, but some of those states are still taxing excessively. Two states where residents received tax breaks in 1979 as a result of the momentum generated by Proposition 13 were Wisconsin and Minnesota. Wisconsin taxpayers received a refund of almost $1 billion from a huge state surplus. In addition, the legislature and the governor agreed to declare a two month moratorium on the payment of income taxes and to lower income tax brackets. In Minnesota, state taxes were reduced by almost three quarters of a million dollars a year. Minnesota, as well as Iowa, has taken action to prevent inflation from pushing state income taxpayers into higher tax brackets. Income taxes have also been reduced in Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, and Vermont. And Kentucky, New Mexico, and Virginia have limited the amount of tax revenues that can obtained from property taxes.

The conditions are still fertile for tax revolt in many states such as Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Washington, each of which, it is estimated, will have a budget surplus of $100 million or more during 1979.

In terms of property taxes alone, the amount of tax grew at startling rates between 1966 and 1976 in Alaska (1,419%), Georgia (187%), New Jersey (140%), New York (147%), North Carolina (141%), South Carolina (190%), and Vermont (166%), according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. We hope to bring Proposition 13 example to all of those states.

New attacks on state spending and taxation have already been launched in many states, among them Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah. I'll be doing my best to spearhead efforts in each of those states, along with the states where we suffered defeats in November 1978,

One of our more recent victories occurred on May 8, 1979, when Governor Edward J. King of Massachusetts signed into law a bill that provided for a 4% a year ceiling on local property tax increases in that state—the first such limit in Massachusetts history. Because of King's commitment to tax reduction, I had campaigned for him in 1978 and helped him unseat the liberal incumbent, Michael Dukakis.

The tax revolt has even caught on overseas. Most of the nations in Europe lack the mechanism we have in this country to amend their constitutions. As a result, many taxpayers have taken to transacting their business in cash so that they won't have to report their true incomes. Government officials are looking for ways to reduce taxes to a level that will be acceptable to the people they govern. In December 1978 I traveled to England and France to speak and advise on tax reduction.

I had an experience right after 13 passes that made me want to do anything I could to help the English. A chap from the BBC interviewed me, and after we had talked for a while he said tom me, "If I could talk to the American people tonight, I would say, 'For God's sake, turn it around. You are following step by step every disaster that has befallen my country. England is down the drain, and England will never come back. But you in the United States have the resources, the power, you have the will—the will to turn your country around.'"

I think what he said is absolutely true. I hope that the victory of fl3 will give people in this country the will to turn things around, and I hope our example will give hope to people in Britain and other foreign countries. Actually, many foreign nations have much higher burdens than we do in the United States. The organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is based in Paris, found that in 1976 in Sweden and Luxembourg total tax revenues amounted to more than half of the Gross National Product, while Norway, Holland, Denmark, Finland, and Belgium pay over 40% of the GNP in taxes. The OECD study covered twenty-one nations, all of which were in Europe, except for the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The United States had the fourth-lowest tax burden among the twenty-one countries surveyed, with 29.3% of our GNP amounting to taxes. But that still isn't much consolation to taxpayers all over this country who feel—justifiably—that they are paying too much taxes.

Under the theory of representative government, candidates for public office state their views on important subjects. Then the voters choose which candidate they want to represent them. once the candidate gets in office; however, he is under no obligation to vote as he promised during the campaign. And, of course, some major issues arise after the campaign and neither candidate has a chance to express himself on those issues before the election.

Elected officials have a responsibility to represent their constituents to the best of their ability. But there is hardly a better example of a conflict of interest than the difference between the best interest of the politician and the best interest of the people he has the duty to represent. The more taxes, the more money government has to spend, the more public employees the politician can put on the public payroll, the more power the politician has. And the lower the taxes, the less money government has to spend, the fewer the number of public employees and the less power the politicians have, the better off the people are.

The only solution is the right of initiative. I consider the right to change federal and local constitutions and enact law through the initiative process a more important right than the right to vote. At present about half the states permit some form of initiative. Most of the states where the initiative is allowed are in the West, where citizens of every state except Texas, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Kansas have that right. Among the Eastern states where the initiative is part of the political process are Michigan, Ohio,, Maine, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.

The idea of direct citizen participation in deciding issues goes back to ancient Rome. One more recent example was the New England town meeting. I believe that every state and the federal government should permit that initiative.

Right now, campaigns are under way to win the right of initiative in many states. Among them are Connecticut, Georgia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia. The best way to convince the state legislature to give people the legal right to petition to change the law is by circulating petitions and collecting the names of as many voters as possible. That's what keeps the politicians honest, or at least more honest than they would otherwise be: the knowledge that the people are interested in their government and that if they don't do the job, the people will reclaim their rights. That's why the initiative and referendum are important. I am working in every state where they need me to help them win these rights. In one state, Texas, they have been able to collect several hundred thousand signatures calling on the legislature to grant the citizens the right of initiative.

There is also a move afoot to win the same right in federal elections. In 1977 Senators Jim Abourzek, a Democrat from South Dakota, and Mark Hatfield, a Republican from Oregon, introduced a proposed constitutional amendment which would allow a proposed law to be submitted to the voters if 3% of the number of registered voters in the last presidential election signed petitions. The public would be able to enact almost any type of law—except for a declaration of war.

The requirement that the signatures of a number equal to 3% of the total ballots cast in the last presidential election be obtained would mean—if it were in effect now—that 2.5 million signatures would have to be collected nationwide. That sounds like a lot, but it's only twice as many as we got in California alone for 13. Gathering 2.5 million signatures from people all over the country should not be too difficult a task.

There seems to be strong public sentiment for permitting an initiative process in federal elections. In May 1978, right before Proposition 13, a Gallup poll showed that Americans favored by a majority of 57-to-21 the right of the public to propose and vote on laws. On the same day that Proposition 13 passed, voters in Los Angeles County approved by 2-to-1 Measure B, an advisory measure in favor of allowing a federal initiative. The percentages on Measure B were almost identical to the vote on Proposition 13 in the county, although half a million more people voted on 13 in Los Angeles County than the number who voted on Measure B.

There are several efforts under way to reduce taxation or spending by the federal government, but I think the plan we proposed in the American Tax Reduction Movement is the best one because it is the only one that deals with both taxes and spending. The other major plans under consideration are:

Kemp-Roth: Named after its sponsors, Congressman Jack Kemp, a Republican from New York, and Senator William Roth, also a Republican from Delaware, it would lower personal and corporate income taxes.

The Friedman Amendment: Advocated by Milton Friedman and the National Tax Limitation Committee, this proposed constitutional amendment would limit expenditures by the federal government.

A Balanced Budget: This is the plan that has received the most attention since Jerry Brown got behind it in January 1979, as one means of boosting his own presidential stock. The National Taxpayers Union has proposed that the Constitution be amended to require the federal budget to be balanced each year.

In theory I could support any of those programs—to reduce federal income taxes, limit federal government spending, or require a balanced budget—but only as a last resort, only if we can't win approval for our plan that requires reductions in both taxation and spending.

The competing plan that disturbs me the most is the balanced budget amendment. Although we are required to have a balanced state budget in California, that didn't stop huge increases in both taxes and spending before 13 passed. If the government were required to have a balanced budget, all the people in Washington would have to do when they wanted to increase spending would be to increase taxes. It's that simple.

Second, the balanced budget concept does not speak directly to the real problem: cutting inflation. The only program that can have any meaningful effect is one that will require government spending to increase at a rate less than the rate of inflation. Otherwise, you're just adding fuel to the fire of inflation. If you enable taxes and spending to go up at the same rate as inflation or at a higher rate, it's just like carrying wood to a fire and say "I'm against the fire, but I'm going to keep putting wood on anyway." I think that's irrational. One of the things that I thing we have to do is to make certain that the cost of taxation does not keep up with inflation. That's the only way to break inflation. Inflation is the result of government extravagance and overspending, which causes them to print more money, which causes devaluation of the dollar. And that's inflation!

A third objection I have to the balanced budget is that requirement that the budget be balanced could be suspended whenever Congress decided there is a national emergency. There's nothing that would keep us from being in a permanent state of emergency.

Then there's the opposite problem: the government has to have some leeway, it has to have room to operate when there is actual emergency such as war or recession. I've never been able to bring myself to support a hard-and-fast limitation on government spending. I don't think it can be done. I don't think anybody can write enough law to cover all emergencies, unless you put in many loopholes that the law becomes meaningless.

I don't think the government should be shut down completely without access to more money when it really does need it. I never wanted to shut off the government absolutely. I consider taxes the number-one evil in the United States. But I think we also have to understand that we need a government. Government must be limited, but "limited" means to me that the government has to be allowed to operate in some areas, with reasonable limits.

I just don't think you can put absolute limits on government. Of course, when I say that, all the right-wingers get angry at me. But that's why we built some flexibility into l3. If someone can sell the need for higher taxes to two-thirds of the legislature, or two-thirds of the voters, they can get it approved.

There's flexibility built into our American Tax Reduction Program. It goes into effect over four years, and there's no requirement that a certain amount be cut in any one year. And after years, if necessary, we can try something else—I don't know what. But the first thing is to get the helicopter off the pad.

My biggest objection to both the balanced budget idea and Friedman Amendment is that the way they're setup, if Congress refused to enact the amendment, a constitutional convention would be called. I'm very fearful of a constitutional convention. We could get a bunch of crazies in there and we might wind up with a constitution that's not nearly as good as the one we have now. I think the Constitution we have is marvelous. There is a real question as to whether a constitutional convention would have to stick to a balanced budget or whatever it was called into being to work on, or whether the delegates could start tinkering with any part of the Constitution that struck their fancy. There's a good chance that question would not be resolved until after the convention met, and that's too big a risk to take. But don't forget that the first constitutional convention was assembled in 1787 to amend the Articles of Confederation, and those delegates wound up drafting an entire new Constitution. I urge all those who share my fears about the risks of a new convention tampering with our Constitution to write letters, speak out, and raise hell against this wrongheaded idea.

Also, don't think the people who want to call a constitutional convention understand the political realities. Before you can hold the convention, you have to have two-thirds of the states in favor of it, and then three-quarters of the states have to approve any amendments that come out of the convention, according to Article V of the Constitution.

I think that's futile. Even if they could do it, it might take ten years, and we need tax relief now—not ten or fifteen or twenty-five years form now. But the thing is, I doubt if they could do it, within ten years or ever, See, if anybody could have done it, the ERA people could have done it, with all their clout. The women are the most powerful political force in this country, and they couldn't put over the Equal Rights Amendment, even without the need for a convention. If the women couldn't do it, how the hell is a bunch of taxpayers going to get it done!

Proposition 13's victory was elusive enough. It took us sixteen years. I don't want to chase any more butterflies like that. And besides, I don't have enough time left. I'm seventy-six, and I want to go with something we can accomplish fairly soon, like get a law through the House and the Senate to reduce taxes and spending.

Just to show how much I dislike the risk of a constitutional convention, I went to Sacramento in February 1979 to testify against Brown's proposal for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. I went because I was invited to testify before the Assembly Ways and Means Committee. And who invited me? Leo McCarthy, of all people.

Meanwhile, back in California, I'm fighting for my new initiative that would cut state income taxes in half. The maximum state income tax bracket is now 11% for people who earn $32,620 a year or more; it would be cut to 5.5%.

As of 1979, the state personal income tax produces $4.8 billion in tax revenues. But the state income tax has been growing in recent years at double the rate property taxes were increasing before Proposition 13. In 1982-1983, if we continue on this same spiral, the state income tax burden will be over $9billion a year. Between 1974 and 1978, personal income in the state increased by 54%, but tax collections on personal income increased by 89%. The other aspects of this initiative include:

—State income taxes would be indexed to inflation, so that cost-of-living salary raises don't force taxpayers into higher income tax brackets.

—The state's business inventory tax would be eliminated to encourage businesses to move into California, which will further boost the state's economy and improve the job picture.

—Again, the idea is to reduce taxes—period—not to shift tax burdens from one form of taxation to another.

Before the end of 1979 I hope to gather the more than half a million signatures needed to qualify the income tax initiative for the ballot in June 1980.

We have to keep working in order to keep government from being the only growth industry in this country. We have to keep working to make sure that government has what it needs to spend—not what it wants to spend.

I don't think the public interest in tax relief is going to diminish. And the public interest is very high. An Associated Press-NBC poll in December 1978 showed that all across this country 63% of the people wanted federal spending cut, while only 27% didn't want a cut; and the public favors cuts in federal taxes by a margin of 57-to-31.

Just in case the people do get complacent, there will always be greedy politicians to keep the fires of tax revolt going. A good case in point is Illinois. In November 1978, 82% of the voters said they wanted a ceiling placed on government spending. Right after that, members of the legislature raised their own pay 40%, to $28,000 a year; members of the Cook County Board of Commissioners—who work part-time—raised their pay 30%, to $32,500 a year; and members of the Chicago City Council voted to raise their own pay from $17,500 a year to $28,000 a year—a 60% increase—and then, after the public complained, the council members cut their salary back to $22,000—which was only 25% more than what they had been making.

As long as I'm around, I'm going to do my best to keep the ball rolling. I think there is always a danger that, having achieved a great victory like we did on 13, some people will say, "I've done it all—I don't have to work anymore." I think there will be a tendency toward a letdown in the wake of our victories in 1978; some apathy is only natural. But it's my job to overcome that, and that's exactly what I intend to do. A willingness to keep plugging away and working hard, no matter what, was something I leaned many years ago, when I was growing up in Utah.