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Steel-rimmed glasses keep sliding down his nose. His sagging jowls perpetually threaten to sweep over the knot of his tie. His voice is booming, raspy, grating. By most standards of political image making, 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. Working 18 hours a day, Jarvis fervently addressed every audience he could find—crowds in high school auditoriums, civic luncheons, Jaycee meetings —and gathered 1.5 million petition signatures for his Proposition 13, which required chopping California's property taxes by 57%, or about $7 billion. 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.
Long considered a nuisance, a nut, or both, Jarvis was suddenly a celebrity. Traveling 150,000 miles, he carried a beguiling message to taxpayers: "The only way to cut the cost of government is not to give them money in the first place." U.S. politicians, from the local level right up to Congress, reacted by making taxes the major issue of the 1978 elections. Yesterday's political big spenders became today's penny pinchers, embracing schemes to cut budgets across the board by 10% or 20% or 30%. A bewildering variety of referendums, the offspring of Proposition 13, sprouted on the ballots of 16 states; 80% of the measures passed. Observed James Savarese, director of public policy analysis for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a vitally affected group: "There's a clear message. Voters want value for the dollar."
Though the message from U.S. voters was clear, governments were slow and grudging in responding. Jimmy Carter and Congress cut federal taxes by $18.7 billion; yet Americans' taxes will actually go up in 1979 as a result of inflation and the immense new bite from their paychecks for Social Security. In most states, the cuts in taxes or spending that voters approved in November will not take effect until 1979. Even in pace-setting California, many bureaucrats reacted vengefully to Proposition 13 by threatening drastic cuts in the most essential services and blaming a lack of money for any and every governmental foul-up. When brushfires swept through Malibu Canyon in the fall, officials hinted that they could have fought the blazes better if they had not had to lay off fire fighters because of budget cuts. Many local governments started charging fees for some public services that used to be financed from tax revenues. A few residents of high-income Palm Springs were so angry about the bills they began receiving for trash collection that they secretly dumped their garbage in the desert. Nonetheless, California managed to soften the blow by passing on to local governments $5 billion from its huge $6.6 billion budget surplus. While nearly 26,400 local government employees in California were initially laid off because of Proposition 13, almost 10,000 were back on the job by year's end.