Sound and Fury over Taxes

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been forced to become two-earner families, and are still being hit with the triple whammies of higher Social Security, inflation pushing them into higher income-tax brackets, and those property taxes. They feel put upon." Commenting on Proposition 13, Florida's Democratic Congressman Sam Gibbons declared: "It's one of the healthiest things that's happened in a long time. I thought California was the most overbloated state government I'd ever seen, and the Federal Government is overstuffed and can stand a lot of trimming down too."

As they worried about the possible impact of the landslide vote in California, even critics of the antitax movement expressed some sympathy for the psychology motivating the drive. "There's a tremendous paranoia sweeping the country," observed Amo DeBernardis, president of Oregon's multicampus, property-tax-supported Portland Community College. "People feel helpless about the way their government is headed, and this is the only way they can fight."

Yet the fact that Californians wielded a meat ax as they cut into taxes bothered many advocates of more moderate efforts to put limitations on government spending. Liberal Economist Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, noted in the Wall Street Journal last week: "Clearly, governments the country over need to be brought to book, they need to deliver more per dollar of tax, and they need to deliver excess tax dollars back to the taxpayer. But all of that can be readily granted without committing fiscal hara-kiri." To John Petersen, an official of the Municipal Finance Officers Association, a group that views virtually any tax cut as a form of harakiri, Proposition 13 is "a Frankenstein, a green hulk emerging from the swamps of the West."

The 75-year-old father of Proposition 13, basking in his first victory in a lifetime of attacking free-spending public officials, is no Frankenstein, but is a self-defined "pain in the ass. You gotta be to get these people to listen to you."

On election evening, Howard Jarvis denied that he was vengeful. "Tonight was a victory against money, the politicians, the government," said the gruff, tireless campaigner as he sagged into an easy chair in an eleventh-floor suite at Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel. "Government simply must be limited. Excessive taxation leads to either bankruptcy or dictatorship."

As Jarvis portrayed it, his goal was to relieve the government-inflicted sufferings of taxpayers. Said he: "We have seen the trauma of high taxes on older people. The deteriorating state of mind. The disease. The ulcers. When elderly people get those tax bills on their meager homes that demand another $1,500 a year, they get a cloud over their heads. Many of them give up the spirit and quietly die. One woman had a heart attack in front of me back in 1962 right in the assessor's office. That means something to me. Even the Russians don't do that, run people out of their homes for no reason. It is a goddamned crime. It is grand-felony theft."

Jarvis is a wealthy retired industrialist who does not see his antitax drive as a matter of self-interest. "Hell, I can pay whatever my property taxes are," he said. "I'll just write a check. But