Taxes, taxes, taxes! Ever since the resounding triumph of California's Proposition 13 last June, the nation has been shuddering with a kind of tax-cutting fever. Even at a time of prosperity, with the economy humming along at a trillion-dollar rate, poll after poll shows Americans in a mood of irritation and resentment about the amount of money they have to spend on the public needs. Tax-cutting measures of all sorts have sprouted in state legislatures and on local ballots. And as Americans prepare to go to the polls next month in the quadrennial confusion of off-year elections, taxes and the related problems of inflation and Big Government form just about the only national issue.
In Washington last week, President Carter and Congress confronted each other in a complex clash over the federal income tax. Carter had proposed a slash of $17 billion, combined with a number of "reforms" aimed largely at business and middle-class taxpayers. The House rejected most of the reforms, and then the Sen ate went on a spree of special tax cutting for special groups. It voted to boost the capital gains tax exemption from 50% to 60%, to grant deductions for parents with children in private schools and colleges, and to preserve the legendary three-martini lunch. Carter denounced the Senate votes as "inflationary" and "unfair." He threatened to veto the bill unless the House and Senate worked out a compromise that was more to his liking.
These concerns have been reverberating throughout the nation in the closing weeks of the 1978 election campaign. As always, the contest is a patchwork of local conflicts. All 435 House seats are at stake, along with 35 Senate seats, 36 governorships and most state and local offices. Nobody expects any radical changes in party strengths: the Democrats will probably, retain their 61-vote margin in the Senate and lose only half a dozen of their 287 seats in the House, a bleak prospect for the Republicans in an off-year election. In much of the country, indeed, many key issues are purely regional — motorboat restrictions in Minnesota's Boundary Waters canoe area, a city charter revision in Philadelphia, a referendum on homosexual teachers in California —yet the money question is not only the dominant national issue but also the principal local one. And although the national temper is by no means so angry as is sometimes reported, it seems to be skeptical, self-centered and mistrustful of attempts to direct it.