Howard Jarvis and the tyranny of the minority

California is broke. Illinois is not far behind, nor is Louisiana. Governors in a half-dozen other states are presiding over budgets that will curtail essential services, not just for a month but for periods likely to be measured in years. Connecticut is also significantly impacted. Funding for our schools, roads, hospitals and other state services will be cut back, and no one can honestly say for how long.

These problems are properly ascribed to the prolonged economic downturn, which has slashed state income from taxes at the same time as expenditures for sustaining out-of-work residents have risen.

The roots in California go back further than the Bush administration, 30 years, to Howard Jarvis, who dreamed up Proposition 13. His immediate inspiration came from art. He drew on the most famous line of a satirical film, “Network,� written by Paddy Chayefsky, our most underappreciated playwright: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.� In the film, the TV anchorman who is quickly going nuts tells his home audience to go to their windows, open them and shout out the slogan. They do, and the slogan becomes a national grievance phenomenon.

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Jarvis embraced that slogan because of skyrocketing property taxes, which were a consequence of rapidly rising California real estate prices. As a homeowner’s property soared in value, his or her effective taxes doubled or tripled. So in 1978 Jarvis started a taxpayer revolt and amassed enough signatures to put Proposition 13 on the November ballot.

It sounded innocuous: Annual property taxes would be limited to 1 percent of assessed value, unless the property was sold, in which case the next owner would pay 2 percent. Voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13, and in the next few years property taxes dropped more than 50 percent. The sky did not fall immediately, as the state used budget surpluses to make up the difference, but within a decade California’s public schools, which had been ranked first in the nation, were ranked 48th.

Further damage from Prop 13 came from a little-noticed provision that mandated a stunning twist to the democratic process: Any upward change in state (or local) taxes must be passed by a two-thirds majority vote of whatever legislative body promulgates them.

The two-thirds requirement creates a barrier because it empowers what I’ll call the tyranny of the minority. We’ve seen this operating in the U.S. Senate when 41 members block the will of a 59-member majority. The tyranny of the minority works even more viciously when the number required is only 34 out of 100.

A two-thirds majority is required to pass any constitutional amendment, which is why there have been relatively few of them during recent decades. That’s a plus. So was the principle’s operation in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He realized that while the Republican-controlled House of Representatives might indict him, he had almost no chance of being convicted by two-thirds vote of a Senate in which the Republicans could not command 67 votes against him.

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Currently, the American electorate is narrowly divided into Democratic and Republican partisans. This, in conjunction with the two-thirds rule, produced the California impasse. The Democratic-controlled Legislature would like to raise taxes to cure the shortfalls in revenue — shortfalls still being caused by Proposition 13 — but because they cannot muster a two-thirds majority, the Republican legislative minority has effectively vetoed such increases.

Some “moderate� Republicans in Sacramento would like to vote with the majority on fixing the mess through raising some taxes, but won’t, since if they do they will be pilloried by more conservative challengers at the next election cycle. After all, George H. W. Bush was hoist on that petard — sent to defeat in 1992 because he had gone back on his 1988 pledge, “Read my lips, no new taxes,� and conservatives refused to vote for him in large enough numbers to prevent Clinton’s election.

Though California may solve the current budget crisis, its shortfall is likely to continue for years. Revenue to the state coffers from personal income taxes in California has fallen by 34 percent in a year, and is unlikely to increase substantially soon. So if Californians want their children to attend public school, to be able to go to emergency rooms in public hospitals when they are ill, to have their roads maintained, eventually they will have to raise taxes, repeal Proposition 13 or do something equally drastic.

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The fault lies — as it often does, if we are honest — mainly with the voters. Like ostriches with their heads in the sand, California voters don’t want to see the lion clearly, for fear that they might have to actually confront it, meaning, in this instance, to confront the need to find a way to pay for needed state services. Pretty soon the service-cut lion will eat up California’s ostriches, attacking them by forcing down prices for the voters’ homes, destroying their equity, because potential buyers from other states will not want to pay inflated high prices for homes located in a state that no longer offers many essential services.

In Connecticut, the combined legacy of “no new taxes� and “I’m not going to take it anymore� has worsened the budgetary impasse. While the Legislature is willing to couple programs of service cutbacks with new revenue-raising laws, Gov. M. Jodi Rell, like Gov. Schwarzenegger, following the conservative line, has pledged to veto new taxes, and wants only draconian cutbacks. Rell touts this as a principled position, but the principle it embraces is so bereft of understanding of the situation that it belies real comprehension. However, it’s a popular principle among ostriches, and so is likely to prevail in Connecticut as well as in California.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.