The California Tea Party : SMALL PROPERTY VERSUS BIG GOVERNMENT Social Origins of the Property Tax Revolt <i> by Clarence Y.H. Lo (University of California Press: $30; 270 pp.; 0-0520-05971-9) </i>

A weak link in democracy is politicians’ extravagance with public funds, in combination with their occupational adroitness in avoiding public accountability. Individually, all spending proposals seem plausible; they all benefit somebody. But add them all up and you have the national debt and more.

Twice in American history has this baneful phenomenon precipitated spectacular outbursts of citizen indignation. One occasion was the Boston Tea Party. The other was the California taxpayers’ revolt of 1978 that produced Proposition 13, the statutory brake on property taxes.

To this day, politicians and bureaucrats tend to turn green at the mention of Prop. 13. It represents not only a leash on their extravagance, it also represents the persisting potential of an enraged citizenry to stomp on governmental excesses.

The politicians, and others, think of Prop. 13 as an aberration--an undercurrent of public vexation with taxes that just converged fortuitously with the messianic energies of Howard Jarvis to form a critical mass.

Clarence Lo, currently a sociobiologist at the University of Missouri, demonstrates trenchantly that the Prop. 13 revolt was far more than that. It was truly, he says, “a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party”--an uprising against taxation without representation.

Not only in California but across the nation, property taxes had become the politicians’ bottomless bank account. Need money for some boondoggle? Just raise property assessments or the tax rate. If citizens protested, spit in their eye. (Los Angeles County Assessor John R. Quinn, Lo says, chortled sadistically to one protest group in 1957: “If you think taxes are high now, wait till next year.” And when a tax objector raised a question of constitutionality, the assessment appeals board’s snotty response was: “Constitution overruled!”)

California’s real-estate boom after World War II threatened to put many a homeowner in the poorhouse. A house that cost $40,000 might be repeatedly reassessed on its presumed market value until an original $200 annual tax soared to a back-breaking $6,000. The system was capricious. At the same time Beverly Hills residents were paying $1.05 per $100 assessed valuation, far less affluent people in Alhambra were being dinged $3.98. (Prop. 13 established a basic limit of 1%.)

A number of books have been written about the pros and cons of Prop. 13, but none has delved deeply into the grass-roots origins of the tidal wave of sentiment that Jarvis rode into history. As a UCLA faculty member, Lo obtained grants to finance seven years of exhaustive research. Taking Los Angeles County, the heart of the tax revolt, as his laboratory, Lo combed newspapers for reports of taxpayer protests back to the 1950s. He tabulated these, correlating them with economic levels by census tracts. From newspapers and other sources, he pinpointed hundreds of “activists” in the tax-reduction movement, leading to about 120 interviews by him and several assistants.

Organized tax resistance surfaced a full generation before its culmination in 1978. But for two decades middle-class protestations--including tax-reduction campaigns by Jarvis and others, even County Assessor Philip Watson--came to naught. Then in the 1970s, two new elements entered the picture. Small-business people and affluent homeowners became aware that they too were being crunched by property taxes. (Big business, from the Bank of America on down, fought Prop. 13 to the end.)

Jarvis was a businessman of many parts who had ended up in 1972 as executive director of a Los Angeles apartment-house-owners’ association. In collaboration with Prop. 13 co-author Paul Gann, Jarvis, Lo recounts, “succeeded in forging a consensus between small residential property owners and community leaders.” The resulting three-way alliance of middle-class homeowners from West Covina to Van Nuys, and small-businessmen and upper-middle-class people from Palos Verdes to Los Angeles’ affluent West Side, ultimately proved invincible. The San Fernando Valley alone produced more than half the 500,000 signatures needed statewide to put Prop. 13 on the ballot. It carried by a 2-1 margin, yielding $7 billion in tax relief the first year. It didn’t seem to bother many people, then or now, that business gained twice as much from the reduction as homeowners.

Prop. 13 not only carried California but touched off a nationwide prairie fire. Within the next couple of years, nearly all 50 states enacted tax-reduction or tax-limiting laws. The movement ballooned into current pressures for a federal constitutional amendment requiring balanced budgets, and had many other impacts. California enacted the Gann Amendment, tying state spending to state revenues. Lo sees the Prop. 13 revolt as a significant strand in the recent upsurge of business activism in politics, and the new focus of citizen attention on the Internal Revenue Service as “a symbol of abusive government.”

The momentum of Prop. 13 can be seen in the Prop. 103 attack on auto-insurance rates. Jarvis died in 1986, but his spirit marches on in the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., spearheading opposition to the ceaseless attempts to water down Prop. 13.

Lo’s book, while it has many dramatic vignettes, is hardly spicy recreational reading, but it is a fine example of practical scholarship--a brass-tacks inquiry into a political eruption that has been short-shrifted and oversimplified. It could be a useful handbook for citizen groups on the perils and promise of fighting City Hall. And it documents the fact that California’s citizenry truly deserves a place in history alongside the be-feathered colonists of the Boston Tea Party.