Word: kuttner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reactions to the shift in mood have thus far fallen along predictable ideological lines, with knee-jerk diatribes or celebrations the general rule. Robert Kuttner, former chief investigator for the Senate Banking Committee and currently editor of Working Papers magazine, has taken the first reflective and analytical examination of the subject in his book, Revolt of the Haves. Though he begins with the difficult but crucial step of acknowledging that something is wrong with the current incarnations of the Great Society, Kuttner does not suggest government abandon the cause of social justice to the free market. Kuttner proposes no liberal...
...that is where Kuttner begins. The first and most entertaining third of Revolt is a narrative of the peculiar (in California what else could it be?) set of circumstances that led to the passage of Prop. 13. Mostly, it concerns the bejowled Jarvis and his trek from the lunatic fringe (Barry Goldwater disowned him as a fund-raiser in 1964 after Jarvis's "Businessmen for Goldwater" kept as "fees" $88,000 of the $115,000 it raised) to national celebrity. Within the context of the loony personalities, slick p.r. firms and confused politicians, Kuttner clears away the inevitable confusion...
From there, Kuttner's narrative takes off in two directions, the lesser known stories of how taxes got out of hand and who benefitted from them. The huge increases in property taxes were actually the result of "reform" of the taxes in 1965. A San Fransisco tax assessor--the man who sets the values at which the homes and businesses are taxed--was found to have been getting kickbacks from certain businesses in return for low assesments, and consequently low taxes. It turns out, however, that the assessor, Russ Wolden, had actually been keeping homeowners' assessments artificially low, and making...
...real outrage came with the wild inflation in the housing market in the late '70s, The property tax, as Kuttner explains clearly, is the product of the tax assessor's judgement of how much the house is worth times the tax rate. When the assessors began to raise their estimates on home values in line with inflation, the taxes people actually paid went haywire even though the government had not raised the rates. Because of the reforms that took power away from the assessors, "as housing prices doubled and then doubled again, the local assessor could only feed the inflating...
...Kuttner also questioned the legislature's competence. "It is 1890 preserved in amber. It is a primitive government," he said...