Howard Jarvis, Populist Entrepreneur: Reevaluating the Causes of Proposition 13

Abstract

During the months immediately preceding California’s June 1978 primary election, Proposition 13, the fractious property tax ballot measure, received a dizzying amount of media attention. Newspaper columnists from California and around the country swapped partisan barbs, debating ad infinitum the initiative’s merits and faults. In public forums, political scientists and economists calculated and recalculated the measure’s possible effects and unintended consequences. Heated letters to the editor and sharp-edged political cartoons saturated the editorial pages of local newspapers. Opinion polls registered the public’s sentiment toward the measure on a weekly basis. Shrill advertisements touting either the necessity or the destructiveness of the proposition interrupted regularly scheduled television and radio programs. Indefatigable Howard Jarvis, the monomaniacal, septuagenarian leader of the tax limitation movement, was seemingly everywhere. By election day, the proponents and opponents of Prop 13 had spent over $2 million each on the measure (CFPPC 1988).