Would a tax revolt be an effective vehicle for pro-white activism? You decide.
After I wrote a recent column on the fiscal mess in some states, I gotan e-mail from a beleaguered New Jersey resident asking what I thoughtwere the prospects for a tax revolt in the Garden State. It is aninteresting and pertinent question because tax uprisings tend to occurduring difficult and uncertain economic times, especially in placeswhere the first impulse of state and local governments is to raisetaxes to make up for shortfalls in revenues.
The two most notable tax revolts in recent memory, for instance,occurred in the mid-to-late 1970s and again in the early 1990s. Taxincreases during those difficult years pushed the state and localgovernment tax burden above 10 percent of income, on average, acrossthe country and even higher in some places, like California, where ittopped out at 11.7 percent in 1977. That helped spark perhaps the mostnotable of all state anti-tax campaigns, the Proposition 13 initiativeof 1978, which capped property tax increases in the Golden State andinspired taxpayer uprisings elsewhere, leading to 13 similar tax caps,including Proposition 2½ in Massachusetts. Though expressed entirely inlocal initiatives, the anti-tax sentiment stirred up in those years wasso powerful that it’s often credited with helping elect Ronald Reaganpresident in 1980.
Memories are short in government, however, and a decade later, when theAmerican economy was again slowing, governors, mayors and legislaturesbegan hiking taxes again, sparking the next tax revolt. One of the mostvisible victims of this uprising was New Jersey Gov. Jim Florio, whofaced a $3 billion budget deficit in 1991 and promptly asked for $2.8billion in new taxes–at the time the largest single-year tax increaseever imposed by a state. Although Jersey had been, as recently as the1960s, one of the country’s most lightly taxed states, Florio’s taxincreases, the culmination of a series of rises over the years, helpedpush the state and local tax burden in Jersey to 11.6 percent of totalincome — one of the highest in the nation. Since the Garden Statedidn’t have (and still doesn’t) California-style initiative andreferendum, taxpayers displayed their ire by handing control of thestate legislature to Republicans in mid-term elections and then dumpingFlorio two years later — the first sitting governor to be defeated in areelection bid since Jersey had adopted its modern constitution in1947.