California’s controversial property tax law, Proposition 13, is considered one of the most significant tax revolts in American history. Libraries, facing decreased funding, were pushed to reset priorities, rethink operations, and learn a new activism. Their struggle left many lessons from which the library community can learn.
Proposition 13 was the greatest tax revolt in American history since the Boston Tea Party. In June 1978, Californians rose up behind a colorful, irascible, unlikely leader, 74-year-old Howard Jarvis, and turned the political world upside down. The first shot in the Reagan Revolution, the Proposition 13 tax revolt changed the world. Told by an insider, this is the story of the politics, odd tales and bizarre arguments that surround the fabled tax revolt from its success at the polls to its survival, despite constant attacks, 25 years later. It is the story of a legend in the making.
A tax revolt almost as momentous as the Boston Tea Party erupted in California in 1978. Its reverberations are still being felt, yet no one is quite sure what general lessons can be drawn from observing its course. this book is an in-depth study of this most recent and notable taxpayer's rebellion: Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13, the Gann measure of 1979, and Proposition (Jarvis II) of 1980.
The history we can't afford to forget. At last, the definitive history of supply-side economics—an incredibly timely work that reveals the foundations of America's prosperity when those very foundations are under attack. In the riveting, groundbreaking book Econoclasts, historian Brian Domitrovic tells the remarkable story of the economists, journalists, Washington staffers, and (ultimately) politicians who showed America how to get out of the 1970s stagflation and ushered in an unprecedented quarter-century run of growth and opportunity. Based on the author's years of archival research, Econoclasts is a masterful narrative history in the tradition of Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man and John Steele Gordon's An Empire of Wealth.
A CNN political analyst and a Republican strategist reframe the discussion of the “Trump voter” to answer the question, What’s next? NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS • “Unlike most retellings of the 2016 election, The Great Revolt provides a cohesive, non-wild-eyed argument about where the Republican Party could be headed.”—The Atlantic Political experts were wrong about the 2016 election and they continue to blow it, predicting the coming demise of the president without pausing to consider the durability of the winds that swept him into office. Salena Zito and Brad Todd have traveled over 27,000 miles of country roads to interview more than three hundred Trump voters in ten swing counties. What emerges is a portrait of a group of citizens who span job descriptions, income brackets, education levels, and party allegiances, united by their desire to be part of a movement larger than themselves. They want to put pragmatism before ideology and localism before globalism, and demand the respect they deserve from Washington. The 2016 election signaled a realignment in American politics that will outlast any one president. Zito and Todd reframe the discussion of the “Trump voter” to answer the question, What’s next?
A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership. Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.
In A Good Tax, tax expert Joan Youngman skillfully considers how to improve the operation of the property tax and supply the information that is often missing in public debate. She analyzes the legal, administrative, and political challenges to the property tax in the United States and offers recommendations for its improvement. The book is accessibly written for policy analysts and public officials who are dealing with specific property tax issues and for those concerned with property tax issues in general.
The president of Forbes, Inc. presents his argument for a flat tax, suggesting that the new tax would be fair and efficient, with the new tax form being no bigger than a postcard and without any of the loopholes that currently exist.
"Miriam Pawel’s fascinating book . . . illuminates the sea change in the nation’s politics in the last half of the 20th century."--New York Times Book Review California Book Award Gold Medal Winner * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * A Los Angeles Times Bestseller * San Francisco Chronicle's "Best Books of the Year" List * Publishers Weekly Top Ten History Books for Fall * Berkeleyside Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for NCIBA Golden Poppy Award A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist's panoramic history of California and its impact on the nation, from the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley--told through the lens of the family dynasty that led the state for nearly a quarter century. Even in the land of reinvention, the story is exceptional: Pat Brown, the beloved father who presided over California during an era of unmatched expansion; Jerry Brown, the cerebral son who became the youngest governor in modern times--and then returned three decades later as the oldest. In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead one hundred forty years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance. The magisterial story is enhanced by dozens of striking photos, many published for the first time. This book gives new insights to those steeped in California history, offers a corrective for those who confuse stereotypes and legend for fact, and opens new vistas for readers familiar with only the sketchiest outlines of a place habitually viewed from afar with a mix of envy and awe, disdain, and fascination.
