Word: antitax
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Moscow is not the only cradle of revolution where people are having second thoughts these days. Now there's California too. The state that gave birth to the taxpayer revolt in the 1970s took a step back last week from the antitax orthodoxy that has kept American government in a fiscal straitjacket ever since. California voters, who have tended to feel about taxes the way Lenin felt about capital gains, agreed to ballot Proposition 111, which doubles the state gasoline levy to fund improvements for gridlocked highways. The outcome of that vote reverberated not just on the West Coast...
...through another ballot initiative, Proposition 13, that Californians slashed property taxes 57% in 1978; one year later, they approved a no less important cap on state spending. In the decade that followed, nearly 20 other states adopted similar measures, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush rode the antitax sentiment into the White House...
Evidence of antitax sentiment is still widespread, and not just in California. In Illinois a group of irate taxpayers is promoting a ballot initiative that would require tax increases to be approved by three-fifths of the state legislature instead of a simple majority. Earlier this year more than 1,000 property-tax protesters stormed the office of Kansas Governor Mike Hayden. Connecticut's Governor William O'Neill decided against running for a third term this fall partly because his poll numbers dropped sharply after he threw his support behind higher taxes...