Lakoff’s Initiative: Don’t T- You, Don’t T- Me, T- The Man Behind The Tree

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By Peter Schrag

The chances that Berkeley linguistics expert George Lakoff will get his California Democracy Act initiative on the November ballot range between slim and slimmer. But in contending that Attorney General Jerry Brown’s title and ballot summary would destroy any chance of its passing even if it qualified, Lakoff starts an argument that goes well beyond semantics. It tells a lot about why California is stuck in the mess that it’s in.

In requiring two-thirds majorities to approve both the annual budget – and all other spending measures – and to raise taxes, California is the only state in the union that gives legislative minorities -- usually meaning Republicans – a veto on both budgeting and taxes. Lakoff, who’s been a guru on language to a lot of politicians, wants to end what is in effect minority rule.

As it came from the author, his measure is summarized by one simple sentence: “All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote.” Wherever California’s constitution provides for two thirds majorities in the Assembly and Senate on appropriations and tax increases, it changes the “two-thirds” to a majority

But in its official language Brown’s office rewrote the title to say that the measure “Changes Legislative Vote Requirement to Pass a Budget or Raise Taxes from Two-Thirds to a Simple Majority” and uses “taxes” or “tax increases” three more times in the summary.

Last week Lakoff published an article in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/brown-v-democracy_b_518388.html) laying out his case and accusing Brown of misleading voters “into thinking that the effect of the initiative would be to raise their taxes, when there would not be such an effect on most voters.”..

Lakoff has no chance of making next Monday’s deadline for collecting the nearly 700,000 valid signatures to qualify the Brown-approved version. Given his reliance on volunteers and the Internet – Lakoff hoped it “would go viral” – he probably never had a chance. Now he’s re-submitting the initiative to Brown with a demand for what Lakoff regards as an honest title and summary.

“As Attorney General,” Lakoff writes in an accompanying letter, “you are obligated to provide a title and summary that fits the actual meaning and intent of the initiative. I am asking you to fulfill that obligation by providing a new, accurate title and summary [for] the recently resubmitted second version of the California Democracy Act, according to its actual meaning and intent.”

Lakoff has data from a poll of California voters commissioned early last month showing that with the original wording, which talks about requiring a majority vote, not two-thirds, on “revenue and budget”, the initiative would pass by a 73-22 margin. Even if opponents were to attack it as a tax measure, according to Lakoff’s poll, it still would pass 62-34. But with Brown’s tax language, it goes down 38-56.

When voters see the word “taxes”, Lakoff says, they immediately think the tax would hit them. But voters aren’t opposed to all new taxes, he says: if taxes are directed at closing corporate tax loopholes or imposing an oil extraction fee. In effect, he wrote in his Huffington Post piece, the attorney general is “acting against the overwhelming yearnings for democracy on the part of voters across the political spectrum, as well as their deep desire to end the state’s budget crisis.”

Is Brown’s language then just a back-alley mugging of a straightforward attempt to enact a reasonable reform restoring some sense to a convoluted fiscal structure that’s tied the state in knots?

Lakoff argues that even the Democrats would never raise taxes on the middle class or the poor: He acknowledges that, as in the old saw, “don’t tax you/don’t tax me/tax the man behind the tree,” it’s the man behind the tree who would get taxed: smokers, the rich, the corporations. The rich do pay the largest share of the total personal income tax, but, as he says, they pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than those with much more modest incomes.

Still, even many of those who’d fervently like to end the minority veto in California government concede that Lakoff’s initiative is still about taxes, and Brown probably wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t make that clear. It’s not been so long since voters rejected a ballot measure that would have reduced the two thirds majorities required for budgets and taxes. So the only way to restore a rational system is avoid the dreaded t word.

Even as voters tell Lakoff’s pollster that they want to restore majority rule in Sacramento, they rely on the two-thirds requirement to check legislative majorities in which the population as a whole – now increasingly minority – is more closely represented than is the disproportionately white, non-Hispanic electorate. For that reason, among others, the electorate doesn’t trust the legislature; it’s for that reason also that it so often relies on the initiative to trump Sacramento.

But in the end, Lakoff is still right. What we have is non-democracy in Sacramento combined with a money-dominated super-democracy in the initiative process. It’s a system that can’t help but be dysfunctional. The longer it continues without reform, the more unmanageable the state becomes and the more frustrated and the angrier the voters will get. In the end, maybe you have to fool them into changing it.   

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Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Monday in the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America will be published in 2010.