In a totally predictable and unsurprising editorial response to the legislative counsel’s opinion that the majority vote budget package was constitutional, the Orange County Register mounted an all-out defense of the 2/3 rule that made the curious and, I will argue, completely unsupported claim that the 2/3 rule actually prevents tax increases.

In fact, what the 2/3 rule has done is massively shift the tax burden onto working and middle-class Californians while enabling the wealthiest Californians to evade their social responsibility to pay their fair share. The result is a collapse of the public services, from schools to health care, that most Californians depend upon to live, to thrive, and to prosper.

The Register argues:

California’s two-thirds vote requirement to pass new taxes is intended to protect taxpayers, not to accommodate tax spenders. This concept appears lost on the Legislature, which already overtaxes residents more than does nearly every other state and overspends what’s collected by billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars by the time a final accounting is made.

Of course, it is not true that the Legislature “overtaxes” residents “more than nearly every other state”. As both the US Census and the California Budget Project prove, California ranks about 12th or 13th in total tax burden. But it’s important for the Register to maintain the fiction that California somehow “overtaxes” people, otherwise voters might decide they don’t like the conservative veto that the 2/3 rule created.

When voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13 in 1978, they weren’t seeking to protect or stabilize government revenue streams. They were seeking to protect taxpayers. Each taxpayer.

This is an odd interpretation, since all available evidence suggests most Californians thought they were voting to protect elderly folks who were in jeopardy of losing their homes to rising property taxes. What exactly does the Register think they were trying to protect taxpayers from?

If Californians knew that the 2/3 rule actually serves to give conservatives veto power over state spending, including efforts to save schools and create jobs, would they be so supportive of it?

What’s at the core of the Register‘s argument is the notion that Californians don’t want higher taxes, so they had to give conservatives veto power to stop it. It has been a spectacular failure of a policy. Since 1978 the tax burden has actually become regressive in California. The lowest 20% income brackets pay 11.7% of their income in state and local taxes, whereas the top 4% pay only 7.1% of their income. It wasn’t like that 30 years ago.

The conservative veto has meant that California cannot raise income taxes on the wealthy in a time of crisis. It cannot raise corporate tax rates during a boom. It cannot stop Chevron, one of California’s largest landowners, from enjoying the same property tax protections as my grandmother.

And yet schools had to be built, potholes filled, and firefighters paid. Local governments had to turn more and more to sales taxes to provide these services. And despite the fact that those taxes are less progressive than income taxes, more than 2/3 of Californians – including Orange County voters in 1990 and 2006 – have voted for sales tax increases.

So when the Register claims that:

Even if your taxes are reduced to compensate for your neighbor’s tax increase, your neighbor’s tax still will have increased. And that’s what California’s constitution is intended to protect against.

…they are not telling you California has seen that very phenomenon take place, precisely because of the conservative veto. Wealthy Californians have seen their taxes decrease, but their neighbors – the vast majority of the state’s residents – now bear the tax burden, an unsustainable and economically ruinous situation which the Register defends for reasons known only to themselves.

California has been ground zero for the conservative experiment in gutting government and allowing the wealthy to escape their tax responsibilities, and the result has been a severe economic crisis. Perhaps it’s time we ended the conservative veto and stopped listening to those who defend it, and instead sought more sensible budget policies that will enable our state to recreate the California dream of sustainable and broadly shared economic security.