Howard Jarvis Quotes

I didn't comprehend this during the 15 years we worked on 13. I didn't comprehend the size it was going to be. I was running around the track like a horse with blinders on. If I had known it was going to take 15 years, if I had known it was going to take 100,000 bucks out of my pocket, then I might have been too chicken to have gone on.

I think the fact that so many people are forced to live in apartments is bad for the country. The solution is more building, but the politicians have made it impossible to build. People don’t have as much interest in keeping an eye on government and politicians when they rent, instead of owning their own home.

I never smoked a cigarette or had a drink or saw a pregnant girl either in grade school, or high school, or college. Never. When I was in high school, the coach would write on a piece of paper. ‘These are the rules,’ and hang it on the wall. And believe me, those were the rules. You had to go to bed at 9:00. You couldn’t eat ice cream or pie. You had to report for practice at 3:35 every afternoon, for all sports. And of course we could not drink coffee or tea or Coca Cola or soda pop. It never occurred to us to disobey the rules.

There’s no question about it: My father was the most important influence on my life. He was a very stern, righteous, but fair guy who had a set of principles by which he lived. Those principles were: you never lied to anybody, you never took anybody’s money unless you had earned it, and education is essential. He would tell us that education was just like the cans on the market shelf: all you have to do is go take it off. But if you don’t take it off, you’re not going to get it. Nobody’s going to hand it to you.

Elected officials have a responsibility to represent their constituents to the best of their ability. But there is hardly a better example of a conflict of interest than the difference between the best interest of the politician and the best interest of the people he has the duty to represent. The more taxes, the more money government has to spend, the more public employees the politician can put on the public payroll, the more power the politician has.

Don’t misunderstand me: the politicians don’t petitions, as long as they have no legal effect. As long as they mean as much as writing a letter to Santa Claus. They don’t read the mail anyway. They don’t want the people to have the legal authority to take control of their government. Government controls people by putting up barriers that reduce the people’s right to participate in government, so legislators generally don’t like the right to petition. It frightens them, as it should, and they fight it every step of the way. As long as the people don’t have the right to petition, the politicians can sit up on their thrones and say, ‘We don’t give a damn what the people say.’ They can do that because they know the people have no way of fighting back.

I guess nobody chose me to lead the parade. I guess I chose myself. If I hadn't done it, I don't think anybody else in California would have done it. Nobody.

Tax shelters are a coffin for money.

An oppressive legislature could drive the people to refuse to pay their taxes and to revolt with guns. We didn’t want that, so we were trying to create a revolution with fountain pens, rather than with rifles, clubs, or a confrontation between the people and the government.

Over the years one of the main ploys by our politicians has been to make government so complicated that people can’t understand it. What the people can’t understand, they’re afraid of and walk away from. That leaves the politicians with a free hand.

The best way to convince the state legislature to give people the legal right to petition to change the law is by circulating petitions and collecting the name of as many voters as possible. That’s what keeps the politicians honest, or at least more honest than they would otherwise be: the knowledge that the people are interested in their government and that if they don’t do the job, the people will reclaim their rights. That’s why the initiative and referendum are important.

Many people don’t understand that property taxes have absolutely no relation to a property owner’s ability to pay—unlike the two other major forms of taxation, income tax and sales tax. From that very first meeting back in 1962, those of us in the tax movement decided that our efforts must be directed toward bringing all taxes— but especially property taxes—down to a level where most people could pay them without undue hardship.

One of the worst scare tactics used against us during the campaign was the dire prediction—based on the phony UCLA study that Governor Brown and other politicians cited—that hordes of public employees, perhaps as many as 451,000, would be laid off if 13 passed. Well, 13 did pass. And what happened?... There have been no massive layoffs of public employees or drastic cutbacks in governmental services in California… only 19,000 employees of local governments and school districts had lost their jobs because of 13. That’s less than 2% of the 1.1 million people who work for local governments and school districts in the state.

I tell off reporters when I think they’re asking me a stupid question or an irrelevant one. I compare their business to everyone else’s. I say they’re not a privileged class. They have no right to ask me what color toilet paper I use any more than I have a right to ask them how many times they had sex last week. And when they suggest that the apartment business should be under rent control, I say, ‘How would you like it if you were under censorship?’ That always stops them.

In Los Angeles County alone, 400,000 people did not pay their property tax this year because they didn’t have the money. They run the risk of being forced out of their homes, which I personally believe is un-American, indecent, and criminal. There is nothing more sacred than the place where a man lives.