Jerry Brown’s Last Chance to Save California

It has been 35 years since California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 13, a measure that, as Governor Jerry Brown put it in 2011, “started the centralization of power” in the state. He should know because he was also governor in 1978 and helped oversee that shift.

At the time, Californians were enraged that their inflation-fueled home values were accompanied by rising local property taxes. The referendum limited those taxes to 1 percent of their property’s value.