George Will’s Strange Tax Revolt Denialism

Remarkably, George Will read the same New Yorker article discussed below and concludes that the U.C. financial crisis is the inevitable consequence of too much–wait for it–liberalism. This is very strange. Proposition 13 was a historic victory for conservatism. It helped launch an anti-tax ideological movement that continues to have a great deal of power today. The so-called “starve the beast” strategy of reducing government spending by cutting taxes was a failure at the federal level, because the federal government can print and/or borrow money and Republicans in the White House and Congress proved to have no appetite for spending cuts. But in states like California, the long-term erosion of the state’s financial foundation has resulted in deep cuts to social services, thousands of unionized teachers being laid off and the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars at that epicenter of liberalism, U.C. – Berkeley. In other words, mission accomplished! Seeing as how he hates liberals, California, and liberal universities, nobody should be more pleased by this than George Will. But instead of taking credit, he constructs a weirdo alternate universe history of California that omits Ronald Reagan’s signal legacy of destroying the state’s ability to provide its citizens with a decent government. What kind of movement doesn’t want to take credit for successfully implementing its most cherished goals?