History Lesson Part 1979

I was born in 1964 and grew up in Southern California. Technically, I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom, although I think of the Boomers as people 15 or 20 years older than I, the ones who went through the sixties as young adults. I don't have much in common with those people. We were the last of the real boom, though. All the way through school the class behind us was much smaller. As we left school, the world around us changed dramatically.

The infrastructure around me as I grew up was excellent. As real estate prices went up, so did property tax, which by law funded the schools, local emergency services, and a plethora of other basics. I received an excellent education in the public school system straight through high school. The roads were paved, the police and fire got there in 3 minutes, the county health care system hummed along without trouble. If you lived in suburbia and were at least holding on to the bottom rung of the middle class in the 1970s it was a good time.

In the late 1970s, the apartment owners' association in California hired a man named Howard Jarvis as their lobbyist in Sacramento. His task was to help them with their taxes. He succeeded.

( What Mr. Jarvis accomplished changed everything. )