Dan Walters

By Dan Walters
dwalters@sacbee.com
Published: Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 3A

As Election Day – and Halloween – approach, Jerry Brown may be getting spooked that his tax increase, Proposition 30, won’t make it.

The California governor once exuded confidence that voters would endorse a sharp increase in income taxes on the wealthy and a token, quarter-cent boost in sales taxes that everyone would pay, portraying it as a way of shoring up support for schools, the single most popular way government spends money.

A cornerstone of that confidence was that he had neutralized potential opposition from business, leaving tax increase foes relatively poor, while raising tens of millions of dollars, mostly from unions, to drive home his message.

Reality, however, hasn’t quite followed that scenario. Big business may be neutral, but wealthy individuals and a shadowy Arizona organization have provided the opposition with at least three times as much money as it had planned to spend.

Molly Munger, the single-handed sponsor of a rival income tax measure for schools, Proposition 38, shook up Brown by spending some of her bottomless treasury on ads that took a shot at Proposition 30.

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