EDITORIAL BACK-STABBING PROP. 13 POLITICIANS MAKE WAR ON AN INITIATIVE THEY CLAIM TO SUPPORT.

WHEN Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor and an economics adviser to gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, suggested that California's property taxes were too low, he stepped into a political firestorm.

To raise property taxes, Californians would have to overturn Prop. 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that's sacrosanct among the state's voters.

Prop. 13 is so sacrosanct in fact, that politicians make repeated efforts to praise it whenever they can. Even Gov. Gray Davis counts himself among its supporters.

But if Sacramento supports Prop. 13 so passionately, why is it working so hard to undermine it?

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, for example, wants to raise property taxes on commercial-property owners to the tune of $2.9 billion a year - a direct challenge to the reforms of Prop. 13.

But Bustamante's ploy is small potatoes compared with a ballot initiative that has the support of the entire spending lobby, most notably public employee unions and various Democratic front groups. The euphemistic name of the proposition is the Budget Accountability Act, but its goal is less about accountability and more about making it easier for politicians to raise taxes.

Seizing on public anger over the Legislature's repeated inability to pass a budget on time, advocates of this smoke screen for higher taxes have been promoting two of the initiative's less significant provisions. The first would withhold legislators' pay should they miss the state's constitutional budget deadline. The second would lower the threshold for approving a budget from two-thirds to 55 percent.

What proponents are less eager to discuss, though, is another provision that would eliminate Prop. 13's requirement of a legislative supermajority for enacting tax hikes. That way, with a mere 55 percent support, legislators could raise taxes at will.

It's a difference taxpayers would feel immediately.

Consider, for example, that this year the state Legislature contemplated 117 different tax hikes, most notably on income, sales, alcohol, tobacco and cars. All that kept a good number of those taxes from becoming reality was the supermajority requirement. Republicans refused to play along, and so Democrats - with majorities in both houses just short of the two-thirds threshold - were unable to balance the state budget on the backs of taxpayers.

If this measure becomes law, no one in Sacramento would even consider reining in the excesses and bloat of state government, and an ever more onerous tax system would send yet more businesses and residents fleeing from the state.

The architects of Prop. 13 knew what they were doing when they made it more difficult for government to raise taxes. They knew that the spending lobby wields mighty influence in Sacramento, and that politicians have a hard time saying no.

Prop. 13 was a vote of no confidence in the way Sacramento was running the state. It was an attempt to offer a sliver of protection to taxpayers.

Now, 25 years later, Sacramento's failures have become so big that the governor faces a recall election and nearly four out of five Californians are pessimistic about the state's future.

Now more than ever, the public needs Prop. 13's protections.

Politicians know better than to publicly criticize Prop. 13, even while their political allies attempt to dismantle it. Their treachery is proof that taxpayers still need all the protection they can get.