Do you think the first successful referenda would be on abortion rights, or prayer in the schools, or a balanced budget? I think it would be a bar on the imposition of the income tax. For all our folly, the system we have functions smoothly and strategically compared to a system whose finances do not have the bare protection of the biennial appropriation and representative government.

QUESTION: A testable hypothesis about voter priorities that could be analyzed against actual ballot initiative data on tax measures across states.

Philip Chase Bobbitt, Philip Chase Bobbitt - Refl…, loc. 274