DO YOU HAVE vested interests?

You better hope not. Because if you do, you'll soon be paying more taxes. As soon as Jerry Brown gets elected president, that is. I know.

I called 1-800-426-1112.

JERRY BROWN, in an attempt to bamboozle voters into buying the notion that a two-term governer of California and a former chair of that state's Democratic Party is a political outsider, advertises a 1-800 telephone number for ordinary Americans to call to make contact with his campaign.

Anyone. From anywhere. Preferably with $100 at the ready, of course, but the point is that it's free. It's open. It's grassroots: A 1-800 number is the voice of the people and recognizes no privileged elites. In fact, this 1-800 downright hates privileged elites, special interests and other nasty phrases that may or may not have any meaning but have certainly run away with Jerry Brown's bid for the Democratic nomination.

I didn't know quite what to expect the first time I called 1-800-426-1112. I had a question about the flat tax proposal, the economic centerpiece of the Brown Insurgency, and I figured that I'd just go to the source.

Analyst after analyst has announced that the Brown proposal for a 13 percent flat tax on all earned income and a 13 percent value-added tax would fall most heavily on the poorest segments of the population, and I wanted to know how the Brown Brigade dealt with that fact. After all, soaking the poor would seem to be a problem for a campaign that breathes fire at Privilege and Insiders in the name of the Disempowered and Forgotten.

So I called. I knew the number, of course. Anyone who has watched television coverage of the presidential race has probably heard Brown shout the magical digits a thousand times as Ted, Dan, Tom, Peter or Mother Teresa tries to get him to answer a policy question.

I dialed. "Brown for President," said a man at the other end.

"I make less than $15,000 a year," I said, "and I want to know how Governor Brown's flat tax proposal will affect me."

The Brown worker wasted no time. "You'll pay less," he said. Then silence. I pondered whether to accept on faith this man's contradiction of dozens of media analyses of the tax's effect on the poor. I decided against.

"How exactly would that work?" I asked.

"Um...er...well," he began, "You take all the money you made during the year, and all your earned income (am I getting it twice?), and from that you deduct charitable contributions and rent, and then you multiply by 0.13 And that should be less than what you are paying now."

That didn't quite satisfy me. First of all, the number wouldn't be less, especially for people who make so little money as to be exempt from federal taxation altogether. Second, he made no mention of the value-added tax portion of the Brown plan. But I left those questions alone. Instead, I asked a different question. "If I'm going to pay less, who is going to pay more?"

"People with vested interests," he said.