Against: Tax increases would come at wrong time
After devoting much of my political life to the urgent cause of strengthening government support for public education, the last thing I ever thought I’d oppose would be a ballot measure that purports to raise revenue for California’s K-12 schools.
The intent behind Proposition 38 is pure and its objective is just. But Prop. 38 — which exposes all Californians regardless of income to a higher income-tax rate — is the wrong tax at the wrong time and, more troublingly, fails to solve the problem it claims to address. In fact, it will worsen California’s education deficit in the near term — and certainly cause devastating cuts to other priorities such as higher education. From a state budget standpoint, Prop. 38 is the fiscal equivalent of the NFL’s replacement referees — well-meaning, but incapable of doing the job and likely to make the situation worse.
To understand the devil-inits-details, it’s important to recall the depth of the fiscal hole in which the state found itself just two years ago and how far we’ve come since. By committing to fiscal discipline and refusing to shy away from gut-wrenching cuts, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature managed to close a $26 billion deficit without decimating education funding.
But, after billions of dollars in once-unthinkable reductions, that path to fiscal stability still includes one final, imperative step — passage of a voterapproved revenue measure to help close the education deficit this year, avoid additional painful cuts to schools and colleges, and stabilize our state’s fiscal situation for years to come. According to projections, under Proposition 30 (the governor’s revenue measure), the state will be in surplus within four years. Unfortunately, Prop. 30 is automatically nullified if Prop. 38 is successful.
Why is this so disconcerting? Because Prop. 38, which would lock in its taxes for 12 years and cannot be changed legislatively even if economic conditions fluctuate, does not provide a dime for California schools until late 2013 at the earliest.
In the meantime, catastrophic trigger cuts would necessarily be made to K-12 education to balance the budget, which would then be $6 billion in the red. As a result of these cuts, it would be at least six years before the net benefit of Prop. 38 to K-12 education is greater than the benefits offered in the governor’s measure. For schoolchildren across our state trapped in underfunded schools, that’s too long to wait. Prop. 38 also completely shuts out higher education of its new funding, virtually guaranteeing that fees will continue to rise and thousands of additional Californians will lose access to college education.
Despite its price tag for middle-class taxpayers, Prop. 38 provides too little, too late for our public education system and makes it significantly harder to end our perpetual state budget crises.