Big picture award
This week's "seeing the big picture" award goes to these guys.
Basically what happened here is that in one of their whacky referenda a few years ago, the state of California hypothecated some money from a gasoline tax into a trust fund which was meant to provide maintenance for trails in public parks to repair the damage caused by jeeps, dunebuggies, dirt bikes and other "off highway vehicles".
Now the state is in terminal budget meltdown, and there is a proposal to slightly alter the terms of that legislation so that the funds can be used for maintenance in public parks more generally, including those in which OHVs are banned. The site linked above is organising a great big write-in protest in order to ensure that this option is taken of the table. "We must not balance the budget on the backs of the quadbikes".
The situation is desperate, but not serious. Somehow I can see people finding better uses for the money than bailing out this sort of political behaviour. Like taking the same amount of money and giving it to Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and West Virginia and letting them use it to provide public services 50% as generous as those enjoyed in California.
n.b. from a CA resident: Our public services are, in general, "generous" in the sense that we spend a stunning amount of money on them. They are not "generous" in the sense that they actually, you know, "work."
ReplyDelete(Of course, we did it to ourselves, so this is in no way a request for sympathy. Quite the opposite really: you may now calibrate your scorn to an appropriately higher level.)
California per pupil spending on public eduction is below the mean average of all states. West Virginia spends more per pupil than California does.
ReplyDeletehttp://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_174.asp
Direct democracy WIN!
ReplyDeleteEducation spending is handled at the school district level in the USA rather than state level isn't it?
ReplyDeleteEducation spending is handled at the school district level in the USA rather than state level isn't it?
ReplyDeleteAlthough each state is different, they all involve some mix of federal, state, and local funds.
In California, roughly 62% comes from state funds, 11% from federal funds, and the rest from local property taxes and other local revenue sources. Moreover, to the extent that local property taxes in districts exceed certain levels, the state funding is accordingly reduced. In California, at least, local districts have less control over funding than the state.
http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us/articles/article.asp?title=Guide%20to%20California%20School%20Finance%20System
Referendum, Recall, Voter Initiatives, Prop 13 and supermajorities required to pass the budget or raise taxes. The only way to overcome the deadlock is to pry the cold dead hands of the California Republican Party off the budget process.
ReplyDeleteLet yet another Californian chime in here...
ReplyDeleteOur state government is broken. We should burn the current constitution and start over. As a previous commenter noted, this is entirely our own fault (though the moronic Prop 13 is older than I am, I plead for leniency on that).
But our states are too closely economically bound for West Virginia to let California spiral into depression. It is in the federal government's interest to bail us out.