Sometimes, I find Californians to be a little crazy. They queue up for public transportation 20 minutes before the bus is due to arrive, wander instead of walk and eat avocado on everything.
However, these quaint peccadilloes pale in comparison to the fullblown insanity of California’s voters.
I’m no psychiatrist, so I’ll stop short of diagnosing this strange psychosis witnessed both on the Berkeley campus and statewide. But even a quack shrink might equate the counterintuitive demands of California’s voters to a strange case of electoral and economic schizophrenia.
That’s a pretty tough accusation to level, so let me make my case: After I moved here from the East Coast and grew more accustomed to West Coast life, I started to observe more profound peculiarities than those oddities listed above. In particular, I noticed that California voters seemed to demand stellar public services from their government but didn’t want to pay for them.
I first encountered this phenomenon at Berkeley after learning that very few alumni give back to the campus each year. In 2010, only 12 percent of alums donated, and 40 percent gave over the course of their lifetime — measly sums compared to the 20 percent who gave last year and the 60 percent who gave in their lifetimes to the second-best public university in the country, the University of Virginia.
To understand these figures, one has to first comprehend the mindset of entitlement among Berkeley students and Californians.
On a campus where hardly any alums gave back this year, many current students are out in full force to protest fee hikes each semester.
I’m not condoning fee hikes. But Berkeley out-of-state tuition still falls short of the cost of an equivalent education in a private institution, and the in-state price tag is another $10,000 less. In a school where, despite rising costs, students still receive a premium education for far less than they would elsewhere, is it really so unreasonable to ask graduates — and taxpayers — to give back? Apparently, according to California voters, it is.
“There is a sense that we strongly value education and higher education, but voters still seem unwilling to vote in support of increased revenues,” said Michele Siqueiros, executive director for the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit organization that works to promote access and success for students in higher education. “In essence, they believe that a mixture of better use of resources or taxing the rich (or anyone else but me) — can work.” This idea of a free education being the right of all Californians can be traced back to the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, the document that envisioned the state’s three-tiered system of universities and colleges.
It is the “mythology” of the master plan that “burned into the minds of a whole generation … of people who went to school in California” that they were entitled to a free ride, according to Judy Heiman, principal analyst at the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
However, although the Master Plan was meant to last only until 1975, “nobody has stopped to take a look at it since then,” Heiman said.
This practice of transforming antiquated legislation into lasting promises and of representatives passing long-term measures to appease voters in the short-term reappears again and again in California’s state politics. The mentality of wanting the service without paying the price is enabled in part by the strength of the ballot box initiative in the state; according to Heiman, it’s “pretty easy” to propose a referendum.
This means that instead of a state budget being considered primarily by the Legislature, some programs are proposed and passed through referendum and then “get locked into state law, or the constitution, where the Legislature can’t even change them,” Heiman said.
Of course, no conversation about California’s funding practices would be complete without mentioning Proposition 13, the infamous 1978 constitutional amendment that keeps property taxes in California absurdly low and requires a supermajority of two-thirds of the Legislature to raise taxes.
Shortsighted ballot initiatives like Prop 13 pass in “boom years” when money is “pouring in,” according to Heiman. Such referendums fail to account for future turbulence and instead increase spending and reduce taxes. If these actions are not taken in a responsible manner, they lead to a severe structural deficit for the state.
And altering such popular initiatives is the “third rail” of politics, as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the LA Times.
Californian voters — and Berkeley students — need to wake up from this spell of lunacy and recognize that turning a blind eye to the impracticalities of half-baked referendums and refusing to pay for the services they demand is not a sustainable way to run a state, or a university.
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University
of California’s new discrimination.
Chancellor Robert J Birgeneau ($500,000 salary) displaces Californians qualified
for public university education at Cal.
for a $50,600 payment and a foreign passport. Need for transparency at University of California Berkeley has never been so
clear.
UC Berkeley, ranked # 70 Forbes, is not increasing
enrollment. Birgeneau accepts $50,600
FOREIGN students at the expense of qualified Californians.
UC Regent Chairwoman Lansing and President Yudof agree to discriminate
against instate Californians for foreigners. Birgeneau, Yudof, Lansing need to answer to Californians.
Opinions make a difference; email UC Board of Regents [email protected]
“ask graduates — and taxpayers — to give back”
There’s a disjunction here. Graduates have benefited from UC. Many taxpayers don’t feel a need to “give back” because they didn’t attend UC and their children have no prospect of attending UC. They don’t want to be taxed so that other people’s kids can enjoy a privilege.
Hey, Nina, ever consider that some of us are tired of feeding the beast?
Could I suggest a reason for Californians’ seemingly illogical behavior tax-spend behavior? Having lived here all my life, I would like to float the hypothesis that Prop 13 has created both a large tax-bruised segment of an already sensitive population — and a small tax-entitled segment eager to egg them on.
Starting at the federal level, the Tax Foundation estimates that only $.78 per dollar of federal taxes paid in California returns to California as federal spending. (This was a 2005 study — I wish it could be updated!) At a visceral level, this leaves California’s economy already ‘in a hole’ from a tax perspective. Californians’ sense that we’re not ‘getting what we paid for’ has the real-world manifestation of being a weaker net economic engine than we might expect. Hence we begin the tax/benefit equation uncomfortable.
Then, at the state level, K-14 schools consume 40% of the budget — but do so very unevenly. Some counties — most notably, Los Angeles (25% of the state) — managed to allocate only a small portion of each post Prop-13 tax dollar to schools (24% vs 40%+ elsewhere). Thus, much of the state experiences a net economic loss of state tax dollars, which head to counties that effectively gerrymandered their spending, e.g., to back-fill LA schools. Furthermore, redevelopment agencies are also 90% funded by draining the school portion of tax revenues, if you analyze their net tax increment and pass throughs. (This is why Jerry Brown moved against RDAs — they drain the state coffers via school back-fill.) And finally, Gov. Schwarzenegger redirected $7B of local taxes (so-called ERAF — educational revenue augmentation) to fund Economic Recovery Bonds and popular Vehicle License Fee cuts. So there is a major shell game going on in school spending — which voters sense and resent, but can’t get a finger on. Our love for our schools has been rather shamelessly manipulated.
Finally, at the local level, 40% of property owners carry 60%+ of the local property tax burden. These are the owners who’ve bought in the past decade. Let me reemphasize this: for almost half of California homeowners, a full third of every dollar they pay goes to subsidize others who bought before 1985 (30%) — and, given high property costs, these new property owners spend more in absolute dollars than family members or classmates in other states. This is further exacerbated by a steady subtle increase in the proportion of pre-1985 commercial property, compared with homes. In short, young families are subsidizing sclerotic landlords.
This is the civic effect of Prop 13 — 40% of homeowners feeling cheated, 30% who bought from 1985-1999 feeling that they’ve been hauling a wagon for 10+ years that is now too weak to carry them … and the final 30% (increasingly, heirs, as earlier generations die off, but their Prop 13 bases survive) vocally pointing to lousy services and the (often, grasping) public unions as an excuse for why they shouldn’t pay more.
Your counterexample, the state of Virginia, has none of California’s individual local property tax entitlements (not for property owners, not for county agencies) — and gets back $1.51 in federal tax spending for every dollar residents pay. So there is a clear sense that what-you-pay-is-what-you-get, which might make them more generous to their alma mater when they have the chance.
Net-net, exactly the Californians you’d expect to contribute to Cal are probably the ones who are net losers at the local level, net losers at the state level, and net losers at the federal level. Rebalancing tax contributions might have the effect of rebalancing expectations.
Californians would be more willing to vote for taxes to fund higher education if we believe the money would be spent wisely. But what many voters believe is that California’s public universities cave in to annual union demands for more pay and benefits, deny admission to highly qualified in-state students in order to fill unwritten Latino and Black quotas, and discriminates in favor of out of state students who pay higher tuition. The chancellor is so reassuring when he says that low-income students need not worry about tuition increases that we believe he will take our money and admit even more low income students instead of improving the infrastructure and educational programs for middle class students. Now we have to pay for the tuition of illegal aliens too.
California is in trouble because it depends on the income of the rich. A generation of California voters have grown addicted to that fountain of tax revenue. That is why Prop 13 will never be overturned, since middle class homeowners can’t understand why we don’t simply soak the rich again and again.
[California is in trouble because it depends on the income of the rich.]
The entire state is dependent on the income of the rich while at the same time pandering to the poor. This state caters too much to the incessant demands of people who don’t even pay the bills…