California Commits Suicide

Most, if not all, of California's budget woes can be traced to a right wing "victory" in 1993, Proposition 13, the result of an anti-tax crusade.

Here is an article from the Economist describing how the budget strangle is killing the educational gem, the UC system:

California has been suffering serial budget crises, the latest of which was resolved last month in a rather desperate deal between the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the legislature. It contained huge cuts, including $2 billion lopped from higher education. The UC alone has lost a cumulative $813m of state funding in the last fiscal year and the current one, a cut of 20%. The second-tier California State University (Cal State), with 23 campuses the largest in the country, and the third-tier community colleges have also been clobbered.

The cuts threaten the legacy of two visionaries, Edmund “Pat” Brown, governor from 1959 to 1967, and Clark Kerr, who was in charge of the UC during those years. Kerr envisioned the state’s public universities as “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour.” In a 1960 master-plan he created the three-tiered system.

His ambition was simple. First, to educate as many young Californians as affordably as possible. The best students would go to the UC, the next lot to Cal State and the rest to community colleges with the possibility of trading up. Second, to attract academic superstars. Kerr went about this like a talent scout, and his successors have continued the practice. The UC campuses have collectively produced more Nobel laureates than any other university.

But the master-plan has been under strain for years. State spending per student in the UC system, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 40% since 1990, says Mark Yudof, the current UC president. The Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan think-tank, projects that California’s economy will face a shortfall of 1m college graduates by 2025, depressing the prosperity of the entire state. Public universities, which award 75% of all the state’s bachelor degrees, will be largely responsible.

The right wing's nutty anti-tax, anti-government agenda is the belief that private wealth is everything and anything public is theft from a private person's personal stash of goodies. But that idiotic view means you starve civil society in favour of gated communities and create islands of decadent wealth amid a sea of private squalor.

The lie perpetrated by this myth, that government is the problem not the solution, is that no real private wealth can be created without a civil society with rules of the game that let the talented and industrious succeed. Take away the civil society and you get the race-to-the-bottom of the Mad Max post apocalyptic world.

California's post secondary system was a true gem. It shows what civic-minded societies can accomplish. But under the dead hand of right wing ideologues this is being destroyed. It is far easier to destroy than create, so it is unlikely that California will ever again have the glory days of post-WWII when it was an exciting middle class society with opportunities to rise to great wealth. Now it will be more like the feudal days of the Middle Ages where wealth is carefully closeted in families and there will be no "opportunity". Some great wealth will remain, but surrounded by a moat and great castle walls manned by ferocious private guards armed to the teeth.