Xblog

It’s hard not to acknowledge that California’s schools are in need of help. We just had a bond a few years ago that shunts a bunch of money their way, but the governor also grabbed a bunch of their money (breaking a promise in the process) to fund other bits of the state budget. Honestly, if you vote for this measure I don’t see how you can in good conscience also vote to reelect our governor, who played no small part in creating this problem.

Most of this money ($7.325 billion) is allocated for K-12 education, with the rest being thrown in to the community colleges, state colleges, and universities. Honestly, I wish more of it was going towards post secondary education. High quality state funded post secondary education was on of California’s best calling cards, and underfunding over the last few years has really started to erode that infrastructure.

As a matter of course, I’m more inclined to support education bonds than other bonds, because they do have the potential to provide a return on investment that exceeds the interest costs. Schools help reduce crime, increase income (and therefore the tax base), attract employers, attract academically inclined immigrants, etc.

Here’s the catch though: this isn’t the first state wide school bond we’ve had. Indeed, we’ve had several as described by Bill Leonard, there have been three school bond measures issued since 1998. We basically keep borrowing more every time the money from the last one runs out. What does this tell me? These school bonds aren’t the one-time measure a bond should be, but rather an ongoing interest in increased education spending. The voters of California really just want to spend more of their taxes on education.

It’s ridiculous for us to burn through half of our education spending on interest payments when what we really should be doing is either cutting spending from somewhere else or raising taxes to pay for our education goals (or more likely some combination of both).