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Maybe I have a special affection for orphaned propositions or something, but I’m having a hard time turning this one down. It is focused on class size reduction and school supplies for K-12 education, with a bit more for safety and security measures and new construction at schools. Opponents seem to pick it apart with all kinds of arguments, many of which don’t bear up to scrutiny.

The critiques I’ve seen so far are:

1) It won’t fund new construction in most California schools. Fair enough, but this isn’t a big omnibus bond to can pay for new construction state wide. It only allocates $85 million for school construction or modernization. Most of the money is for class size reduction and teaching supplies, which most schools would qualify for.

2) Money collected in one community might get spent elsewhere. Frankly, one of the crimes of our education system is that more money is spent on education in wealthier neighbourhoods. Spend the money where it can do the most good. Fine by me.

3) It’s the first state wide tax imposed since 1910, and if it passes we’ll get more. Hey, if that means they’ll do that instead of recurring bond measures that waste tax dollars on interest payments, I’m all for it!

4) The new tax is never ending. I must have missed the memo that went out suggesting that education spending is only a short term state obligation. Furthermore, while the tax is neverending, the impact of it over time will decline due to inflation. If anything I think the proponents should have added a clause that adjusted the tax for inflation.

5) Proposition 88 gives Scaramento politicians increased power to decide where and how to spend your money. We’re talking about fifty bucks here. Yes, that’s a lot given how much we straight jacket them right now, but even those fifty bucks have a enough restrictions that I’m quite confident the money will be spent in the right places.

I’m pretty sure this one is DOA, but I’d really like to understand why I shouldn’t vote for this one.

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).