Campaign Quotes Are Fickle Friends
There are six budget-related initiatives on next month’s special election ballot in California. The key ones are Proposition 1A and 1B. Prop 1A extends temporary taxes, creates a rainy day fund, and limits spending (maybe). Prop 1B will guarantee $9.3 billion to public schools. For 1B to take effect, 1A also has to pass.
The California Teachers Association supports both 1A and 1B and as part of its multi-million dollar campaign has sent out mailers to voters. One mailer quotes Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub from his April 5 column, “Why you ought to vote for 1A.” CTA excerpted the paragraphs about why conservatives, liberals and moderates should support the measure – leaving out the part about how 1A “was written behind closed doors, with little public input and far too little sunlight before its adoption by the Legislature.”
OK, but the only reason CTA supports 1A is because it is necessary to get the money in 1B. So today, Weintraub tells us what he thinks of 1B in an editorial called “More of what got us into a mess.”
If you want to know what’s wrong with California’s government finances, take a close look at Proposition 1B on the May 19 ballot.
That measure would perpetuate the tangled mess of constitutional strings that tie the state budget in knots and make balancing it so difficult for the legislators we hire to do the job.
…That is exactly the kind of ballot-box budgeting that brought California to the brink of insolvency. At the very time when we should be reassessing our priorities and keeping every option open, this proposal asks voters to close off options and lock in spending by formula.
…The schools will get this money whether enrollment climbs or falls, whether the economy booms or continues to bust, and no matter what other cuts lawmakers must make to find the money to pay this obligation.
…If Proposition 1B fails, the teachers union will probably sue the state to force payment of the disputed funds. But even if the union wins that lawsuit, the result won’t be much worse than what 1B entails. If the CTA loses such a lawsuit, a little bit of the Legislature’s flexibility will be restored, and with it a modest ability to weigh competing priorities before deciding how to spend the state’s limited resources.
