Prop. 13: the You're On Your Own culture

Cross-post from www.examiner.com:

I was pondering where to start on a 30th-anniversary commentary about 1978’s tax-cutting Prop. 13 and its impact on public education – and on the rest of our society – when an excellent Sacramento Bee column by veteran journalist Peter Schrag landed in my inbox. Schrag has been critiquing Prop. 13 for many years.

Proposition 13 did not cause every public service calamity of the last 30 years, much less the Northridge earthquake or the San Diego County wildfires.

But in the years since Proposition 13's passage, it has compounded California's governmental and fiscal mess something awful. California's per pupil school spending, which was among the top 10 states in the 1960s, is now among the bottom 10. Proposition 13 alone is not responsible, but along with two major court decisions that preceded it, it helped decouple school funding from the local tax base and thus undercut voter incentives to fund education generously, as it had been in the generation after World War II. Our roads, once a national model, are an embarrassment. …

California once had a communitarian ethic. That's been turned into a market ethic. It once did serious planning for the future. For now, that's a nearly forgotten hope.

(Read the whole column here.)

It goes almost without saying that Prop. 13 devastated California schools. It knocked them from the top in the nation to near the bottom not only in funding, but also (this is more complex) in achievement. (Our schools face more challenges in other ways than many other states’, including a very large number of limited-English newcomers and the impact of our high cost of living.)

As Schrag and others note - there are, of course, many pro-Prop. 13 commentaries floating around too - Prop. 13 was a social/cultural movement that went beyond just slashing homeowners’ tax rates as their property values soared. (The increases accompanying California’s newly skyrocketing real estate prices were what ignited the furor.) It was all about sticking it to those crooks and bums in Sacramento and, by extension, D.C.. "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address, 2 1/2 years after Prop. 13 passed.

It’s ironic, because Prop. 13 was a movement of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations – born roughly 1895-1930. And those generations, which suffered hugely through the Depression and one or both World Wars – also benefited hugely from government leadership and spending. The New Deal helped pull many of them out of desperation during the Depression, and the G.I. Bill transformed the fortunes of the entire World War II generation. There seems to have been a massive disconnect when so many of them turned hostile to government and tax spending after having benefited so greatly from both.

We saw a similar disconnect displayed in a quote in an unrelated Chronicle article a few months ago, about the question of charging tolls to use Doyle Drive at the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge, to cover needed safety work. "Doyle Drive needs to be taken care of by the city, not the taxpayers,” declared a San Francisco driver. If the reporter asked him where he thinks “the city” gets money, the answer wasn’t included in the article.

In my opinion this boils down to the fact that too many people don’t grasp that taxes are the price we pay for the services that keep our society civilized. You don’t hear many people proclaim their willingness to give up public services – that San Francisco driver wasn’t opposing making the repairs on Doyle Drive.

A new Field Poll says that 57% of Californians would vote for Prop. 13 today, while 23% would oppose it. But do all those Californians understand that taxes pay for services they are likely to need someday, or are they all soulmates of the guy who thinks “the city” should pay for those services instead of “the taxpayers”?

In some ways I see it as a conflict between those who want a “You’re On Your Own” (YOYO) society – social Darwinist, dog eat dog, every man for himself – and those who prefer to believe that “We’re In This Together” (WITT). But there needs to be a third category for the disconnected, the descendants of those who thrived under the G.I. Bill and somehow failed to grasp that it was tax-funded government programs that benefited them, their families and their communities.

There’s no doubt that homeowners needed relief back in the ‘70s, when their taxes soared along with their home values. (Let’s not forget, however, that these folks were getting enormously land-rich due to sheer lucky timing.) Legislators could have worked out ways to meet that need without starving government, and they blew it. Says Schrag:

Sacramento diddled in its futile effort to provide relief. But it's inconceivable that … Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature wouldn't have gotten the message in the 1978 general election and offered a more workable solution, even if it had taken legions of geezers with pitchforks to deliver it.

I worry that the generations behind mine (I was 24 when Prop. 13 passed) find it too deeply inconceivable that a society would actually be willing to provide for its members’ needs; that they’re too numbed to fight the YOYO mentality. We need a “Never Forget!” movement for a more optimistic, more determined spirit. It seems un-American to shrug “oh well” and give up on building a better society.