California Ballot 2016 - Proposition 51

The first of the many propositions on this November's California ballot is Prop 51, an education bond.  If approved, $9 billion in bonds would be issued for the purpose of improving and constructing K-12 and community college facilities throughout the state.  Specific funding allocations would be:

• $3 billion for the construction of new school facilities;
• $500 million for providing school facilities for charter schools;
• $3 billion for the modernization of school facilities;
• $500 million for providing facilities for career technical education programs; and
• $2 billion for acquiring, constructing, renovating, and equipping community college facilities

Both the Democratic and Republican parties of California support this proposition.  Politicians on both sides of the political aisle support this proposition.  There is no longer any organized opposition to the proposition as the one official PAC that was against Prop 51 ceased operations this past June.

Prop 51 is different than other bonds that have appeared on the California ballot.  It is the first such initiative to appear on the ballot that did not originate in the state legislature ever.  There have been 42 such bond initiatives since 1914. 

But rather than examine who is behind Prop 51 and how they would benefit, let's look at it from a different perspective.  California is already $400 billion (or more, depending on which estimate you want to believe) in debt.  The cost of this bond would be an estimated $8.6 billion in interest costs over the life of the bond.  While the thought of spending money on schools is attractive, this bond measure gives officials at the state level, rather than local levels, control over the expenditures of these funds. 

In a blog I wrote in May, I pointed out that 70% of California's income tax revenues come from only 1% of the population.  The combination of dependence on such a small segment of the population and the ever burgeoning debt of the state is a danger that cannot be overstated.  We simply can't borrow enough money to fix all of the state's problems.  The disaster of the $19 trillion U.S. public debt that looms like a black cloud over the nation's future is worse when viewed from the narrower perspective of just the state of California.

So I will vote no on Prop 51 and urge you to do the same.  Let the legislature find other ways to fix our state's school facilities than spending nearly as much to finance the repairs as the cost of the repairs themselves.