The libs still want to rewrite history, even 25 years later. They can't stand it that hindsight has proven that Ronald Reagan was right about both foreign policy and tax cuts, and that Prop. 13 actually strangled the government behemoth for a few years.
I lived in California in the years following 1978, and there were no schools in my area falling into disrepair. Instead, the economy boomed thanks to us peons being able to keep more or our money in our pockets thanks to Prop. 13, followed by Reagan's tax cuts in 1986.
Dan Waters is not stupid - he knows these facts. He is being dishonest.
I graduated from UCSD in 1976. At that time the university charged $212 per quarter for registration. That figure is $3850 per quarter in 2002 for residents and ILLEGAL ALIENS. Non-residents pay $13,850 per quarter. I recently purchased a car for my college age son for $14,000 that is of similar quality to the one my father purchased for me in 1973 for $4600. The car today costs 3 times as much. Why does the university education cost 18 times as much today? Idaho State University charges $1400 per semester in Pocatello.
Let's see....twenty-one million eligible voters....five million voted....and there was a 'distinctly rightward tilt' to those who did. Let's take a leap and define a 'distinct tilt' as sixty percent of the whole....which means that there must be at least 5,000,000 x .60 = three million 'distinct right wingers' in the state of California. That's about 4,999,900 more than I would have guessed (I have an Uncle Charlie in Fresno, and he has maybe a hundred friends).
With that said, Mr. Walters' definition of 'right' and mine (and I daresay that of most honest conservatives on this forum) differ greatly. No person of 'right' mind would have voted for these bond issues (long-term debt, obligating the California working class (of which there seem to be fewer each day) and their children to decades of paying through their noses for something the benefit of which by then will have already been realized and past).
And paying for what? 'Necessary' school construction and repairs, made 'necessary' by the fact that such mundane considerations as (a) projecting future enrollment figures so as to have an education infrastructure capable of accommodating them (lack of foresight appears to be a prerequisite for employment in CA state government), or (b) fixing physical problems as they occur rather than allowing them to evolve into more expensive deterioration, apparently took second place to (c) procurement of higher (bordering on exorbitant, I'm willing to bet) salaries for teachers and administrators and (d) the funding of education for the ever-growing number of illegals.
A local school district, or state program, which places (c) and (d) above (a) and (b) requires an overhaul, not a bond issue.
....school bond legislation may be modified at the behest of construction unions to effectively limit contracts to the relatively few unionized firms, thus denying work to many tens of thousands of smaller, nonunion contractors.
A 'modification' which the 'right' voters of California should veto before the ink is dry on the proposed (modified in order to be labor-sensitive) legislation. Labor-sensitivity = inferior workmanship at superior cost.
And it needs to repair many of its existing schools, whose maintenance was shamefully neglected for years in the financial scramble that followed enactment of Proposition 13 in 1978.
Mr. Walters has tipped his hand, and made apparent one of the main reasons he is employed at the Bee. He exemplifies the required hatred of Ronald Reagan, and a willingness to revise history.
I truly believe that the seeds for the movement to end big government in America were planted by Ronald Reagan, following closely in the footsteps of Howard Jarvis' Proposition 13. (And the fact that those seeds have failed to germinate properly over the past twenty-five years are not the fault of either Mr. Jarvis or Mr. Reagan, but it is a result of an abandonment of their agenda).
13 not only affected California finances, but its ripples were felt throughout the country, serving as an essential catalyst for Reagan's '81 income tax cuts. And, between 1979 and 1985, almost half of the states followed suit with their own versions of a taxpayer revolt -- and most of the resulting legislation is still on their books today.
Unfortunately, some of Prop 13's positive long-term ramifications were later nullified by Pete Wilson's and the CA legislature's passage of the biggest state tax increase in the history of the country. But don't expect the mainstream media to give voice that important truth.
California's economic upturn as a result of Prop 13 was momentous. During the ensuing decade, the state's budget nearly doubled (a seventy-five percent increase above the rate of inflation), and state tax revenues as a share of citizens' incomes actually rose (because of the resulting economic boom) from eleven to twelve percent. Hardly the economic disaster that liberal pundits (of then, and still today) would have us believe
The major effect of Proposition 13 has been to save the average homeowner in California tens of thousands of dollars in property tax payments over the past twenty years. That is money that would have fueled an even more rapid buildup in California's state and local public bureaucracies if it had been sent to Sacramento and city hall....Stephen Moore, Director of Fiscal Policy Studies at the Cato Institute