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Commentary
Some California myths are just that
09/28/03
PETER SCHRAG
When it comes to political myths, California has more than its share of hardy perennials, and this recall election has hardly been immune. And as usual, the candidates who know the least -- in this case, Arnold Schwarzenegger -- are the most severely afflicted.
Myth 1: Californians are overburdened with taxes.
Measured as a percentage of personal income, according to federal data, California in 1999-2000 was 18th in the nation in state and local taxes. If you include things such as university fees, which, despite recent increases, are still lower than in most other states, our rank was probably 19th or 20th.
The average Californian pays just more than 16 percent of his or her income in state and local taxes, compared to a national average of 15 percent. That, as we're learning, isn't enough to pay for the high level of services we demand.
Schwarzenegger and state Sen. Tom McClintock, the conservative who's his chief Republican opponent, talk glowingly about the wonderful days of the 1960s, when, in Schwarzenegger's words, "this great state said to the people everywhere: Come here, work hard, play by the rules, and your dreams can come true."
But in 1968, California was a high tax state -- among the top 10 in the country. The previous year, California's new Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, had just called for, and signed, the biggest tax increase in the history of any state.
Myth 2: California's terrible business climate has driven thousands of jobs to other states.
While it's true California's workers' compensation system is an expensive rip-off benefiting the lawyers who are among the principal backers of legislative Democrats, California lost fewer jobs proportionately than the rest of the nation. Since November 2001, when the current national "recovery" began, the state lost just less than 53,000 jobs, a 0.4 percent reduction, compared to 0.8 percent nationally.
That's hardly good news. The state's unemployment rate, driven in part by the high-tech bust, is slightly higher, at 6.6 percent, than the nation's. But it's far lower than the 9.7 percent rate, second-highest in the nation, that it reached in 1991, when Pete Wilson was governor.
The numbers put the constant talk about what Schwarzenegger calls California's "hostile business climate" into a different light. Since 2000, according to the Budget Project, "wage gains of the typical California worker have significantly outpaced those of the typical U.S. worker."
Myth 3: If we only spent money properly, our schools wouldn't be failing.
The state's test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are low, and school funding, with bipartisan support, has increased in the last few years -- one of the causes of the alleged overspending that Schwarzenegger and McClintock complain about.
Some of the money is misspent, especially when districts, under pressure from powerful teachers unions, get little productivity in return for the substantial pay increases they granted during the boom years of the late 1990s.
A lot of money is also wasted on across-the-board class-size reduction -- now costing the state close to $2 billion annually -- that, according to studies here and elsewhere, yield no proportional gains in student achievement.
Wilson also initiated that program. He was constitutionally required to increase school spending in 1995, chose to reduce class sizes in early grades to no more than 20 students, thereby keeping the money off the bargaining table and, Wilson thought, punishing his longtime nemesis, the California Teachers Association.
What he accomplished instead was to vastly increase the CTA's membership rolls and revenues, fill a lot of classes in high-poverty schools with underqualified teachers and drain the system of billions that probably could be better spent in other ways.
Many schools, in any case, are not "failing"; they often succeed against great social and financial odds. California still spends well below the national average per pupil -- we're now roughly 35th in the nation, a pathetic rank for a state with a high cost of living and the huge challenges California schools are facing. Merely to catch up with the national average would cost us $3.4 billion, and even that would be inadequate to California's needs.
You can't nourish a golden age on the cheap.
2003, Sacramento Bee |
