Page 4750 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 7 December 1994
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The tax revolt, in addition to plunging California into insolvency, has transformed California's political landscape generally for the worse. Almost overnight, Jarvis-Gann taught countless political consultants, media operatives, and direct-mail outfits what could be done with what had once been regarded as the people's weapon against the interests ...
It is worth repeating that, because that is the strength of the argument that Mr Stevenson and Mrs Carnell put. The article reads:
... with what had once been regarded as the people's weapon against the interests: how to test-market issues to see whether they could be exploited, both for votes and (more important) for money, through direct-mail appeals and then sold to one or another interest group as future initiatives. Those skills have found takers both on the right and on the left: among environmentalists and tobacco prohibitionists on the one side, among taxpayer groups on the other, and most emphatically among major industrial and professional groups - the insurance companies, the tobacco companies, the trial lawyers, the doctors - looking to fund special programs, or looking for protection and exemptions from regulation or for advantage against other interests. In some instances, voters have been faced with duelling initiatives, some of them hundreds of pages long, whose combined effect, when more than one passed, no-one could have predicted.
I flip over a couple of pages. It says:
California, among the top ten states in per-pupil spending for schools in 1969, is now roughly fortieth -
almost last -
despite the requirement of Proposition 98 that 40 per cent of the state's budget must go to schools. California now spends just half for each child in the public schools, roughly $4,200 a year, what New York or New Jersey spends. Almost everything that Jonathan Kozol attributes to the "savage inequalities" of funding for inner-city schools in Illinois or New Jersey or New York is true about schools everywhere in California: the leaky roofs, the broken windows, the dry rot and peeling paint, the bathrooms that are locked because the plumbing has failed, the "temporary" portable classrooms that have been there for thirty years.
I am quite happy to make the article available to any member. The concluding paragraph states:
For the foreseeable future, then, California will remain locked into a system of supermajority government that makes a parody of the theory of constitutional checks and balances: government's not really supposed to work, and if it does, it should work only slowly and only
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