1. CA spends more money per student than any other state in the US. Washington DC spends more, but obviously they’re not a state.
2. CA was ranked, last I checked, 49 out of 50 with respect to test scores. I think the only state CA can poke fun as is Alabama.
3. The state lottery was supposed to help pay for schools and school related issues.
4. Prop 13 caps tax increases to 2% per year IIRC. My in-laws own a home in San Clemente which they bought new in 1965 for $45,000. It went up to about $1.5M, yet their property tax bill this year was, wait for it…… just under $900.
This cap in Prop 13 was bypassed by passing the Mello-Roos bill which adds a special bond that you pay for for the rest of your life! It can go up whenever necessary, and was meant as nothing more than a way to bypass Prop 13.
CA is a state where the government is so caught up in spending every single penny they can leach out of its people, and then spends another $10B on top of that. We should have been setting 1-2% aside each year so that in the lean years we’d have something to tide us over. Now we’re gonna be something like $20B short of our budget needs this year, the bureaucrats in Sac are wringing their hands about trimming $5M here, and $25M there, and when it’s all said and done they’re gonna recommend a tripling of the car tax and many other increases in taxes. Instead of any semblance of fiscal responsibility we got clowns pretending to understand budgets and how to not spend more money than they get!
– Doug
(Quickly becoming the newest soapbox preacher.)
