I lived and voted thru the 70′s and a lot of the actions take by the public and public legislators toward public education seemed to be in reaction to Brown vs. Board of Education. It played a role in redistributing certain populations from urban centers to suburban districts and gave a huge boost to private education.

I do not believe that the public had a good grasp of what was in the Prop. 13 at the time of its passage. They simply hoped that Grandma would not have to pay all of her social security or pension check to keep up with sky rocketing property taxes that went up with the sky rocketing market values for residential property at that time. The public mood around public education in the post Brown era was not open to the pleas from the education community that it would damage public education in California. It is time that these injustices were reversed. I hope that we are good enough as a people to do so.

My complaint is how all the government agencies refuse to triage their work or modify their operations to conserve funds. They all want to continue business as usual in a world where their business models need to change. That will result is more pain later that might have been avoided.

I work at the county hospital and I worked on the sales tax Measure to fund the county hospital Measure “A”. Ten minutes after the Measure past the county claimed that the “public hospital” owed them millions and that your tax dollars would have to go back to them.

Measure “A” tax dollars go to the hospital but then get sent back to the county to pay “debt” to the county.

The county supervisors are neither honest nor ethical about how they use and abuse these types of funds.

However we do have a deflation in real estate prices for the time being.

I don’t think the CA voters will upset Prop 13 anytime soon. Baby Boomers like it. As far as it being “unfair” – so what. Life, and tax law, is really unfair. That is just not a problem. We make our plans with “unfair” in mind. “Unfair” tends to favor those who plan ahead. Voters don’t have a problem with that concept and the legislature doesn’t either. Lawyers, Lobbyists and Accounts work with “unfair” to their client’s advantage and to the disadvantage of their adversaries.

And as far as the public schools go – the middle class and up which is where the votes and money are have abandoned the public schools (except the public Ivys such as Piedmont which can raise all the money they want). The only way to change this is to run at least some of the public schools in such a way that the middle/upper classes can identify with them.

If the public schools systems allow themselves to be devoid of whites – such as Los Angeles Unified with 6% white students (and falling?) the schools will get all the political support enjoyed by the cities of Detroit, Gary In, Compton, Baltimore and other such Garden Spots. The reason we are seing apartheid in school systems is that the schools honestly think they can run themselves like a 3rd world nation while keeping respect and funding from that part of the society that makes money and employs people.

The white participation is merely a marker. This is a social class thing. If the urban public schools don’t maintain respect and participation of the higher (at least the higher half of society) classes they are done for.

So no, you will never be able to upset Prop 13 in this State the way things are going.

Brave New World.

We’re probably the H1B capital as well for the same reason.

I would not have a problem with adjusting the rates for businesses though.

The idea of adding on an income tax would never pass with the voters and I am afraid that with sales tax so high already, poorer counties would refuse to pass any additional tax. There is also the remote possibility that people would actually leave the county for big ticket items, worsening the situation.