A letter to my students

There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower.<p>Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflation?

Education is actually a very substantial part of the California budget. According to <a href="http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html</a> it's 31% of the budget, with the next largest expenditure being Health and Human Services.<p>There are few major issues with the California budget.<p>1) Much of the revenue is required by law to be allocated in a certain way. This leaves the government with very little wiggle room to make changes to the budget.<p>2) State workers have powerful unions that have burdened the government with an amazing out of debt and future obligations in terms of pension of benefits. No matter what the budget shortfall, the government must meet these obligations.<p>3) When revenues increased during the DOT COM boom, government was more than happy to spend the increased revenue on new services rather than either decreasing taxes or saving the money in a "rainy day" fund.<p>4) California is a mess of red-tape and bureaucracy. I'm actually surprised how many startups do business in California and the Bay Area with the all the labor laws and extra benefits that businesses have to pay for that other states don't, like CA SDI that pays for paid leave, while other states don't have it. Also, state land use laws and regulations were directly responsible for the increase in housing prices by making it so difficult to build new developments (among other factors, of course).<p>Californians have burdened themselves with a massive amount of debt and regulations that have severely hampered the ability of businesses to grow and contribute to state job growth. A article posted a few weeks back showed that there's a huge exodus of people from California to other states. I personally left California (East Bay) because I couldn't afford to buy a home and settle down with my family, not to mention the 9.75% sales tax on purchases from Newegg.com!

I think the author is mistaken. You see, what happened in years past is that they "took out a loan" to pay for now with the promise that they'd pay it later. However, later has come and now those that benefited the most can't understand why those that have to pay for it need to tighten their belts. None of us want to stop paying for it but we've learned what they haven't: you have to live within your means.<p>My father said it best, "I had it great, you're screwed. Thanks for paying for it."

"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff."<p>What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! When this fails to happen it usually because of artificially erected barriers to entry in an attempt to capture rent for a select few. And just who are loading up teachers "with more and more mindless administrative duties"? Taxpayers? Who benefits when it is increasing difficult to acquire the "skills" necessary to become a new teacher?<p>He doesn't really provide any unique insight besides blaming all of society's ills on tax cuts. Food has gotten cheaper, electronics have gotten cheaper, why has our government gotten more expensive!?

An article like this without a single reference to the impact and influence of unions is absurd, like trying to explain the workings of the solar system without invoking the concept of gravity.

Reality check: "The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm: California taxpayers don’t get much bang for their bucks." <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_california.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_california.html</a><p>Excerpt:<p>California is the only Sunbelt state that had negative net internal migration after 2000. All the other states that lost population to internal migration were Rust Belt basket cases, including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio.<p>As Tiebout might have guessed, this outmigration has to do with taxes. Besides Mississippi, every one of the 17 states with the lowest state and local tax levels had positive net internal migration from 2000 to 2007. Except for Wyoming, Maine, and Delaware, every one of the 17 highest-tax states had negative net internal migration over the same period.

It's common knowledge that the founders of the United States favored the separation of church and state because they didn't want government interfering with freedom of religion by telling people what to think.<p>At that time, there were no government-run schools in America. If someone had suggested that government should be involved in running schools, maintain massive "Education Departments", etc., I'm sure Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest would have had the same reaction that they had to the idea of government-run churches.<p>If it is dangerous to a free society for government to be involved in telling people what to think via religion (and it is), how much more dangerous is it for government to be involved in telling many of the youngest and most impressionable members of society what to think?<p>We should demand the separation of school and state and end government control over education in the United States. Schooling is not the only means to getting an education (Mark Twain famously said "Never let your schooling interfere with your education"), but if universal schooling is deemed desirable, you could simply take the amount of money spent by government to run schools and maintain bureaucracies, divide it by the number of students, and issue each student a voucher to spend at the non-government, voluntarily funded community school of their choice.<p>To support freeing children from the dangers of government indoctrination and control, visit and join the Alliance for the Separation of School and State -- <a href="http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm</a>. As authoritarians are so fond of saying, "Do it for the children!"<p>-Starchild, candidate for School Board, San Francisco

Perfect timing for this<p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools" rel="nofollow">http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal...</a>

tell me where a man gets his corn-pone and I'll tell you what his 'pinions are.

I think that this is somewhat disingenuous for the reasons noted by others, but also the failure of the writer to acknowledge that colleges and universities have embraced business models and focused on revenue generation in ways that distract from the core mission.<p>I hate to say this but while most of the guilt should be borne by fat-cat administrators, faculty are greedy whores who are easily divided and conquered.

He bashes the older generation for not spending enough to support the government. Then he excuses them by talking about how they work 2 jobs just to put food on the table.<p>This guy should run for congress.

Edit: You know what? This post sucked. Here's a good link I used while babbling thoughtlessly (unless it wasn't good per _delirium): <a href="http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/documents/CHART-B.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu...</a><p>See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.

Great candor, great article. Displays some very critical perspectives that people often miss, they want safety, they want good roads, they want good education for their kids, etc, and still not pay the taxes that enable these things. One has to invest now, for a better future.<p>But there is a paradox, I couldn't find an answer.<p>The provision of safety, social support systems, equal opportunities, low cost education, etc are critical to getting out the best of a population of a civilization so that that 'advancement' of that civilzation continues.<p>Yet, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the larger the systems required to sustain that advanced civilzation becomes. And the larger a system becomes, the more in-efficiencies and over heads creep in and the costlier it becomes to sustain that system, at a per-capita level.<p>The more you charge (taxes) the population to sustain that advanced system, the lesser that people will have to spend on themselves, on their own dreams and development. And the less that people spend on their development, the lesser is their ability to contribute to the advancement of the civilization.<p>How does one break this paradox?

Manhattan Project cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in present day value).(<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project</a>) It employed more than 130,000 people. Many labs and plants built in 1940s for the project are still in use today.<p>We have just spend $760 billion on so-called stimulus. The money is gone, and nothing to show for it.<p>That's how bloated gov't works nowadays, in CA, federal, and all other states. And the letter is calling for more of this!<p>PS Great book on Manhattan project: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0684813785" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...</a>

That song he links to at the end is quite awesome. I guess this is the original version<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs</a>

I live in Michigan. It's no secret that Michigan is having severe budget problems. In fact, there are several counties in Michigan (38 comes to mind) that are actually UN-PAVING roads because they are too expensive to maintain. I often wonder how Michigan would look if instead of making tax cuts, and then cutting services, we instead paid .5% more taxes a year to the state. Would it improve our situation? I hope so. At the very least, we might not be un-paving roads.

(edit: reply to _delirium, not sure this might be out of order, oops)<p>As you mention, those stats are only for the UC system (no source), but leave out a whole chunk of other relevant data. The author is addressing what he believes is the decline of public educaiton <i>in general</i> in California, not just UC.<p>Some people outside CA may not understand that the UC system (University of California) is only one part of the public college and public education system in California.<p>As far as colleges, California also has substantial state funding for a lot of other non-UC California state colleges (CSU, California State University -- 23 campuses compared to 10 UC) and community colleges.<p>Of course, additional funding goes to non-college education as well, and grants that people receive who attend private colleges and schools.<p>Also future liabilities and pensions which are not included on budget.<p>So my point being--just focusing on your UC stats is misleading.<p>1. How about the whole California state college system? 2. How about community colleges, vocational education? 3. How about other forms of public education? 4. How about all education grant totals made with public dollars? 5. Also while you are at that, how about adding in future liabilities/pensions which are not included in the yearly budget?

I wrote three comments and erased them all before posting. Let's try #4:<p>This thing bugs me in a greater sense than simply the issues or people involved, and here's why: <i>you're paying this guy to petition his students to pay him more</i>. Strip away all the (real) problems and politics and all of that, and you end up with some guy you write a check to who is doing his best to a) call you a slovenly idiot, b) get you to spend more on him and his projects, and c) use his position as educator to influence his students to advance his causes.<p>He may be exactly correct. I don't think he is, but whether he is correct or not doesn't matter. Even if he is 100% accurate in everything he says, it's a conflict of interest. We simply can't have people on the public dole who also are political activists -- even in their spare time. I wish there was some way around this quandary -- the military has higher standards but we still see them getting dragged into various political fights. We have scientists who are activists, teachers who are promoting dissent, and public sector unions who are playing politics with public funds.<p>Again, it's not that I disagree with their politics or efforts. It's that we cannot self-stimulate. The money that comes from taxpayers cannot be caught into a feedback loop to promote even more money coming from taxpayers. The people we entrust with various public functions cannot also be using the stature we give them to score political points.<p>The only exceptions to this are political appointees, whose sole purpose is to play politics and be party hacks. For the rest of them, I am concerned that this is a really bad thing that is only getting worse and worse over time. I really hope some of these professional organizations can come up with appropriate ethical standards. It's like I read the other day: it used to be that scientists told you what "is". Now they tell you what we need "to do". (It was accompanied by an interesting graph from Lexis-Nexis with the frequency of the words "science says we must" which is rising exponentially in popular media.)<p>Aside from the specific politics in this case, the trend here is not good at all.

There's a lot more discussion of this post at the author's own blog: <a href="http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-to-my-students/" rel="nofollow">http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t...</a><p>Here's the comment I posted:<p>I copied the following figures from the comment at <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794</a><p>1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)<p>1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)<p>2008-2009: $144B ($145)<p>2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)<p>According to the comment thread, the state population increased from 15 717 204 in 1960 to 36 961 664 in 2010, which figures I assume are from the census.<p>My own calculations: that's about 1.7% population growth per year on average (1.017^50 * 15717204 ≈ 36 500 000) so we can interpolate the population in 1966 as 15717204 * 1.017^6 ≈ 17 400 000. That gives a state tax burden of roughly US$1610 per person in constant 2010 dollars. The 2009–2010 tax burden is US$3200 per person.<p>Therefore, at least over the 1966 to 2010 time period, if these figures are correct, then far from being the victims of an "enormous cheat" or "terrible swindle" in which state taxes were cut to the bone by a generation supported by state taxes, necessitating massive cuts in public services, state taxes per capita have nearly doubled during that period, adjusted for inflation using the CPI.<p>Some other possibilities were suggested in the comment thread:<p>• Maybe the CPI isn't the right deflator to use, because most of the state's revenues go to education and health care, not vegetables and beef, and these services have inflated in price much faster than the CPI. However, this doesn't rescue the "terrible swindle ... walking away from their obligations" claim.<p>• Maybe O'Hare isn't referring to public services as they were provided in California during the 1960s but during some earlier period, such as the 1940s. Prof. O'Hare, can you clarify your claims?<p>• Maybe most of the tax money is being wasted on unproductive things such as prisons, managers and administrators, or legislators, rather than being spent on productive things like public education and road maintenance. In this case, there is a "terrible swindle", but the perpetrators are not the voters or the taxpayers but the employees of the government.<p>• Maybe much of the high standard of living some decades ago was paid for by externalities. For example, power plants might have been less expensive to operate before the EPA was established, K-12 schools might have had higher quality when economic opportunities for women outside of them were sharply limited by institutionalized sexism, US military power might have kept the prices of many raw materials artificially low, and unsustainable depletion of fossil fuels might have kept the prices of energy and asphalt artificially low. As some of these externalities have been internalized, taxes would have to rise. For example, to attract the best and brightest women to teaching in K-12 education, the way we used to in the 1950s and 1960s, we'd either need a massive propaganda campaign about the nobility and importance of teachers (comparable to the one we have about soldiers), or we'd need to pay top K-12 teachers US$200 000 a year or more — with a credible commitment to continue to do so for half a century into the future.<p>So, on the face of it, the numbers don't seem to add up to support your claim. Can you help out with that?<p>Other comments related to this question include <a href="http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-to-my-students/comment-page-1/#comment-45779" rel="nofollow">http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t...</a> which seems to not be using the same facts as the commenter whose figures I quoted above.<p>The California Budget Project's summary gives a lower number of US$86.8 billion for 2009-10, which is still much larger than the inflation-adjusted per-capita 1966 number: <a href="http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budgetmyths.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budget...</a>

<i>Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.</i><p><pre><code> —Socrates </code></pre> These kind of education articles are fucking stupid and only help fan the flames on all sides of deeply flawed ideologies. Beating this dead horse is so common that I've learned to tune these from out when NYT, NPR, etc run these formulaic education scare pieces.<p>The flaw is that you just can't compare apples to oranges and expect any kind of meaningful conclusion. In this case, it's cross correlating some super high dimensional manifold from 1964(or whenever) comprised of easily hundreds of thousands of variables, against a similar large manifold(2010). There are just too many totally different variables between then and now for it to be a fair comparison at all.<p>Sure, each side sees what it wants in whatever tiny slice of the data they <i>choose</i> to use. Blame the Mexicans, no blame the Rich, no blame the Liberals, no blame Reagan, <i>ad infinitum</i>.<p>And this guy, a professional in higher education, wants to step out on a far limb to make some grandiose claim about the status of California education. I am more fearful of him ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning than I am of any of his exaggerated, inaccurate conclusions.<p>You know what? More likely than not, the world will keep going the way it has been, people, kids, and education will keep <i>improving</i>, albeit incrementally, and there is not going to be some apocalyptic doomsday in the future of public education in California, or anywhere.<p>In summary, he's basically following the same pattern so many old people follow: somewhere along the way they lose touch with reality, with the youth, get stuck in their ways, and believe the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and all because of some imagined flaw in the entire youth population. Old people forget what it was like to be young, and lose their ability to rapidly adapt and learn as children do. And without fail, each generation grows up to believe they were somehow better than later generations. Bollocks!<p><i>I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.</i><p>—Abe Simpson

Hippies pretty much ruined it for everyone.

TL, DR: liberal tax &#38; spend is the way O brother! Heed the call and deliver us from the hideous capitalists!<p>Oh BTW check out my new startup, we're going to make a ton of money.