Time for California to Ditch Its Ghosts

Californians are governed by ghosts. Literally.

That does not mean that the specter of Hiram Johnson flies through the Capitol, negotiating budget language and vetoing bills (though maybe that would be one possible explanation of how this happened).

No, what it means is that California’s budget and political systems are so complicated, so gummed up by voter-approved measures, so just plain stuck that Californians don’t get to make democratic choices about the essence of government, which is taxing and spending.

Who is making those choices? The answer usually is: elected officials and interests gropus, but that’s not really true either. It’s not that somebody else is making choices. It’s that those choices have already been made – by voters and lawmakers who long ago locked in tax and spending decisions into the soup of the constitution. Prop 13 is more than 30 years old. Prop 98, the minimum school-funding guarantee, is more than 20 years old.

Through these measures, our tax rates are set by the people who were voting in 1978 when I had just turned 5 and California had 16 million fewer people than it does now. The funding levels for the schools to which I will send my toddler in a few years were set by a majority of voters in 1988 when I was a high school freshman. Many of the people who made these decisions are dead. I respect my ancestors, but it is another thing to be ruled by them. Until Californians adopt an initiative to provide free, public séances (a great idea to be sure, but where would we get the money?), we are unable to argue with these ghosts that govern us.

Too many Californians either do not understand this or do not care. With California Choices, Next 10 and Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West are seeking to engage our generation, an extraordinarily diverse and rising generation of Californians, now just starting to reach middle age. California Choices’ greatest contribution is the non-partisan, easy-to-understand information it provides about California’s system.

My hope is that, with the benefit of this engagement and information, we will awake, engage, learn -- and unwind these old rules. To fix our broken system, we Californians must seize power back from the ghosts, and give ourselves the opportunity – and the responsibility – of choosing for ourselves.