Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflation?
1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)
1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)
2008-2009: $144B ($145)
2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)
Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled.
You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less.
I feel the urge to get out numbers here, but it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
It's from a ca.gov domain, so I'm not sure it gets much more authoritative.
You can do your own analysis, but one snapshot would be 137B total spent in 2000-1 to 200B total spent in 2010-11. I chose to include federal funds on the grounds that for the topic in question, that would seem the relevant measure since a lot of those federal funds lately have been for public services, the topic in discussion. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl shows the inflation rate across that time frame as a 1.27 multiple, vs. a 1.46 multiple in California spending.
You can make the numbers somewhat worse by using 2009-2010's expenditures of 221B; how fair you think that is is up to the reader, I guess. Given that our author probably still thinks that's not enough, arguably that would be a more fair demonstration of what is still apparently not enough money.
All following figures are from US census data:
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 1964: $2182.85 (helpfully provided by the 1964 census).
Total revenue from all taxes 2005: $146,692,000,000
Total resident population of California, 2005: 36,250,000
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 2005: $4,046.68
HOWEVER, what I will never do is frame statistics or data just to fit my argument better. I was curious about this statistic (I don't really believe this tiny bit of data is really evidence for any drastic response) and decided to do the grunt work with the past US census data to satisfy my curiosity, whatever the results.
Also, the US census papers look way better in 1964 than they do in 2005. I think the 2005 documents may have a more legible typeface but it certainly makes me go "ugh." The margins are very bad in the '05 docs, too.
He learned Latin in high school (think inner city kid learning Latin). Grew up with all the airfields in LA and mechanical engineering seemed like the thing, I guess. So despite being interned (he was a Japanese American) he went on to be a very successful engineer and eventually businessman (owned his own hydraulics company, etc.).
It's arguable that a lot of this happened because of a golden age in California's educational system. Same thing with my parents. I've met them and they're idiots -- but at least my father benefited greatly from UC Berkeley (he's a philosophy professor).
I think PG is right to question what exactly is going on. But there really was an extraordinary investment in higher education (for whatever reason) in the early- to mid- 20th century. And arguably, that affected a lot of things which we Californians take for granted.
I think what the OP is trying to say is that our attitude about public education has changed. It was irrational, the level of investment that was made into higher education pre-1980s (both raising and allocating funds). And today's set of challenges may require a different emphasis (e.g., charter schools, leaner campuses, more online learning, etc.) -- but that generous spirit that, afaik, built California into a great state -- that's not worth overlooking.
Prisons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_rate_of_inma...) Just locking up all the bad people sounds like a great idea but it's also ridiculously expensive and provides little long term benefit.
Pensions without appropriate savings represent a huge drain on the government that "suddenly appears" (after 30+ years).
Personnel costs rise not just with inflation but with the completion from the local job market. Unfortunately for the state it can't reduce benefits when times get tough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_t...
For fuck's sake, where's the justice? Anyway, the dudes now got over 30 points so maybe my heroic effort did not go in vain. On-topic: unjustly locking up a whole swathe of your citizen's has got to be a drain on resources. Compare US incarceration rates to most Western European countries and think about the consequences for a while.
Exactly right; and that, not the numbers, is the point of the article.
Thanks for the reminder.
What would likely be more effective would be data on changes in teacher salaries over time, changes in administrator salary over time, etc.
This makes a huge difference in the argument if for no other reason than that the increase in revenue over time has been due to increased services (not necessarily relating to the betterment of the state or its educational systems) rather than the deepening of the pockets of existing services in 1964.
If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)
Take over healthcare and beat back prices? Hey, I'm all for it, but I think that's gonna cost more in the short term.
I guess you didn't really grok my point about prices not being exogenous entities.
On a more serious note, there isn't one solution. There are hundreds of thousands of ways to spend less and bring more money in. It took this country, and that state, a few decades to get into that mess. It will probably take just as long to get back to the prosperity the 40's and 50's were known for.
(E.g., something like higher post-diagnosis death rates for statistically comparable people?)
It probably would have been cheaper to allow people to have real personal health savings accounts and provide a "last-resort" insurance that pays everything over some amount ($100K perhaps). That last bit probably would bring down premiums because of a max risk.
It'd be almost impossible to quantify - and it is probably only one of several factors - but the take-home point is that increased spending isn't necessarily an indicator of better education.
Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664
$28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person.
And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not everything. The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation.
It is fashionable to be anti-government, but the the numbers don't seem that bad to me when you look at the whole picture.
I would assume that the government is disproportionately likely to spend on these categories. So isn't this another way to illustrate inefficiency? If there's a correlation between government being a customer, and prices rising while the quality of the end product drops, that sounds like one more argument in favor of lower spending.
(There's a term for this effect, but I'm having trouble finding it again.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) [...] involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. [...]
Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time because productivity gains come essentially from a better capital technology. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.
How many people have health insurance in the US?
How many of those are government employees? (Answer: far less than half)
Is the government running health insurance? (Answer: no).
EDIT: Wasn't trying to get too political on this. I just find the argument "the government buys some health insurance, so that's why it's expensive" outrageously unpersuasive.
We have a heckavu budget morass in California. Our ballot initiative democracy has _written into the constitution_ both spending minimums (40% of general budget from Prop 98) for education, and tax maximums. It's a massive vote of no confidence to strip our legislatures of the working room to make a budget.
I'm going to agree with the letter here. Somehow, in California in the 60s, we decided as a state to build the world's best civil infrastructure. We (well my grandparents) built this to benefit residents statewide. The terms of debate have changed from what makes the best place to live, to fear or sounds-nice-but-not-right-nowism.
From 2/3s majorities, to social issues, to pensions, we're in a real hole. But a rebuilt civil infrastructure is necessary, decline is obvious.
I do think it's likely they haven't decreased greatly, though--- imo a bigger factor has been that where the money is spent has shifted greatly (less on education, more on cops and prisons, for example).
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_cur_exp_per...
To turn this into a 'low taxes vs high taxes' debate is kind of deceptive. I think that the point about taxes is that the debate around taxes has essentially become petty and mean-spirited.
If a politician wants to raise taxes (in any way, even on the wealthiest 1 or .1%, who would barely notice), countless will bitch about it, without regard for data or reason (or common sense). It will be a knee jerk reaction.
WRT to his assumptions, I don't think that he is assuming that California is not spending its money wastefully (see his mention of the penal system). There is an argument to be made, however, that it is incredibly difficult to reclaim wasteful spending that has already been done. (California is not going to pardon 60% of its prison population and close its prisons or cancel state pensions).
So the expedient solution, if you believe in spending more on education and social services, would be to tax more. (but no politician in their right mind would say that).
The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve.
In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result.
This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out.
Our political system needs a new heuristic.
(Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)
For the change in average levels of education and knowledge, the cause seems pretty obvious to me. If you extended the border of California 400 miles south into Mexico, the average state scores on tests of math, history, and English would obviously go down, simply because of the composition of the population. Similarly, if you move 10 million Mexicans into California, the average test scores of the people living within the borders of California will fall (even if there is no change in the amount of learning for one individual person). In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant.
However, he does link to real government sources (near the botton), so you can check to see if he weighs by ideology when posting numbers.
Sometimes they end up in disagreement with me, but I always prefer informed and still wrong to uninformed and wrong[1]. :)
[1]Which is not to say these numbers are wrong or right. I'm speaking generally.
My point is simple. You have a group A of 10 million that on average score 450 on the math SAT. You have a group B of 10 milllion that score 500 on average. If you randomly move 5 million from group A to group B, then statistically, the average score of group B will fall to ~481.
Good job, you just discovered that our standardized tests scores are biased in favor of white kids.
A better way to show that standardized tests mean nothing is to have every student take them, but then store them away for the next 40 years. No one knows the results. And then in 40 years correlate the results of these tests with "life success". We've already seen with one similar measure "IQ test", which has little bearing on academic placement, that it turns out to have very little utility in predicting "life success". UPDATE: Link on IQ -- http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html
That article comes right out and says that IQ does not have an effect on life outcomes, if life outcomes are normed for educational attainment. It then goes on to say that IQ does not predict career success, if career success is measured by money and normed for career type. That's like saying air temperature has no effect on snow cover, if snow cover is corrected for season. And altitude.
But sticking with just the article. The point he makes is that its the educational attainment that people pay for, not the IQ score. Now you're saying, "But educational attainment is a product of IQ score". Possibly, but in controlling that factor you can attempt to tease out the extent at which it really is the educational attainment rather than simply the IQ.
A better way to put is that if IQ was in itself the key to life success then it wouldn't matter if you went to college or not. Rather, what the data seems to show is that those with high IQs seem to at least have the wisdom to know that educational attainment will be the key their life success. Quite possibly being tracked into by virtue of a higher IQ.
BUT the data should show that regardless of credential, higher IQ yields more success. But it doesn't show that.
Now there are a lot of factors that potentially come into play. And that was my original point. One can't look at SAT scores and then say, "those with high SAT scores do better in life", when there are so many comingling factors that complicate the equation, and are ridiculously difficult to control for in the real world.
Two grad students at CalTech were having a discussion about what Feynman's IQ must be. They bandied 180... maybe even to 200. When coincidentally Feynman walks right past them.
One of the students pipes up and meekly asks Feynman, "Professor Feynman, what is your IQ?"
Feynman turns around and responds, "120". The grad students have a look of disbelief. To which Feynman adds, "but its all in Physics".
The problem is that a young black kid raised where many are raised, SAT scores not withstanding, likely won't have the opportunities that those I listed had. Let me give a glimpse of Michael Dell's early life, from Wikipedia: "The son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston, Texas. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals. Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered his first teletype machine in junior high, which he programmed after school."
If you go into the inner-cities, this type of early life, even from the bright and ambitious will likely look very different.
And lastly, Asians are disciminated against in a very different way than Blacks are. They are discriminated in the belief that they excel at math and engineering. I've seen first hand, in elementary school, how powerful expectations are (and there is good data around this too).
Any ethnicity can have a scholarly culture, but for people starting out at the bottom, in a new society, it's less common.
There's also a selection bias against those who have not moved up in society. E.g. take a depressed area -- if the people with the gumption to improve their situation do so and leave, what's left? Right, concentrated fail.
So really, I think it's far more important to question: 1) How has the cost for these public services scaled with the population in the past? 2) Based on that, how do I think the cost of the these public services scale with the population in the foreseeable future? 3) Is this increase in expenditure due to wasteful mismanagement of funds, or a design problem in our cities and services?
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl,0,95571....
To be fair, the CA real estate boom/bust really did a number on the state's coffers. To ignore the impact of the "great recession" is to not see the problem accurately. The govt relied on increasing property tax revenue that disappeared as quickly as the monopoly money used to pay for it (aka subprime loans) and on state income taxes and sales taxes from workers who quickly lost their real estate bubble jobs. If those workers still had their jobs and homeowners still had their homes, we'd find something else to complain about. Moral of the story is be careful when playing with credit.
Example: USPS has seen slow/negative net revenue growth, so they're considering cutting Saturday service.
But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.
Great anecdote from NY State on a recent episode of This American Life ("Social Contract"): Arizona sold their state capitol to cover costs, and now pays rent to use the building.
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
At first we weren't supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another.
[...]
[During my time on the commission,] there were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, "And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?"
And he gave a number: It was less!
The first guy got up: "If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!" -- and his bid is still less!
Norris asked, "Well how is that -- we get the books earlier and it's cheaper?"
"Yes," one guy says. "We can use a special offset method we wouldn't normally use . . ." -- some excuse why it came out cheaper. The other guy agreed: "When you do it quicker, it costs less!"
That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.
Or, put another way, where exactly do you see an extra $100B in CA's budget?
That would effect total spending. Whether that means California is doing more for its citizens in this way is a question one can ask.
9.6% of the general fund on corrections/rehab programs
43.4% on K-12 education
14.3% on higher education
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pd...
California per-pupil spending 2008: $9,015 California’s Annual Costs to Incarcerate an Inmate in Prison: $47,102
http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/08/california-pe... http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/...
Why should those be, in any way, comparable?
Prisoners need cells, three meals a day, healthcare, clothing, and constant supervision, 24 hours a day. Schoolchildren only need classrooms and supervision for six hours a day five days a week. And prisons can't get away with a 30:1 inmate-to-guard ratio, either. It makes perfect sense that a prisoner should cost more than a schoolkid.
Of course I'm sure California prison guards are still ridiculously overpaid. My personal solution to this conundrum is to outsource California's prisons to Mexico.