Prop 3: Yes
“Make income taxes on higher earners permanent to fund education and healthcare”
The “vote the opposite of Howard Jarvis’s unclean ghoul, as it stalks the land in search of progressive policies to defund” rule applies here. The “against” argument comes from people whose objection to taxes is an objection to spending money (which comes from taxes) on things like schools and health care, because publicly funded schools and health care are objectionable to them. What they are asking you to vote no on, here, is a tax on higher-income earners that those folks have been paying, now, for twenty-two years. In that sense, voting “no” is a tax break on single-filers making more than $400k, who now pay roughly 10–12 percent, down to 9 percent or so, if this fails.
Do not vote to cut taxes on the rich by taking money out of education and health care. Vote yes.
Oakland Review of Books
As always, it sucks that we have to do it this way. We shouldn’t have to periodically vote to fund basic governmental functions like “public education.”
So why do we? Well, this proposition makes permanent the high-income tax brackets which were first introduced by 2012’s Prop 30 (official title: “Temporary Taxes to Fund Education”), which Jerry Brown sold as a temporary fix during a budget crisis and, as such, contained sunset provisions. Four years later, because the permanent budget crisis continued—because we still live under the regressive tax break that Prop 13 gives homeowners, among other things—Proposition 55 extended that income-tax sunset to 2030.
Why did Jerry Brown only “temporarily” raise taxes in 2012? Well, because he couldn’t get those changes through the legislature, due to Republican opposition, even though Republicans had been “out of power” for decades (they last held a majority in both state houses in 1970, and only held a majority in either house in a brief session in the wake of the 1994 Republican blowout). But they are still “in power” in a more fundamental sense, because anyone you elect to the California Legislature will be constrained by California’s original sin, Proposition 13, which declares that: “Any change in state statute which results in any taxpayer paying a higher tax must be imposed by an act passed by not less than two-thirds of all members elected to each of the two houses of the Legislature.”
This means that even when Republicans can’t get a majority to say yes to anything, they can almost always still say no to new taxes. Any given duly elected legislature, installed by a majority of voters, can therefore levy new taxes only by punting it to the voters. This proposition at least sunsets the sunset provisions by codifying these tax rates in the state constitution.
But put aside all the inside baseball and tax code. All that matters and it should matter to you. But it doesn’t matter the same way that having to close more schools will matter to the children who attend them and the teachers who work at them. Vote yes on Prop 3 because our state and our schools need this money to keep the machine that keeps our children healthy and educated running.
Find more of our voting guide here.