Reply #48: a good follow up to this

[Locrian]

How Tax Cuts Killed California

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/16/how-tax-cuts-killed-california/

Under Republican Gov. Earl Warren and Democratic Gov. Pat Brown, California epitomized the postwar American dream. Its public schools, from kindergarten through Berkeley and UCLA, were the nation’s finest; its roads and aqueducts the most efficient at moving cars and water — the state’s lifeblood — to their destinations. All this was funded by some of the nation’s highest taxes, which fell in good measure on the state’s flourishing banks and corporations. <...>… With the state sitting on a $5 billion surplus, frustrated Californians grumped to the polls and passed Proposition 13, which rolled back and then froze property taxes — effectively destroying the funding base of local governments and school districts, which thereafter depended largely on Sacramento for their revenue. Ranked fifth among the states in per-pupil spending during the 1950s and ’60s, California sank to Mississippi-like levels — the mid-40s — by the 1990s.