Honig Deserves Support

The best news from Sacramento this week is that an initiative to change the crippling Gann limit on state spending has qualified for the June 7 ballot. Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction, deserves credit for tackling this issue that is so vital to California’s future--and he needs help to ensure that the measure passes.

In a wave of reaction to high property taxes and state surpluses, voters in 1979 passed Proposition 4 tying increases in California’s budget to increases in the federal consumer price index. We opposed Proposition 4; we still think that it should be abandoned. It has placed an artificial lid on programs to improve the schools, provide care for pregnant women, maintain trauma centers, help the mentally ill, improve law enforcement and finance countless other critical programs.

Honig’s initiative wouldn’t go as far as wiping out the limits, but it would offer a more realistic yardstick for setting them. Using the consumer price index ties state spending to family expenses, not to the price of repairing bridges, teaching children or caring for the sick. The initiative on the June ballot will call for a different yardstick--annual increases in personal income. Thus in years when Californians prosper, so will the programs that serve them.

Last year $1.1 billion was returned to California taxpayers because the state had exceeded its spending limit. The effort to improve the quality of California teachers, to give students better textbooks and materials, to educate the increasing number of immigrant children could have used a big chunk of that money.

The schools are not alone in needing more money. For that reason Honig should not be alone in campaigning for the initiative. He deserves support from all groups that find programs in which they strongly believe being crushed by the Gann limit on spending.