Spending Limits in California

I read Assembly Minority Leader Pat Nolan’s column with great interest. He states that Proposition 13 has saved Californians billions of dollars. I wonder what it has cost California.

How many gang members selling cocaine or robbing and killing citizens could have been turned into useful citizens if school districts and after-school programs would have received proper funding? How many school dropouts and mentally ill people, now wandering our streets, could have been prevented or helped with proper funding? How many citizens have died because of the same poor roads that Nolan describes? How many people have died traveling to distant hospitals because local ones were closed? How many people have been murdered, burglarized and terrorized because police services were curtailed, cutback or cancelled? How many jobs have been lost because businesses decided not to locate in California due to poor funding of schools and essential services?

The effects of Proposition 13 on California are even more insidious when you consider that the person who could have discovered a cure for cancer or AIDS, or the next Copernicus or Pasteur were denied admission to the UC system because of rising admission costs. Thousands of outstanding teachers, policemen and other public servants have left the jobs they loved because their families could not afford for them to continue on such low salaries.

If one were to total the cost of these effects they would be astronomical, but these are not the only effects. Local control of education is a thing of the past. Public services, police, fire and a myriad of other social services have now been passed into the hands of those very “rascals” in Saramento Nolan mentions. Every year these services must go hat-in-hand to Sacramento and fight for funds.

Yes, both the economic and human costs of Proposition 13 have been huge. I wonder if Nolan has ever bothered to tally it up.

STEPHEN J. HAGER

Oceanside