nostalgia for the present

I’m moving to Berkeley in a month.  Berkeley and San Francisco are next door neighbors, but living next door is not the same as living in your very own lovely laughter-filled house.  I am going to leave mine, which I moved into so recently (six months, just).  Yesterday we had friends over to eat “gay cake” (rainbow-frosted) in celebration of Pride and warmth.  We sat around in the backyard drinking homemade mint lemonade and mimosas and eating food and talking and laughing.  At some point a guitar was brought and put to use.  The remnants of the party decided to make dinner, and we sat 10 people down for a feast just because we were all there and did not want to leave.  I tied an apron on to cook, and my friends in the dining room made up blues verses about each of us.  At dinner we argued and laughed and drank wine.  After dinner we cleaned up, crawled into bed.  My roommates came in to kiss me goodnight and gossip.  It was a glorious day.  

I won’t have a lot of days like that when fall hits.  There will be good moments, I am sure, and I know I will come back to my friends in the city.  But as a student, weekends are no longer enormous blocks of leisure time.  I will have to measure and worry and trade-off time.  It’s worth it; I am excited to do it; but days like yesterday remind me of what I’ll be missing for the next two years.

This is brought to the forefront of my mind due to the true beginning of my apartment search in Berkeley.  I went on Saturday and looked at three apartments, two of which were uninhabitable (one tiny, one too crowded by the residents of the adjoining house) and the third of which I would have to pay an extra half a month of rent for.  More will come, I know, but I am in the anxious stage now, where I don’t know where I will be in a month, I don’t know if this move will be an upgrade or a downgrade, and I am already nostalgic for the life I haven’t left yet.

On the CA budget crisis and my lack of expertise

A few weeks ago at lunch one of my co-workers asked why the California budget is in such terrible shape.  Her sister-in-law was claiming outrageous things about excess spending.  I argued, pretty forcefully, that the current budget crisis (and the failure to find a timely solution to it) is caused by three things:

1. The proposition system, which ties up much of the state’s budget, leaving the legislature no room to maneuver;
2. Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which limited state tax revenues (specifically property tax revenues); and
3. The two-thirds rule, which states that all new taxes have to be approved by two-thirds of the legislature.

The people I was eating lunch with all seemed to believe my assessment.  After lunch, the co-worker who had started the conversation asked me for an article or two that she could send to her sister-in-law to straighten her out.  I went looking and realized that the reason I believed the argument made above was that I had read it in a couple different blogs.  Writers I trust had made these claims, and I believed them; but that hardly seemed like sufficient evidence to convince someone who did not want to hear it.

After sending on the information I had, I started digging around.  This report (http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_1208BCR.pdf) from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) examines the institutional constraints on the budget.  Comparing California tax and spending levels to pre-Prop 13 levels, as well as to the levels in other states, PPIC finds that California tax revenues are about the same as a percent of GDP as they were before Prop 13 (though they did plunge in 1979).  That is, we have managed to raise other kinds of taxes to make up for the loss of property tax revenue.  As PPIC also points out, the California state government has largely been divided for the last thirty years, with Republican governors serving as a check on tax increases just as surely as the two-thirds rule.   We also spend about the same amount on about the same priorities, and only ten percent (cite) of the budget is actually tied up in mandatory funding from propositions.

In short, it turns out that none of the three things I listed really caused the problem.

So what did?  My modified answer is: a highly unstable tax base.  Income taxes – particularly on high marginal incomes – service fees and bonds now make up a much larger part of our revenue stream.  When capital gains plunge, as they did last year, the state budget takes a major hit.  Similarly, in a recession that has everyone scrambling to be thrifty and save up, people are less likely to approve temporary bond measures.  You can blame this on Prop 13 (we would not have to turn to such unstable revenue streams if property tax revenue had not become largely off limits) but then again, what is more unstable than property right now?

I still think the two-thirds rule (which applied to both tax increases and the whole budget, as it turns out) is trouble.  We would still be in a fiscal crisis, but we could probably have passed a budget a lot faster than we did last year if we did not have to beg for minority support.

My larger point is one of expertise.   I consider myself a well-informed person, and I’m known among certain groups of friends as a political/policy wonk.  But this incident made me realize how little I really know about some of the things I happily pontificate on.  More reason to be excited to engage with GSPP, where I hope to complicate a lot of things I think I already know.

(Hopefully to be cross-posted here once I get my login credentials.)

It’s a new world

Dear blog,

I decided to give you a ridiculously long name full of a lot of “p” words.  Why “p” you may ask?  Well, it starts both “public” and “policy” which are the two words that make up the name of the discipline I will soon be studying.  Other good words that start with “p” that I did not use include: picnic, post, pillory, puntilious, pugilistic, and plucky.

As you may have guessed, the creation of this new name signals other changes.  First of all, I’m going to try and write in you.  I know that sounds dirty, but I think it will be a good thing.  Second, since I am no longer campaigning, I am not going to be writing about the Obama campaign anymore.  Instead, I will try to focus on the experience of being a graduate student.  I will also be cross-posting wonky policy stuff with a blog run by students at the program I will be attending (the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, known hereafter as GSPP).  I may also be entertaining a request from a dear friend to include a serial novel.  However, I make no promises on that front; that may be beyond my powers at this time.

Love,

Felicity