A second consideration asks the old question: Who is subsidizing whom? It is absolutely documented that people with a college degree earn more than those without that degree. A recent figure puts earnings at 40 percent more. Doesn't this mean that medium-to-low income earners in California are going to be subsidizing medium-to-high income earners? A California resident begins paying taxes no matter what his income is -- excise taxes are the same for indigents and millionaires, and where the demand is inflexible, or nearly so, as when buying gasoline or cigarettes, tax money is going out regressively, paid by the low-income he/she.
The counterargument can be used, namely that the greater incidence of higher-earning citizens brought on by the proposed college subsidy will elevate the economic plateau, causing benefits to rich and poor alike. Yes, a good point, but not one that Democrats are likely to run off with, smelling as it does of supply-side.
But here are the virtues of the idea:
(1) It is an individual state, California, acting on its own, unrelated to Washington, D.C. In this space, over the years, we have stressed the unintelligibility of the "round-trip dollar," namely the dollar that travels from Rhode Island to Washington and then back to Rhode Island from Washington, having spent there an expensive night out on the town.
(2) California is swimming in a huge fiscal surplus at this moment and feels the impulse to spread its welfarist wings. The theater of operations is education. A huge question in the state is the dismal performance of many public schools. There are schools there which, if they give out B grades, are doing so as an act of misguided charity, or else because they stumbled into a student who has contrived to learn athwart the obstacles of bad teachers. Designed to accost this most fundamental problem is Proposition 38, a voucher-oriented measure that would help those families stranded in bad schools but unable, for lack of far less than $9,700, to get what students most need: a productive educational launch in life.