• One of our current problems is that there are so many spending mandates in California that our policy makers have very limited freedom to respond to the crisis. Further tying their hands makes no sense.
• A spending minimum is realistically also a maximum, particularly in a fiscal crisis. It could easily be good economic policy to not cut higher education in a fiscal crisis, or perhaps make less-than-proportional cuts. If a minimum exists, other constituencies would point out that the minimum had been met, and they would demand that they deserve whatever is left, without a discussion of the merits of the proposed spending.
• The number set is independent of the need, independent of the number of students or the costs of providing the education.
• It arbitrarily restricts future citizens’ choices when we don’t know their preferences or circumstances.

It looks to me as if the proposal was one-off to get the lame-duck governor a cheap applause line in his last State of the State, but it could have real impacts. I worry that California’s government, a government that increasingly exists to serve its employees instead of its citizens, will use this to protect another group of employees, at the citizens’ expense of course.

“Forget Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. It says here that the most interesting political issue in California next June might not be the Republican and Democratic nominations for governor, but possibly a ballot proposition with the following title: “Changes California Law to Legalize Marijuana and Allow It to Be Regulated and Taxed.””

The piece is here.

For an economist, none of the proposals goes far enough. Prohibition never works, and black markets are always a response to missing or inefficient markets, and they are always an improvement. The costs of prohibition are well known. They include law enforcement, corruption, increased crime, more prisons, lost taxes and the like.

As Tim describes it, the proposals “would legalize possession statewide, but declares that the buying and selling of marijuana would be allowed only in those cities that choose to permit, regulate and tax such activities.”

That’s fine, but it doesn’t go far enough.

What we need to do is completely legalize and regulate the production and sale of marijuana. Based on newspaper reports of drug raids, the stuff grows like a weed in California. Legalizing it and regulating it exactly the way we regulate tobacco and alcohol production and sale would reduce its availability to kids, decrease crime, reduce prison and law-enforcement costs, increase agricultural production and profits, and generate large revenues for the state.

Imagine fields of cannabis in our Central Valley. It’s easy if you try.