Columnist: Brown's Budget Shortchanges Other Social Programs In Favor Of Education

In a column in the Sacramento (CA) Bee (5/15), Dan Walters writes about California's 25-year-old Proposition 98, which "engraved a complex school finance structure into the state constitution," noting that the mandate that the state give schools "more money than politics and fiscal economics otherwise would have allocated" was controversial because it set up "conflict with other big-ticket spending categories, such as health and welfare services and prisons." Walters writes that Gov. Jerry Brown's (D) school funding budget brought this conflict to a head, noting that it mandated that "all of a multibillion-dollar revenue windfall must be given to schools, thus leaving advocates of restoring multibillion-dollar cuts in health and welfare services for the poor, the elderly and the infirm sputtering."