California’s Proposition 15 Ballot Measure Is About Rolling Back Neoliberalism
For decades, California has been robbed of billions of dollars a year from schools and social services by a state tax system on commercial property that favors wealthy corporations. Proposition 15, on the ballot this November in the Golden State, would change that.
California citizen holds up a sign in support of Prop 15. (San Francisco Examiner)
One evening in the early 1990s I found myself in a Los Angeles restaurant across the table from a young United Teachers Los Angeles staffer as we prepared his local for a possible strike. Over the course of our conversation, we agreed that the strike would be unnecessary if corporations and the wealthy paid a larger share of taxes to support public education.
Turn the page to September 2020, when an op-ed appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News about a measure appearing on the November 3 ballot in California, Proposition 15, “Schools and Communities First.” The opinion piece was signed by that same former UTLA staffer, Antonio Villaraigosa, now the ex-mayor of Los Angeles and promoter for billionaire charter school interests. Reciting the talking points of the “No on 15” campaign, the article claims that Prop 15 “would have a crippling effect” on small businesses, jobs would be lost, it would “hurt everyday Californians,” and “won’t differentiate between rich or poor.”
The truth is somewhat different. Prop 15 would finally bring progressive taxation to the state of California’s property tax code, raising taxes on the rich to increase desperately needed funding for social services.
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