A is for Average: footnotes from Chapter 3

19) Everything is more complicated than it needs to be, when you’re in California. That’s all I have to say about that.

20) Here’s the link to the California City Finance page showing the success rate that school bonds have had.

21) It’s been observed by many researchers that people are generally fine with their own member of Congress, but absolutely hate everyone else’s member of Congress. The result of this is that few members of Congress lose their reelection campaigns.

22) Here’s the link to the source data for the time series of Gini coefficients for California (and for all other states as well). The underlying source is an interesting paper exploring the idea of linking income inequality to presidential voting outcomes. The relevant data is in Appendix 2.

23) The base grant details can get complex quickly (this is California, remember.)

24) “Basic aid” is a rare term in government that is both simple and well-tethered to what it actually means.

25) To me, it seems reasonable that property tax dollars should be retained in the communities from which those dollars come. Frankly, of all the challenges we face as a society, people wanting to invest more in their kids is pretty far down the list. But, you should decide for yourself whether you agree with me about that.

For those who don’t agree with me on that, good luck persuading the general public to redistribute their property taxes.

26) Here’s a picture of the graph showing the detailed formulas:

27) Here is the link to the high-level model of this proposal by district. Each county has its own tab; within that tab, you can locate your district and view an approximate estimate of the additional funding it would receive under this plan. You can also download this model and adjust the two parameters of the logistic function to see how changes would affect both the total statewide cost and the allocation to individual districts.

An instructional video on downloading and adjusting the model step-by-step will be available here [NOTE: I will be adding this video as soon as possible.]

Notes from the “how you can help” section:

Here is the link to the spreadsheet that has a district-by-district model to approximate the cost of reforming the supplemental and concentration grant funding. It’s a view-only link, but you can clone a copy for yourself as a google sheet or as an excel workbook, and then you can play around with the parameters and see how they impact the overall cost of the proposal.