California to vote on school aid tax rise From the first commercial satellites and clean-air laws to curb auto emissions, to trail-blazing Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Apple, California has been the birthplace of many world-changing ideas. The most populous US state could become a pioneer of a different kind if Molly Munger gets her way. The civil rights lawyer - and daughter of the Berkshire Hathaway billionaire Charlie Munger - has secured about 800,000 signatures, which is more than enough to get an across-the-board-tax increase on California's ballot in November. Ms Munger is financing the campaign with her own money. If voters back the tax rise - and polling currently suggests that they do - it would be one of the biggest examples anywhere of a public initiative to pay more for essential public services. The new taxes would fall heavily on the wealthy and raise more than $10bn a year over a 12-year period, with the money ring-fenced for the state's ailing school system. In a Financial Times interview at her Los Angeles offices of the Advancement Project, a public policy group that focuses on inequality, Ms Munger admits to being "stunned" at the level of support her proposal has garnered. "It didn't seem very likely that in this economy it would have much of a chance," she says. But the percentage of people willing to tax themselves to help schools was in the 60s. Initial polling was "very negative" at the beginning of 2011. Then a funny thing happened. There were terrible cuts to education between 2008 and 2011 and by the time schools reconvened in September 2011 people were finding that there were 40 kids in a kindergarten class, art teachers had gone, assistant principals had gone. . . Conditions had become scary. People essentially concluded that to save schools they had to pay. Many people felt their own economic distress was because they had not been well-educated. They weren't going to let that happen to their kids. The decline of California's schools over the past four decades has become a great public concern in the state. Critics on the right say the fault lies with California's public sector pension system and have called for cuts to benefits for current and future workers. Two cities - San Diego and San Jose - this week voted for pension cuts for state workers. Other cities are likely to follow their lead. But Ms Munger says a generation of children will fall through the net unless there is an immediate injection of new money. "I've been a civil rights lawyer for 20 years and civil rights work, by its nature, involves challenging a status quo, a consensus that has become unfair to a group of people," she says. What's happened in education is a consensus that is unfair and those being affected are children. California's school system used to be the envy of the country and, in the 1960s, its schools were in the top five of US states for per-pupil funding. "We started to fall and, by the late 1970s, it fell apart and we were lagging the national average," she says. The decline has accelerated since then, with the state now ranking 47th out of 50 US states in per-pupil funding. Unlike most other states, which tend to use property taxes to pay for education, California's education budget comes from its general fund which is overly dependent on taxes on income and capital gains. There have been various attempts to bolster education spending, notably Proposition 98, a 1988 ballot measure that ring-fenced about 40 per cent of the state's general fund for schools. Ms Munger says it failed to work. Prop 98 doesn't account for changes in population and as the general fund shrinks [because of the economy] so does the money that goes to education. The taxes proposed by Ms Munger's "Our Children, Our Future" initiative would raise new money and the state would not be allowed to use the money for any other purpose. The group's tax proposition, which has the backing of the California Parent Teachers Association, will not be the only one on the state-wide ballot. Jerry Brown, the state's governor, is also preparing a ballot proposition to raise new taxes to plug a $15.7bn budget deficit. Supporters of Mr Brown's proposal say two tax proposals on the ballot will harm the chances of both. Ms Munger disagrees: the two could appear side-by-side on November's ballot, she says, and still prevail. "Jerry Brown has called me twice," she says. And neither time did he raise the idea that we shouldn't be doing what we're doing. What about her billionaire father? My father is a Republican and it's unlikely that [new taxes] would have been his choice. But he's a very thoughtful person. He has never voted against any school bond or education initiative and he told me he isn't going to start now.