Some people seem to forget that a bond is a loan. It makes sense for you to take out a loan to buy a house, but it would be irresponsible to use one to pay the electric bill. Similarly, we’re fine using a bond to build a bridge, not fine using one to maintain a bridge. The former is a large one-time expense that a bond allows you to spread across many years, while the latter is an ongoing expense that should be part of the budget every year.
A bond is appealing if you think of it as free money, less appealing if you think of it as a way to nearly double the price of something (with the extra money going to bond purchasers, who are typically wealthy). Returning to the bridge example, the alternative to using a bond would be to save money for many years (not that government has shown any ability to save) and then finally build the bridge when you have enough. A bond lets you actually use the bridge during those years, which is arguably worth the cost of the interest you pay. Sometimes an initiative even identifies the source of the money that will be used to pay off a bond, like if you collected bridge tolls. Now, that’s a bond we could really get behind.
But more often than not, bond initiatives are maintenance-type projects that should be in the regular budget, and so we vote against them. Or frequently a proposition pays for something like building low income housing for bullied kids with cancer. Since we’re talking about building something, that sounds like the kind of bond we would support…except that in a state as large as California, low income housing needs to be built every year, so that too should be part of the regular budget. We’re not heartless, we want to help those kids too! We just want to do it responsibly. If there’s no room in the budget, cut something or create a new tax. That we would vote for.
So, to summarize: kids good, bonds (often) bad.
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