A state, like a business or a household, has only a limited capacity to borrow. On March 2, voters on two state bond measures, Propositions 55 and 57, will decide how California will use its debt capacity, and what kind of state it will be.

Will it borrow to invest in the education of the next generation? Or will California waste its borrowing capacity to paper over politicians' unwillingness to balance the state budget?

Proposition 55 is the second piece of a bond package to rehabilitate and construct schools, colleges and universities around the state. The measure authorizes sale of $12.3 billion of general obligation bonds to finance the state's share of the cost of classrooms, libraries and laboratories. The interest and principal of the bonds would be repaid over 30 years out of the state general fund.

There's no doubting the need for this investment. The state has pending applications to build new schools for 1 million students in growing districts and to do modernization work - new roofs, wiring, bathrooms - on existing schools that serve another 1.1 million. The state dollars provided by Proposition 55 would match local dollars that have been raised by local school bonds and developer fees.

Passage of the bond would bring nearly $1 billion to Sacramento area districts to cope with growth and the deterioration of aging schools. It would also provide capital funds to University of California, Davis; California State University, Sacramento; and local community colleges to deal with swelling enrollments.

California's economic future is as the leader of the knowledge and information economy. The jobs of the future will come when private investment in those industries is drawn here by the public's investment in the research and educated workers they need.

Like a homeowner taking out a mortgage to buy a new house or a business issuing bonds to build a new factory, prudent governments borrow for that kind of long-lived investment in the future, paying for them over time. Proposition 55 is good debt.

Proposition 57 is not. The $15 billion bond measure placed on the ballot by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature does not invest a dime in the state's future. It simply relieves the fiscal pressure on state officials to enact the combination of spending cuts and tax increases needed to get the state budget into balance.

In the irresponsible bipartisan budget passed last summer, the Legislature and then-Gov. Gray Davis failed to come up with solutions for a $8.6 billion shortfall carried over from the prior year. Instead, they opted to borrow the money, repaying it somehow over five years.

Now a new governor and the same Legislature want to compound the irresponsibility with Proposition 57. It would roll together the 2002-03 shortfall with the cost of paying for the revenue loss this year and next from Schwarzenegger's reduction of the car tax, and ask future taxpayers to pay off the debt over the next nine to 14 years.

The governor and other proponents of this pass-the-buck bond have being traveling the state, warning of the direst consequences if voters fail to approve. The state will run out of cash, they say, and we will have to do awful things to you if you don't go along.

Those warnings are dishonest and exaggerated. The state is in fiscal trouble, but its problem is only about half the size of the one California worked through early in the last decade, when its economy was far more distressed than it is today. The governor and legislators could put the state back on track with a balanced package of spending cuts, tax increases and borrowing both smaller and shorter term than Proposition 57.

Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature adopted a package like that a decade ago, and California subsequently boomed. The problem today isn't bigger than that. Unfortunately, the leaders and their imaginations are smaller.

Proposition 57 asks voters to load the cost of today's evasion onto the future. But the cost of the measure won't only be repaying recent mistakes with interest. Bad debt will crowd out the state's ability to take on good debt, such as Proposition 55, to invest in the capital projects that will underpin California's future prosperity.

That would be unprecedented in the state's history. And it would be wrong. Voters should say Yes on classrooms and laboratories for our children, No on letting politicians pass them the buck for failed leadership.