Since he's coming from the perspective of someone noticing a decline in the UC system, he might be partly noticing a shift within the education spending, rather than overall spending declining (and over-generalizing that perspective). Here's some funding data for the UC system, which has a downward trend in per-student terms since around 1990, except for a brief upward blip during the dot-com boom, and is now lower than it's ever been (as far back as I can find data, anyway):
Year State funding (2010 $) Enrollment Per-student funding (2010 $)
1965 $1.37 billion 59,000 $23,000
1970 $1.84b 73,000 $25,000
1975 $2.31b 84,000 $28,000
1980 $2.75b 94,000 $29,000
1985 $3.23b 108,740 $30,000
1990 $3.47b 125,044 $28,000
1995 $2.68b 123,948 $22,000
2000 $3.94b 141,028 $28,000
2005 $3.09b 158,933 $19,000
2010 $3.02b 181,520 $17,000
That probably understates the decline somewhat, because the cost of living in California has grown faster than inflation, so funding should probably be adjusted against a wage index of some sort. Going by pure inflation-calculator adjustments like I used in the above table assumes that you can pay staff in 2010 the same salary as they would get 1965, adjusted only for inflation. That would mean getting professors for around $55,000, sysadmins for around $45,000, etc., which you aren't going to have much luck with.
Benefits outside this direct funding were much more generous in my parents' generation also--- my dad went to a private university in California with his tuition mostly paid by the state, courtesy of the Calgrants program, which used to pay for any California student with grades above a certain level and with financial need to attend any California university, public or private. So to some extent it is sort of annoying that a generation that benefited from those kinds of programs, getting their degree without incurring student-loan debt, now thinks that they need to be cut.