Dave Johnson, Speak Out California

Here is an idea for solving California’s budget crisis.

What if the California legislature temporarily budgeted for districts according to the wishes of the district’s legislators.  If an Assembly or Senate representative demanded cuts to schools, fire, etc. then the schools, fire, etc. in that representative’s district receive the entire cut!  This would be an honest application of representative democracy, allowing the citizens of an area to be governed according to their wishes without it affecting all of the citizens in the state.

Wait, you say, why should only certain districts be punished with cuts?  Why should only a few citizens shoulder the burden of balancing the budget through cuts?  The answer is because those are the people who elected the extremist minority who are forcing the cuts, while refusing to ask the rich to pay their fair share and actually cutting taxes for huge corporations.  (Yes, the budget “solution” included a huge tax cut for the Wal-Marts and Exxons.)

With this plan the residents of Santa Clarita (the right-wing bastion of northwest LA County) could get their wish to have no schools, police, road maintenance, firefighters, etc. while the residents of San Francisco could keep their government services.  And the residents of both areas would have what they want.

Or, at least, they would have the opportunity to understand just who they elected.

Click through to Speak Out California

Now that you’re truly titillated, allow me to explain.  Today, Director of Finance Mike Genest and Treasurer Bill Lockyer meet to discuss the amount of money California can expect to receive from the federal stimulus package.  The meeting is public and will begin at 10am.  Some of our Twittering favorites like Anthony Wright and John Myers will be on hand.

Why is this important?  Well, if you’ve been following things, at issue is the budget “trigger” that would be reached if the state meets a threshold of $10 billion dollars collected from the federal government that can offset General Fund spending.  That trigger would reduce tax increases and eliminate some of the worst cuts from the budget deal in February.  While there lurks the spectre of a continuing deficit for FY 2010, meaning that any cuts and taxes saved by the trigger would just increase that deficit, the consequences of particularly these cuts are very real as well.  They are almost all focused on health care for the very neediest members of society.  The aforementioned Anthony Wright explains:

More directly, about three million low-income California parents, seniors, and people with disabilities will lost dental, optometry, podiatry, psychology, and other benefits. A full run-down of the lose benefits, and their economic and human impacts, is available in a handout on our website.

As the chart shows, the list of Medi-Cal benefits to cut share one striking characteristic: elimination of these benefits is not cost-effective and instead is likely to cost the state more to provide care to the same population. For example, the elimination of optometry services means that Medi-Cal beneficiaries will go to ophthalmologists.

The elimination of podiatry means more expensive and less expert care from physicians. The elimination of incontinence creams and washes will lead to Stage 3 and 4 bedsores—bedsores that would be reportable as adverse events or “never events” if they occurred in a hospital. But because they will happen to persons with disabilities trying to live in the community, they will result in the institutionalization of those who could otherwise have remained in the community. Penny-wise and pound-foolish does not begin to describe these cuts.

Those cuts could be entirely offset by the massive corporate tax cut which could go as high as $1.5 billion dollars a year, so I suggest the legislature look elsewhere for their pound of flesh.  Not to mention that a failure to get the most out of the stimulus funds would do a disservice to the state.  It is unacceptable at this critical time that any money gets left back in Washington.  And the tools are in place to cross the $10 billion dollar trigger point, as The California Budget Project has ably shown.  

It sets up to be an interesting meeting, as the Treasurer has not made many public comments about the trigger, while Finance Director Genest’s reports show the state falling short by $2 billion dollars.  Thanks to the poor drafting of this provision, there’s no telling the outcome if Lockyer and Genest disagree.  Don’t expect a resolution today – the participants have two weeks before a final solution.  

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown are teaming up, along with most of the political establishment in Sacramento actually, to try and get rid of Clark Kelso.  He’s the federal prison health care receiver who has been charged by a judge with ending the cruel and unusual punishment in state prisons and bring the medical treatment up to a Constitutional standard.  Nobody in Sacramento likes him because he insists on spending money to do that.  The argument is that Kelso has already improved prison health care so dramatically that his services are no longer needed.  And today, on the same day that Brown and the Administration’s officials went to court to get Kelso dismissed, two stories are leaked to the Sacramento Bee painting him in a bad light.

First, they printed an article that might as well have been an amicus brief for the court, both lauding the improvements in health care while assailing Kelso’s administrative capacity and costs:

Three years later, prisoners, clinicians and inmate advocates say conditions slowly are changing. Thanks to improvements in clinical staffing, many inmates get skilled, effective treatment. The court-appointed overseer of prison medical care, J. Clark Kelso, maintains that eventually his plans also will save the state billions of dollars.

But a Bee investigation of Kelso’s operations found clinical successes tempered by deadly lapses – including a rise in “possibly preventable deaths” and serious errors linked to fatalities. Administrative missteps have jeopardized the availability of specialist doctors. And the cost of the receiver’s operations and plans dwarfs spending by other states.

These arguments sound exactly like the dichotomy at the heart of the politicians’ case for dismissal – Kelso is good but not good enough, and he’s wasting money.  Just to prove the point, they added a sidebar claiming that Kelso is overpaying staff:

Given the state’s budget woes, the prison health care receivership has raised eyebrows for generous compensation of its employees. A state audit exposed exorbitant salaries in 2007 at the quasi-public agency. Yet enormous salaries remain common.

Last year, seven of 26 staffers – including two part-timers – still were paid more than the $225,000 annual rate earned by corrections chief Matthew Cate. Eight enjoy large Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation pensions on top of their salaries.

And prison doctors and nurses dominate the state’s best-paid roster. More than 240 doctors or nurses, state employees overseen by the receiver, were paid more than the $226,359 earned by the state prison department’s medical chief.

This just appears conspicuous to me.  Leading up to this hearing on Kelso’s dismissal, a major newspaper prints two exposés reflecting negatively on him.

State leaders are in no position to whine about money.  They caused this crisis and continue to cause it every single day through their gross negligence and failure to rein in out-of-control sentencing of non-violent offenders.  The parole system is a mess and increases recidivism.  There is a total failure of leadership at all levels, and somehow they’re trying to pin this on the independent receiver brought in to fix their failure?  I’m all for lowering prison costs, but the best way to do that is to reduce PRISONERS, not give them inadequate facilities or care or rehabilitation and treatment.  Sacramento’s elite doesn’t want to face that, so they Swift-Boat the people who tell them the truth and run away from the real challenges.