A while ago, I mentioned the regional centers. The Regional Centers protect California’s mentally disabled, both children and adults. However, with the recent budget cuts, there simply aren’t the resources to protect everybody. But that’s far from it.
In today’s California Report, the Contra Costa County Adult protective services tells the tale of a 5’7″ adult female who weighed only 90 pounds and had severe physical trauma. While you don’t get the visuals, you can understand why an in-person investigation is so important. However, under the new rules, social workers are required to investigate by phone only. While these great social workers are truly miracle workers, it is nearly impossible for them to protect everybody. In fact, the county grand jury now says that APS “no longer has the resources to carry out its legal mandate to investigate physical and financial abuse.”
| state | rank | per capita spending($) |
| Alaska | 1 | 16952 |
| West Virginia | 2 | 10245 |
| Alabama | 7 | 7872 |
| New York | 14 | 5804 |
| Iowa | 25 | 5051 |
| California | 26 | 5028 |
| Pennsylvania | 31 | 4583 |
| Nevada | 50 | 3209 |
| FY07 Stats from Kaiser Foundation | ||
Arnold is talking about “living within our means,” but what does that mean if we are letting people simply die? How are we living within our means then? The fallacy of the right in this state that we are simply overspending has somehow been taken to heart by all sorts of moderates and even many progressives. But it is simply not true. As Jon Ortiz pointed out in the State Worker blog yesterday, we have the second lowest number of state employees per capita. We are solidly middle of the road in terms of state spending per capita. In fact, we are 26th in state spending of the 50 states. Take these few examples in the table to the left.
As you can see, California is hardly overspending relative to other states in the union. We aren’t some sort of outlier. The only thing that we have that is an outlier is our completely dysfunctional system of government. We are living within our means. We are providing the state with slightly above terrible level of services. Yet, the myth of California “living outside our means” persists. Why? Well, you know why, I know why, everybody knows why. Yet only a few actually say it. It is convenient to believe this myth. It makes scapegoats out of those who dare to use government services.
After all these years of “two santas” tax cuts, we simply have nothing left to give. We are at the point of completely cutting welfare, completely cutting state aid to state parks, completely cutting adult and child protection services.
That’s not anything resembling “living within our means.” That’s just unjustifiable societal manslaughter.
of our ancestors and never left our villages, we would not need APS. That’s the real problem. The Governator is just trying to drive us back to our roots.
Now, of course, that kind of stability and community are entirely compatible with the post-industrial take-no-prisoners worker-flexibility mobility-required capitalism that the Governator also supports.
demonstrated their fund-raising prowess in their effort to pass Prop-8 last fall. Perhaps they will now show the same zeal for their Christian duty to care for the poor and the sick.
Our “Two Santas” have been replaced by “One Scrooge”.
To them, anyone who has a job can pay for whatever they need. If you don’t have a job, then fuck you. As Chuck DeVore said, the jobless should just leave California.
As a consequence, they believe that if you’re unemployed, or sick, or young, then you should just drop dead, and not cause the wealthy to have to pay a slight bit more money in taxes.
Meanwhile Democrats sit on their ass and do nothing to vocally push back against this “kill the poor and the sick and the jobless” mentality of the Republicans.