• The President made a funny at the Radio and TV Correspondent’s Dinner about Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying that they were building a new reality show around him and the troubles in Sacramento called “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.” LOL.
• Yay! Something positive about the budget. Well, sort of. Corporate tax revenues are up. That’s good, but it is really only because a budget bill from last year SB 28 1X required corporations to frontload their annual tax payments in the first two quarters of the year.
• Following S&P’s watch report on California’s credit rating, Moody’s has done the same.
• Moody’s isn’t entirely sanguine about our budget mess either, joining Standard and Poor’s by placing California on a credit watch list.
• The California State Parks Foundation has had success with their recent action items. They’ve sent over 125,000 letters in support of the state parks. It really isn’t that surprising as state parks are commonly used by fairly politically aware people who were jolted into action by Arnold’s call to close most of the state parks. We mentioned it 3 weeks ago, but if you haven’t done so, how about taking some action for the parks?
• Shira Tarrant does not like the proposed cuts to the CSU. Under the budget committee’s plan, CSU and UC take equal cuts to their budget.
• John Myers has a good wrap-up of some loose ends about the Dems’ budget deal. Meanwhile, the California Budget Project did a side-by-side comparison of the Dems’ budget and the Governor’s. Check it out.
• One area of success in the Prop 8 campaign? Asian-American votes swung in favor of marriage equality rapidly. Asian-Americans supported the ban in Prop 22 in 2000 by a 36 point margin. In 2008, it was only a 6 point margin. There is a lot more work to be done in this community, but hopefully next time we’ll win this demographic.
• Is Placer County the new Orange County?
• California leads the way in the edible garden movement.
‘The word from Chancellor Charles Reed’s office is to either accept furloughs or face layoffs. The first option is bad; the second choice is worse. What’s more, these options pit members of the CSU workforce against each other since furloughs impact tenure and tenure-track faculty while layoffs affect part-time workers. The old divide-and-conquer routine.’
It’s not just divide-and-conquer between tenure-track and part-time faculty in the CSU. It’s divide-and-conquer between the staff union and CFA. Many of the layoffs would hit the staff hardest.
Further,:
‘But students are also free to vote on these issues, and they haven’t. Neither have their parents. Political Science Professor Charles Noble explains, “If students felt that their education were at risk, and if their parents felt the same way, that political force alone would shake up this budget debate. But they don’t; so it doesn’t.”‘
I don’t know about my students’ parents, but my students always are unable to tell me who their assembly representative or senator is. Of course the legislature knows this.
The executive has offered a plan. The legislature is so far they are tasting thanksgiving dinner. I am not sure what it takes to get this. You cannot raise taxes any more in California.
There are just not the votes for it.
There is at best going to be a federal backstop, and the most to be squeezed out of the reserve is probably 4 billion – so with 10 billion more in RA notes, you still need about 10 billion in cuts.