Back in May one of the main reasons Calitics, the Courage Campaign, and numerous other progressive organizations mobilized to defeat Proposition 1A was to prevent the massive cuts that had already been made from being locked into place, as they would have had the spending cap of Prop 1A become part of the state constitution. As was reported at the time, Prop 1A would have created a budget deficit of nearly $20 billion by 2013, mandating long-term program reductions. Stopping that from happening was one of the key victories in the May 19 battle.
And yet those long-term cuts may well happen anyway. The billions in cuts being made right now in Sacramento are unlikely to ever be restored. The news that Republicans don’t want to repay the education funds is just the tip of the iceberg.
As the United Ways of California noted on their twitter feed last night, it took 7 years to cut the number of uninsured kids in half. That work has been undone by the Legislature last night. The work done in the late 1990s to ensure that federal welfare reform did not destroy the safety net for the poor is being undone with the attacks on Cal-WORKS. Years of battling to properly fund IHSS is out the window. And many decades of work to fund public education is now being undone as well, including 50 years of the Master Plan for Higher Education.
So why am I skeptical those funds will ever return? Consider the political consensus in Sacramento, which Democrats are working very hard to reinforce. It is a consensus that holds that budget cuts are necessary and taxes are bad, that California “overspent” in recent years. When you have people like Jerry Brown going on CNBC to say that California had a spending problem this decade, you’re witnessing the creation of a powerful political urge to resist new spending for many years to come.
Economic recovery will eventually arrive, though not for several more years. When it does, there will be intense pressure from Republicans and their allies in the state media such as George Skelton and Dan Walters to resist using increased revenues to increase spending. Even if the state runs multi-billion dollar surpluses, Democrats will come under pressure to put it in a rainy day fund – or to rebate it in the form of permanent tax cuts, as was done in 1978 and 1998. Any restoration of lost spending will be framed as “new spending” that somehow the state “cannot afford.”
In short, what we are witnessing is the construction of a new normal, a political spending cap that lacks the force of law but carries with it the equally powerful force of precedent and conventional wisdom. Given that the state is already committing itself to billions in spending in future years to repay the robbery of local government funds with no identifiable source of repayment, it will be even more difficult to restore the other program cuts.
This is something you would think Democrats would be keeping in mind as they vote for all these cuts…
is that this seems to be a political position entirely independent of any kind of position that the citizens of California hold. It’s like the politicians in Sacramento have just been evolving their own bizarre views over the years to the point of utter disconnect…
…except to get rid of the 2/3 voting threshold or electing more Democrats to overcome it.
Beating up on the Democrats we have elected is counterproductive.
Even though California has the 3rd lowest number of state employees relative to population, the 15% pay cut will be felt on Main Street in every county – at a time when “Store For Lease” signs are sprouting like weeds.
California has 105 employees per 10,000 residents. The U.S. average is 142 per 10,000 (CCCSE – 2006). In fact, there are more state employees per capita in so-called “red states” like Texas and Alaska.
The Republican Party has been “seduced by the dark side of the force”. It will take more than liberalism to defeat it. We need a resurgence of rational, pragmatic conservatives as well.
http://www.ccsce.com/pdf/Numbe…
While your analysis of the politics, and especially the media narrative is dead on, there’s also the macro-economics and the failure to understand the impacts of a deleveraging state economy that was built on reckless unsustainable borrowing.
I posted a diary
It will be really hard for me to support any state legislator for statewide office.
californians have forgotten how their economy is intertwined with the state. at least in the already-pulverized sacramento valley, we’re about to have a few more rock thrown down the well on our local economy’s chest.
the more i look at this, the more i cannot see it as anything more than a desperate attempt to prevent the emerging california from coming to fruition, at any cost. and it is beyond disturbing to see the CA dem party on the other side of the line, time and time again.
this sort of thing could very well destroy the party, if the pattern persists. the state is already inching towards its collapse, and CA democrats forget at their great peril that their current majority rests upon a certain social contract with the voters.
these are the sorts of times that destroy old coalitions. at a certain point, things are going to snap.
for any politician to hide behind the rationale that CA spent too much.
The analysis that we undertaxed during the boom and skimped out is much more accurate. The Governator WAS cutting taxes and public funds during the boom time, and even stuck his big mug in the CA DMV booklet to remind everyone how he lowered vehicle registration taxes. He surely opposed any income tax reform in the upper income brackets his whole time in office, as well.
So we didn’t save for a rainy day is the simplest way to put it. We skimped. And voters obviously aren’t against public funding of health and schools, but are tired of these anti-progressive taxes like 1A, etc. Leave it to politicians to misinterpret that, and adopt the right wing viewpoint.
Jerry Brown gets sleazier by the day.
Not quite a Joni Mitchell quality lyric, but it’s true.
Now we need to shine a bright light on the actions of Black Thursday, as we watch cities and counties across the state collapse to finance the looting of California by Arnold, the GOP and their corporate backers.