Here at Calitics I’ve been charting the many ways in which Californians reject spending cuts. The May 2010 PPIC poll showed large majorities supported new taxes in order to prevent cuts to public schools and health and human services programs.

Voters then went out and backed up that opposition to cuts by approving 3 out of every 4 tax measures on the June 8 ballot.

Public opposition to cuts is so strong that it requires significant political manipulation to force them through. That is the essence of the “shock doctrine”, the label Naomi Klein gave to the last 30 years of neoliberal economic policy, aimed at the transfer of wealth away from working people and toward a small elite. Klein explained this was only possible through the taking advantage of a crisis, a crisis usually manufactured by those same neoliberals. As she explained it to Democracy Now!:

The shock doctrine, like all doctrines, is a philosophy of power. It’s a philosophy about how to achieve your political and economic goals. And this is a philosophy that holds that the best way, the best time, to push through radical free-market ideas is in the aftermath of a major shock. Now, that shock could be an economic meltdown. It could be a natural disaster.

The reason that an economic crisis works is because only the “shock” of the crisis enables political power to overcome deep and strong public resistance to the implementation of that agenda. Californians absolutely do not want to see their school budgets cut, but it happens because Californians are told we have to make these cuts or else face fiscal ruin.

Even then, Californians reject these arguments – and they do so even in forums designed to impose a misleading and dishonest agenda of massive cuts to the safety net. That’s what Calitics alum David Dayen found yesterday when he visited the Pasadena meeting of the nationwide “America Speaks” event. Funded by Pete Peterson, who for decades has been trying to make massive and devastating cuts to Social Security and Medicare, America Speaks was intended to gin up public concern about the budget and manufacture consent for cutting those core programs. But as Dayen found, many people in attendance weren’t buying it:

While the cumulative effect of all this tends towards social safety net cuts rather than tax fairness, the crowd in Los Angeles, at least, wasn’t biting at first. In surveying the discussion groups, most people seemed more concerned about the desperate need for more stimulus spending to move the economic recovery forward. They feared a double dip recession without job creation, and fretted about the lack of unemployment insurance extensions to help the less fortunate. “No one is talking about the long-term unemployed,” said one participant. In a nationwide poll, taken by participants through electronic devices at all 19 America Speaks sites, 61% said the government needed to do more to strengthen the recovery, with only 25% opposed. Even with a push poll question asking if participants supported government programs to increase growth “if it increases the deficit,” got a majority, 51%, of the group.

The public instinctively rejects deficit concern trolling, and feels an immediate revulsion to the notion that core public services ought to be cut. Instead they quite clearly preferred progressive solutions that favored economic recovery, rejecting claims that we have to cut spending and worry about the deficit instead:

During the discussions about the long-term budget challenges, there was a greater tendency from the participants to place a greater burden for deficit reduction on those with the ability and capacity to do so. Among the anti-corporate sentiment, someone mentioned that Exxon paid $0 in federal taxes last year. During the scare film about the budget, a few people screamed “Wrong!” when it was suggested that defense makes up 20% of the total budget (that doesn’t include spending on wars). Lastly, people thought that the wealthy weren’t paying their fair share for the commons. Someone mentioned the carried interest loophole, allowing money managers to treat their income as capital gains instead of income, drastically lowering their tax rate. One of those money managers is Pete Peterson, the funder of America Speaks.

Nationwide, the results appear to have been the same. Despite the efforts of the America Speaks organizers to push and manipulate attendees to support right-wing solutions, the results instead showed strong support for progressive solutions to whatever problems Social Security and Medicare might have. From America Speaks’s very own news release:

Reforms that were preferred by participants at the National Town Meeting included options that:

   * Raise the limit on taxable earnings so it covers 90% of total earnings.

   * Reduce spending on health care and non-defense discretionary spending by at least 5%.

   * Raise tax rates on corporate income and those earning more than $1 million.

   * Raise the age for receiving full Social Security benefits to 69.

   * Reduce defense spending by 10% – 15%.

   * Create a carbon and securities-transaction tax.

Most of these are extremely progressive solutions. Given the overwhelming bias of the event toward regressive solutions, it’s no surprise that two of them – cutting spending on health care/non-defense spending, and raising the retirement age – made it onto the list. But it’s obvious that the list is full of very deeply progressive revenue solutions that Americans, including Californians, very clearly want.

I’m fairly confident even the two regressive solutions on the list could be dealt with. Health care costs would be lowered overall with a single-payer system, even though the nominal amount that government spends on it would go up. And it shouldn’t be difficult to argue against raising the retirement age – we don’t have enough jobs to go around as it is, so once people hit their 60’s, it’s time for them to retire and leave the workforce.

Overall the event reinforces the obvious: Californians do not want spending cuts. They want their public services to be protected. It’s a message Sacramento needs to hear loud and clear over the next few weeks as they hammer out a budget deal – a budget that could finally embrace “economic recovery” (a phrase that is forbidden to be uttered in Sacramento) or a budget that would merely repeat the failures of the last few budget cycles and prolong California’s recession in the name of austerity.