Following up on Michael O’Hare’s essay from yesterday, today we get the very real consequences of what we have become.  We no longer pay to educate our students:

California’s top fiscal officials Monday ordered the deferral of $2.5 billion in payments to the state’s public schools next month to conserve cash and stave off the need to begin issuing IOUs.

The state’s budget is 54 days late, and that delay has stretched the state’s depleted treasury to the breaking point. Issuance of scrip could come within weeks.

The deferral announced Monday “was not taken lightly,” state Controller John Chiang, Treasurer Bill Lockyer and Department of Finance Director Ana Matosantos wrote in a joint letter to the Legislature. (LAT)

Sure, the schools had notice that this was coming down the pike, and they will be able to get loans to cover them in the short term until the budget is passed.  But that’s not really the point is it?  

Once again, we allow ourselves to be at the whim of the credit markets, and are paying interest where none should be paid. We spend a lesser share of our GDP on state funding today than we did 30 years ago, and we spend a lesser share of that smaller pie to educate our students.

And if the neo-liberal takeover wasn’t well and truly complete, we have the fact that financial institutions are the ones that benefit from this little delay.  Hardly the biggest moneymaker ever for them, but when this is all said and done, some very real money will come out of classrooms and land in the pockets of Wall Street.

The fight is worth fighting, we simply cannot continue to cede further ground every year.  This isn’t a matter of not being able to afford our services, it is a matter of not wanting to pay for our services.

At one point, there was an ideal for California as the place where people could go to dream big dreams, and climb up the ladder.  The ladder is now just being pulled up faster than people can attempt to move up. If we are to move forward, we must fight just as hard in order to push the ladder back down and facilitate education, and development in the state.

That doesn’t mean a slavish devotion to jobs at any cost.  If we are giving Californians the option of a McJob or nothing, we are not really helping anybody, and we have failed.  We need real jobs, with real pay that can support a middle class lifestyle.  That is why Jerry Brown’s plans are simply far more appealing than Whitman’s plans for forced austerity, and the slashing of 40,000 jobs. It is neither possible nor positive.

And it is just one more reason that we have to ensure that we elect Democrats throughout the state this year. The alternative is just too horrifying.