One of the most despicable yet effective attacks on public services and government spending made in the last two years of the budget crisis is the argument that spending cuts are necessary because public employees are overpaid. I am certain we’ll see at least a few such comments pop up in response to this post.

We’ve made the argument that this is just not so, that the overwhelming majority of public employees are barely hanging on to their middle-class status (if that), and that spending cuts are merely exacerbating the recession instead of helping resolve it.

Over the weekend Shane Goldmacher showed us the true impact of spending cuts on public employees. It is not a pretty picture.

Reporting from Sacramento – State worker Rochelle Johnson’s $38,000 salary never allowed her family to live in luxury. Then the furloughs hit, cutting her pay by 14%.

Now Johnson, an appointment scheduler at a California agency that reviews disability applications, finds herself at the mercy of payday lenders, utility companies’ patience — they shut off her power once already — and co-workers who share their lunch leftovers….

Carrie Ann and John Quintos of Chino work for California’s workers’ compensation insurer and earned a combined $70,000 before the furloughs. The pay cut made their $3,200 mortgage unaffordable.

Selling the house was impossible; they owed more than it was worth, so they rented it out and took a town house. But their tenants missed a payment and the couple, in turn, missed payments of their own. Then their car was repossessed in the office parking lot.

“It was the most embarrassing moment that I’ve ever endured,” said Carrie Ann Quintos.

The couple got the car back but gave up the town house. Now John lives with his parents in Moreno Valley; his wife and four children are with an aunt in Chino some 30 miles away.

“I don’t know how anyone can be expected to live like this,” said Carrie Ann.

These Californians are innocent victims of a malicious and virulent strain in our politics – a demand from those who have means and resources to make other people suffer so that they don’t have to pay another penny in taxes. “Beggar thy neighbor” was a common national policy response to the Great Depression. It was a complete failure.

The last thing California needs is fewer people able to pay their mortgages, able to service their debts, able to spend money at local businesses, able to pay their taxes. Government’s role in a recession is to provide countercyclical stimulus to flood the economy with money. Instead California, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger and with the full compliance of both parties in the state legislature, has decided on a pro-cyclical strategy of worsening the foreclosure crisis in one of the state’s hardest-hit regions (Sacramento).

It’s not just public workers, of course, but Californians of a wide range of backgrounds and occupations are financially and materially worse off because of budget cuts. Meanwhile, those who already had wealth and privilege are not being asked to sacrifice one bit to deal with the state’s financial and economic crisis.

As Simon Johnson has concluded the US is increasingly becoming a two-track economy. Perhaps it’s not news to John Edwards, but Johnson’s point is specific to the context of 2009, that the Wall Street bailouts and spending cuts that affect everyone else are producing a massively unstable and unequal economy that is almost certain to lurch into another crisis before much longer:

The two-track concept overlaps with, and builds on, long-standing issues of inequality in the U.S., but it’s also different.  Within existing income classes, some people find themselves in relatively good shape and others are completely hammered….

If you’re on the outside track, you are experiencing a version of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”.  Some (former) members of the elite are in this category – this is another standard feature of emerging market crises and “recoveries”. But mostly, of course, it’s nonelite on the outside track and a more concentrated, reconfigured version of the elite on the inside.

This can lead to short-term growth – the speed of recovery in many emerging markets surprises many, from about 12 months after the crisis breaks.  But it also leads to repeated crisis, to derailed growth, and to a loss of income, status, and prospects for most of society.

California is becoming the poster child for this two-track economy, as we are now experiencing the shock doctrine in full swing. The successful attacks on schools, health care, transportation, public safety, jobs, and other vital services are producing a state that will almost certainly be suffering prolonged economic malaise. Economic recovery, the phrase that is forbidden to be discussed within the halls of the Capitol, is nowhere in sight. California was once the epitome of the American dream. There are few dreamers here now.

And yet there may be some hope that California’s political leadership, the Democrats in particular, might someday realize that strong public services are a winning political position. (Or they could just look to the results of the May 19th special election and the Binder Poll.) After years of deflation and depression, Japanese voters threw out the longtime center-right government of the Liberal Democrats for the Democratic Party of Japan in Sunday’s election.

The DPJ ran on a platform of reversing the Liberal Democrats’ massive budget cuts, promising to expand public services and hire more government workers. In a remarkable op-ed published in last week’s New York Times, incoming DPJ Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama called for a new economics based on human dignity:

In the fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism people are treated not as an end but as a means. Consequently, human dignity is lost.

How can we put an end to unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation, in order to protect the finances and livelihoods of our citizens? That is the issue we are now facing.

In these times, we must return to the idea of fraternity – as in the French slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité” – as a force for moderating the danger inherent within freedom….

Under the principle of fraternity, we would not implement policies that leave areas relating to human lives and safety – such as agriculture, the environment and medicine – to the mercy of globalism.

Hatoyama now has an opportunity to put these ideas into action, thanks to a massive landslide election victory. Let us hope that it does not take California 20 years to go from crash to enlightened economic policy. We must not continue to let our government be used to produce human suffering, whether it’s that of a state worker of anyone else hurt by the cruel and exploitative budget cuts.

For over 70 years the Orange County Register was more than a local daily newspaper for the vast suburban sprawl that grew up around Santa Ana. It was also one of the key right-wing news outlets in California, espousing a version of libertarianism that was a thinly veiled intellectualization of anti-union, anti-worker, “profit is awesome” attitudes that made it rather clear that in the eyes of Freedom Communications, what was good for business was good for America.

Their editorials, especially over the last 30 years, consistently argued against government and for the private sector. Didn’t matter if the private sector failed where government succeeded – the Register zealously followed its anti-public, anti-democratic imperatives no matter where it led them (except when they had to suspend those ideals to support this or that Republican).

So it is hard, oh so very hard, to resist my inner Nelson Muntz when I read that Freedom Communications, publisher of the OC Register, is about to go bankrupt:

Freedom Communications, owner of The Orange County Register and 30 other daily newspapers, is expected to file for bankruptcy this week under a plan that will hand its publications to its lenders, people briefed on the matter said on Sunday.

A filing by Freedom, which could be made as soon as Tuesday, would be the latest by a newspaper publisher, as the industry struggles to cope with declining advertising revenue and heavy debt loads.

Obviously this does not yet mean the end of the Register, although things have been looking grim at 625 N. Grand Avenue for some time. And any schadenfreude is tempered by the fact that it will likely be the workers and beat reporters at the Register, many of whom do not at all share the publishers’ wingnuttery, who will suffer the most.

And yet it is hard to resist pointing out the incredible irony of a publication dedicated to the exaltation of the free market so completely and utterly failing to actually survive in that free market. Especially when, as the Wall Street Journal notes, the folks who would be wiped out by a bankruptcy filing are the wealthy members of the Hoiles family:

The Hoiles family has been divided for years about what to do with the Irvine, Calif., company. Family members representing about one half of the Hoiles clan sold their stake in the company as part of the recapitalization more than five years ago. The stake of the remaining half likely would be wiped out by a bankruptcy filing….

Struggling with its debt, Freedom about a year ago suspended its dividend, which was the primary source of income for members of the family’s fourth generation, many of whom don’t have jobs….

“Nobody is going to be destitute,” said one family member. But the filing is bound to force some family members to work, said people close to the situation.

Unless you spent the first 20 years of your life reading their editorials about how people who don’t work and collect welfare are cheats suckling off the teat of the hard-working middle-class man, you may not quite realize just how stunningly hypocritical – and therefore entirely unsurprising – it is that the Hoiles family is now going to have to work for a living.

As Atrios, who did a fair amount of time in the OC himself, put it earlier tonight:

Not cheering on the death of newspapers, cheering on the death of newspapers owned by glibertarian assholes.

At least the Register had the decency to survive long enough to devote an entire lead editorial to attacking me, which was one of the most important pieces of validation I have ever received.

Besides, who needs the Register when you have the OC Progressive?!

Dominating the skyline of much of Southern California is Mount Wilson, one of the tallest peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains. It’s home to the broadcast transmitters for virtually every TV and radio station in the region, and houses the historic Mount Wilson Observatory, where Edwin Hubble discovered the redshift that suggested the universe was expanding.

It is now under threat from the Station Fire, along with the Antelope Valley town of Acton. Large portions of La Cañada Flintridge, northern Glendale and the Tujunga area are still under threat and/or evacuation orders.

As with other recent large fires this raises the question of how state budget cuts have hurt California’s ability to fight these fires. The LA Times claims it hasn’t, looking at the story of a DC-10 tanker that Arnold vetoed funding to bring permanently to CA. We now rent it as-needed:

The state budget that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed last month canceled the contract for California’s largest firefighting tool, a DC-10 jet,  to save taxpayers about $7 million.

It was replaced with a contract for two DC-10s on a pay-as-you-go basis, but at a higher hourly rate. But after several fires hit Northern California earlier this month, authorities reversed that decision and signed a 90-day contract for the plane, which costs taxpayers an average of $43,404 a day.

“The determination was made that it would cost more to have it on an as-needed basis than on an exclusive-use contract,” said Cal Fire aviation chief Bill Payne.

Cal Fire supplements these with two more tankers owned by the province of Quebec (yay for French Canadian socialists!), and for now they appear to be getting the job done.

But as California enters the high season for wildfires, it’s another sign of how the zeal for budget cuts is trumping every single other consideration. The decision about whether to buy or rent an aerial tanker should be based on need, utility, and best operational practice. Instead we are basing it on what helps enable Arnold Schwarzenegger to keep rich people’s taxes low.

There is a much bigger discussion to be had, as Mike Davis reminds us, about the fundamental injustice of spending all this money to defend homes built in known fire zones. But as long as we believe that fires should be fought no matter where they occur, we need to be ensuring that firefighters have the resources they need – and not working them on the cheap because our political leadership has decided that revenue increases are scarier propositions than properly fighting fires.

All summer long the Courage Campaign has been mobilizing our members (I work for Courage as the Public Policy Director) to push Senator Dianne Feinstein to unambiguously and clearly support the public option. After our July action we started hearing from members that Feinstein staffers were telling people that DiFi backed a public option. But that wasn’t quite strong enough. So yesterday we launched our most recent action on this front, asking the senator to uphold Senator Edward Kennedy’s legacy and make a clear public statement for the public option.

Today Senator Feinstein released a very long and detailed statement on the matter. She says she supports a public option, but that co-ops can suffice:

Another way of stabilizing premium affordability is the public option.  Depending how the competition is structured, this “option” could compel insurance companies to lower premiums to remain competitive.  It remains a viable proposal. The public option should be one of a variety of choices for people who want improved coverage, giving them an option between a private insurance plan and a public one.  The public option is simply that-an option.  No one will be required to enroll in the public plan.  Instead, it would offer consumers an additional choice as they select a health insurance policy.  Instead of choosing between policies offered only by private insurance companies, people could choose to buy a public insurance plan.  Those that prefer to buy private insurance could still do so. (emphasis in original statement)

Unfortunately that paragraph is immediately followed by this one:

The purpose of creating a public plan is to increase competition so that premium costs can be controlled.  It is very clear that in the current market, private insurance companies do not control the price of premiums.  The public option will not replace anyone’s private insurance coverage, but it could prevent future premium increases as private insurance companies lower their prices to compete with a public option.  I am also open to considering a non-profit co-operative model, as long as it can accomplish the critical goal of controlling premium costs and spurring competition. Because insurance company profit taking has been so high, it will be very difficult to control premium costs without some non-profit option. (emphasis mine)

So it’s a mixed bag. Feinstein clearly understands the need for “some non-profit option.” Unfortunately she does not seem to grasp what Pete Stark understands: that co-ops are totally unworkable.

Clearly public pressure is working on Feinstein – we’ve pushed her to make a public commitment in favor of a public option. But this isn’t enough. More activism is going to be needed to secure her vote for true reform.

As recently as 2003 you could count on California having a distinct fire season. “Fire season” would officially begin on June 1, but it was when the Santa Ana winds picked up in October, combined with hot temperatures and dry conditions, that the firestorms usually erupted.

In recent years, however, global warming has completely changed the rules of the game. Now major fires can begin at virtually any time of the year. Higher temperatures and less rainfall have produced dramatically drier conditions, leaving more fuel for fires. As I explained back in October 2007, the fire, water, and climate crisis were all facets of the same overall crisis.

And so as we enter the waning days of August, that crisis is coming together as fires erupt across the state:

• “Several homes” damaged on the Palos Verdes Peninsula

• Evacuations underway in La Cañada Flintridge for 500 households

• Fire near Hemet in Riverside County, no homes threatened yet

• Two fires here in Monterey County, including one east of Soledad that has caused 400 homes to be evacuated and another, larger fire further down the Salinas Valley near Lake San Antonio

And I am sure there are many others that I haven’t mentioned.

The fire/water/climate crisis dovetails with the state’s other crisis – the budget mess. Firefighting costs in California have tripled over the last 10 years, and as John Laird pointed out, Republican anti-tax zealotry has blocked a solution to the matter of how to pay those costs:

The Governor made a similar proposal for the current budget year. The non-partisan Legislative Analyst suggested an alternative fee on property owners in “state responsibility areas”, places where wild land fires generally occur. The theory is that those adjacent property owners who are protected, not all California taxpayers, should pay for the cost of fighting fires. The Legislative Analyst has a point. Yet this proposal was adopted once about five years ago, and abandoned after the administration never moved forward in its implementation.

Legislative Republicans, committed to oppose any new fees or taxes, strongly opposed the Governor’s proposal, and were primarily responsible for the fact that it was not enacted. But they were also not enthusiastic about the earlier proposal that placed the firefighting costs on those who receive the services – generally in more rural, Republican areas – with similar opposition because it was fee-based.

In other words, California Republicans are doing their best to channel the Bloodhound Gang – “we don’t need no taxes, let the motherfucker burn.”

Not exactly comforting thoughts as the fall, three years of drought-stricken hillsides, and the Santa Ana winds, are all still ahead of us.

Continuing a series here at Calitics (see here for a recent installment), I thought it worth mentioning several votes that took place this week around California on local tax proposals. To my knowledge, all of them passed. The measures included:

• Homestead Valley (Marin County) parcel tax, which crossed the 2/3rds hurdle with just 12 votes to spare.

• Rocklin (Placer County) parcel tax for parks, which polled a whopping 82% in favor. Note that this is in a region of the state being hailed as the “new Orange County” in terms of its more conservative electorate.

• Carmel Valley (Monterey County) property tax for ambulance service which polled around 86% support.

There will be plenty of local tax proposals on the November ballot, including two here in Monterey County alone. Some of those will pass, and some will not. But the overall trend is that local taxes are more often approved than not. And if there weren’t a 2/3rds rule in place, local taxes would almost always be approved.

Obviously this does not immediately translate to state government. Despite the fact that local governments tend to be more scandal-ridden than the state government, voters still have a basic level of trust in their local governments that they utterly lack in state government, and that may make it easier to pass a local tax than a statewide tax.

That being said, going back to at least 1998 most state-level tax increases have won at the ballot box. Several tax proposals did not pass in 2006, but between 1998 and 2004 a number of others were indeed approved by an electorate that behaves like and resembles the one we have today.

Let us not forget (the way pretty much everyone else in the state has forgotten) the David Binder poll from May that showed large majorities for various statewide taxes. Voters aren’t likely to just want to dump money in the general fund, but taxes to fund specific services, such as schools or health care, are widely popular and would probably be approved at the ballot box.

So let Chuck DeVore throw a hissy fit about a tiny tax increase that conservatives themselves brought about through indexing brackets – most Californians do not share the vehement, frothing-at-the-mouth dislike of taxes that the Zombie Death Cult espouses.

That’s the outlook for the California budget according to the state Department of Finance projections released yesterday. Our recent exercise in massive, insane program cuts may have given us a few months’ reprieve on the bond markets, but it has not obviated the basic fact that California still has a structural revenue shortfall. Unless we are able to generate significant new revenues, California’s economic crisis is likely to continue for some time to come:

Operating Deficits in coming budget years:

2009-10: $4.958 billion

2010-11: $7.419 billion

2011-12: $15.467 billion

2012-13: $15.097 billion

The primary cause of the big jump in 2011 is the expiration of the temporary tax increases approved in the February budget deal (which, wouldn’t you know it, haven’t produced the economic armageddon the wingnuts predicted). As Jean Ross points out, the recent budget deals have a role to play in the size of those deficits:

Back up materials to the forecast, not posted on the web, but circulating among Sacramento budget wonks, provide interesting insights into the implications of the recent agreement.  The forecast assumes, for example, that the state will repay local governments for property tax dollars borrowed pursuant to Proposition 1A of 2004 in 2012-13. The state will repay local governments $2.37 billion in 2012-13 in exchange for the $1.935 billion borrowed in the recent agreement – that’s an extra $435 million in interest and other amounts owed.

2011 is also the year that the corporate tax cuts from the February budget deal will fully kick in, costing the state another $2 billion.

Ross also points out that the DOF projections assume that the insane cuts of February and June 2009 will continue, including the cuts to Healthy Families. She also notes that the DOF projections assume no transfers to the budget stabilization account, for which we can thank the successful campaign to defeat Prop 1A in May (had it passed, those transfers would have continued in the face of severe ongoing deficits).

The policy implications of these ongoing deficits, primarily caused by what will likely be a sustained recession with persistent unemployment, are significant. First and foremost they should prove that California DOES NOT have a spending problem. We’ve seen $30 billion in cuts and still deficits are projected. Yet we are almost certainly going to hear more demands for spending cuts over the next 3 to 4 years, demands that Democrats have shown every indication they will cave to and accept.

This is exacerbated by the recent CBO projections of rising federal deficits. As Paul Krugman and Dean Baker point out the deficits aren’t really the problem, instead high unemployment is the real issue. Baker noted that the US deficit at the end of World War II was $18 trillion in 2008 dollars, but that didn’t prevent 30 years of sustained economic growth.

Unfortunately, the likely reaction to these projections in both Sacramento and Washington DC will be further demands for spending cuts. President Obama may well repeat FDR’s crippling mistake of 1937, where he let concerns about spending and deficits lead him to cut back on public expenditures, driving the economy back into a severe recession. And, surprise surprise, instead of the cuts appeasing the right-wing, conservatives used the recession to achieve a game-changing victory in the 1938 elections.

If anything the state DOF projections show the need for a second federal stimulus, aimed primarily at state and local governments. Unless Democrats break themselves out of the conservative fiscal mindset they’ve embraced lately, we aren’t likely to see that outcome.

And California will continue to suffer the consequences.

Two months ago my wife and I spent our somewhat delayed honeymoon in Portugal. For the first week we relied on the excellent Portugese passenger rail network, from the intercity Alfa Pendular high speed trains to the very useful and reliable metro trains in Porto and Lisboa.

But we also wanted to get off the beaten path and see some of the more out-of-the-way sights that Portugal had to offer. So we rented a SEAT Ibiza and spent the second week driving around the Alentejo and the Algarve.

Our travels included drives on the Portuguese superhighway network – the auto-estradas. Most of them were toll roads, operated by private concessionaires such as Brisa. At a portagens (toll plaza) such as that shown at right on the A2 Auto-Estrada do Sul, you paid the toll and went on to your destination, just like you would crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. The overall toll to get from the Algarve to Lisboa was €18, about $25.

As I paid my toll and continued my trip, I started to think about how this model could be imported to California. We already have implemented high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes on the 91 freeway in Orange County, and soon to be implemented on other carpool lanes around SoCal.

But that is no longer enough. In an era of persistent budget crises, where California desperately needs to fund the construction and ongoing operations of mass transit, where dependence on the automobile and the airplane for intrastate travel is costing us money and hurting economic growth, not to mention the environmental consequences of such travel, it is time we explored alternatives. We need to pay for everything from keeping existing bus routes open to building a high speed train. And that should lead us to look at the freeways, and ask ourselves if they really should remain free.

As we who have been involved in transit advocacy are well aware, there is nothing free about the freeway. Freeways do not recoup their operating costs, and are heavily subsidized by federal, state, and local tax dollars. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. California and the US government agreed in the 1950s and 1960s that subsidized freeways were essential to economic growth and security. Subsidizing freeways was the right move, assuming you accepted the logic of sprawl.

But the 2010s are not going to resemble the 1950s and 1960s. There is no longer any justification for subsidizing freeways – particularly the intercity routes – while we starve the mass transit systems that will serve as the basis of economic prosperity and growth for the rest of this century.

California needs a higher gas tax, no doubt about it. But we should also implement tolls on several of the state’s freeways to help pay for mass transit. There is no good reason why someone should be able to drive from the Bay Area to SoCal on Interstate 5 without coughing up a couple bucks.

That route is the best, first place to implement a toll policy on superhighways. We ought to be charging $25-$30 to drive between Tracy and Santa Clarita on Interstate 5. That route is an ideal location to start implementing tolled superhighway policy. It primarily serves long-distance travelers and freight. The annual average daily traffic (AADT) on I-5 in this section is roughly 33,000. If we charged a $30 toll to drive that section of I-5 the state could take in as much as $361.35 million a year, minus the costs of collecting the tolls. That’s a pretty damn significant chunk of change. Sure, the toll might cut down the AADT, but an overall collection rate in the range of $100-$200 million is still very plausible.

More below…

We should consider implementing such tolls on other major intercity routes:

• I-15 between Victorville and the Nevada State Line (people driving to and from Vegas should be paying through the nose, since they’re going to be spending a lot more money outside the state)

• I-40 between Barstow and the Arizona State Line

• I-10 between Beaumont and the Arizona State Line

• I-80 between Auburn and the Nevada State Line

• US-50 between Placerville and South Lake Tahoe

• I-5 between Redding and the Oregon State Line

• US-101 between King City and Paso Robles, and again between Santa Maria and Goleta

• CA-46 between Paso Robles and Lost Hills

And many other routes. At this initial stage I would argue for staying away from tolling urban freeways and other key routes, such as Highway 99, at least until we have more robust alternatives in place.

The toll collection absolutely must be done by Caltrans, and not by a private concessionaire. The purpose here is to use our existing 20th century infrastructure to pay for 21st century infrastructure, not to hock state property to a bunch of wealthy shareholders the way Indiana did.

If done correctly, this could bring in nearly $1 billion to the state transit fund, helping to reverse the insane cuts to mass transit and helping build things from the Subway to the Sea to high speed rail. And once the tolls have become familiar and commonplace to Californians, as we build out our commuter and metro rail/bus transit systems, we can then take the big plunge and start tolling the urban freeways.

Let me be clear: this isn’t a solution to all our transportation funding woes. We will definitely need a higher gas tax as well, and should explore other methods to fund mass transit. And it will require a federal waiver, perhaps even a new act of Congress, to slap tolls on freeways built with federal funds, though the USDOT and Congress have shown themselves willing to consider this policy in recent years.

But it is ridiculous to be leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table by refusing to toll the intercity superhighways. It would take just a few months to erect toll booths and hire staff. And since these would not be on the main commute routes the potential for backlash would be smaller. Backlash will still exist, but it would come from the usual wingnut suspects. Californians have shown they will tax themselves to pay for mass transit – and most Californians would support tolling the intercity freeway routes to do the same.

It is high time California ended the freeway.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, our family used to take Saturday drives from Orange County into the Inland Empire to explore new housing developments. We’d drive to Corona, or Rancho Cucamonga, or Temecula, or Moreno Valley, and follow the signs and flags to a new project. We’d find the model homes, park, get out, walk in and have a look. My sister would pick out her room and already have figured out where her Barbie collection would go.

But I never did imagine myself out there. It was too hot, too dusty, too far away from what passed for civilization in my mind. We were out there to see if we wanted to “drive until we qualified” – the 1980s housing bubble had priced my family out of homeownership in Orange County, so if we were to become a homeowning household, we had to go inland. I secretly hoped we never would, and we never did. Only at the last housing bottom in 1994 did my parents buy, and it was on the same street that we’d be renting on for 10 years. They still live there now, and probably will live there until they’re dead.

Soon after 1994 the great California housing bubble began to revive, and this time it would be bigger than any other asset bubble in history. And whereas our family was settled in Orange County, many other working-class and middle-class families just getting started were quickly priced out. Many of them made their way to the Inland Empire. To cities like Moreno Valley. To cul-de-sacs like Beth Court.

Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times has also made her way to Beth Court, and has turned her observations into a series of articles about the effect of the economic collapse on California exurbia. The first article on Sunday set the scene of what had once been an affordable way to own the California Dream having been destroyed by a housing bubble, widespread speculation, and soaring oil prices. The lack of health insurance, state budget cuts, and what can only be described as an Inland Empire job market in an outright Depression have taken their toll on families, balance sheets, and neighborhoods:

“All my work is enough for my kids and food, and that’s it,” said Ms. Burgueno, who began crying while talking about the turn their lives had taken. Indeed, the few conversations she agreed to have with a reporter began and ended in tears.

“I’d like to go to school again, maybe be an interpreter or a dental assistant,” she said. “I pay for health insurance now because I don’t like those little clinics.”

More from Beth Court over the flip.

Today’s article focuses on unemployment and how one family, that of Eloise Sanchez and Phil Winkler, have coped. Steinhauer falls into the trap of writing a story of individual fortitude, of the family that pulls itself up by the bootstraps to try and survive the crisis:

But within the Winkler family, there has also been an unmooring. The family’s comfortable middle-class life can no longer be sustained on Ms. Sanchez’s job as a dental office manager and checks from Mr. Winkler’s unemployment benefits, which he has renewed twice and are set to run out in November….

Mr. Winkler had taken a test for a job at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It had gone well, but there was still no word. He wonders when he goes to job fairs why the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is always there. He had passed its test, but never heard from them. He took another test to work in the Kimberly-Clark factory nearby. Passed that one, too….

Ms. Sanchez lets her thoughts be known, and when it comes to her troubled block, her central message has been that men should be held accountable for the undoing of their families’ homes through financial folly.

And yet the only thing standing between Ms. Sanchez’s family and the fate that has befallen that of her neighbors is the fact that she still has a job and Winkler has a unemployment check (and it helps that they bought in 1997, right at the beginning of the bubble). But all of that is in jeopardy. As job losses mount, fewer people have dental coverage or can afford to visit a dentist. Since California has eliminated dental benefits from Medi-Cal and is dramatically scaling back healthy families, dental assistants are going to be facing a difficult time maintaining their employment. Winkler might make an excellent police officer, but very few agencies are going to be able to hire anytime soon. And with the state unable to augment unemployment benefits, his only hope is another Congressional extension of unemployment benefits.

I don’t mean this to criticize Sanchez and Winkler. There but for sheer luck go my own parents, one of whom works for a school district and the other who works in electronics. The criticism should more appropriately be leveled at Steinhauer for making it sound like these problems are to be experienced and resolved only in households, or on small cul-de-sacs. She’s written collective action, political organizing, and the public sector entirely out of the picture (though there are several more installments to come, so perhaps she will yet pursue the topic).

What their experiences show is their desperate need for government to play a much bigger role in addressing the economic crisis. The people of Beth Court need health care coverage. They need jobs. They need better transportation options. They need a right to rent.

And their state government isn’t giving them any of it. Instead Sacramento is wasting everyone’s time and making the economic crisis much worse with a reckless, single-minded focus on cutting spending. The words “economic recovery” are forbidden to be spoken in the halls of the Capitol. Government is to be undermined and scaled back no matter the cost or effect on a society teetering on the edge of a Depression. One might imagine that Democrats, having long desired a chance to break into the Inland Empire and pick up seats, would be aggressively pushing measures to help people like those on Beth Court. Dems aren’t, and their failure to do is truly stunning.

To add insult to injury, hardly anyone in Sacramento appears focused on providing long-term change. The people of Beth Court, of Moreno Valley, of the Inland Empire have found that the California economy of the last 30 years has totally failed them. Using asset bubbles to drive job creation and growth has been a failure. A few folks might be able to muddle through the wreckage, but most will not. They need our help.

Notice I said this was the death of a California Dream. The dream itself – that anyone can come and find economic security amidst the freedom and natural splendor of the Golden State – is still viable.

Renewing that dream requires us to fix a totally broken and undemocratic government so that we can mobilize public resources to address the crisis.

Ultimately we will need to redirect housing growth and families back into the coastal urban centers, so they can be closer to job opportunities that are not dependent on asset bubbles. We need to provide guaranteed health care and dramatically expand the ranks of government job opportunities for the remainder of what Paul Krugman called “economic purgatory.” We need to provide more transportation options so folks can get to their jobs without having to pay ever-rising sums of money to the oil companies.

What the New York Times is finding on Beth Court is people who are desperately trying to right their listing ships, but are receiving no assistance at all. As a result, many are sinking.

Government exists to help people. To offer a second chance. To give a boost to people who want to start over and do it better next time. If we are to renew the California Dream, we need to fix California’s broken government so we can implement the kind of sustainable and social democratic policies we need for 21st century prosperity.

Dan Walters has an interesting column today that seemingly comes out of nowhere – a long complaint about California’s incomplete freeway plan:

When Jerry Brown began his first stint as California’s governor in 1975 – he apparently yearns for a reprise next year – he more or less shut down the highway construction program that had transformed the state, for better or worse, in the three decades following World War II….

A few new freeways were built, such as the Century Freeway in Los Angeles and Interstate 5 between Sacramento and Stockton. But dozens of projects, some of them in the works for decades, were erased, leaving Caltrans’ last official freeway map a quaint artifact.

Walters doesn’t mention that freeway construction has been quite a bit more widespread than that – Highway 85 in the San José area, the eastern half of Interstate 210, and numerous state-maintained toll roads in Southern California are just a few of the all-new freeways built since 1980. More significantly, thousands of miles of freeway lanes have been added to existing freeways over the last 30 years. The most prominent may have been the massive decade-long effort to double the size of Interstate 5 in Orange County, but across the state we can find freeways that are much larger in 2009 than they were in 1979.

So when Walters complains about the unbuilt Sacramento-Bakersfield Highway 65 freeway, or the “missing link” along Interstate 710 through South Pasadena, it’s hard to see this as a particularly bad outcome.

California’s zeal for building freeways will go down in history as a truly colossal waste of money, a stunning misallocation of resources, and a central cause of the economically and environmentally ruinous policies of sprawl. What’s done is done, and so we ought to be looking forward to smarter transportation policies that don’t double down on past mistakes, but that instead support the kind of economically sensible land use policies California needs to thrive in the 21st century.

So when Dan Walters wonders whether LA County will find the $3 billion to finish the 710 extension, I wonder whether LA County will find the political will to abandon a project that hasn’t made sense for 30 or 40 years. Antonio Villaraigosa wants to accelerate the timeline for building the Subway to the Sea – a task that will require several billion dollars more than LACMTA has on hand. Tunneling a subway under Wilshire Boulevard is far more vital to Southern California’s future than tunneling a freeway under South Pasadena.

Walters understands the nature of the choice before us:

One wonders which will come first – closing the I-710 gap, digging the peripheral canal or building a 500-mile-long bullet train. No one now breathing may be alive to learn the answer.

Let us hope and work to ensure the bullet train is that answer. Jerry Brown’s original goal in the 1970s was to rein in freeway construction and start building high speed rail. 30 years later we may finally have a chance to put that plan into action.

Instead of building more freeway lanes, we need to put tolls on existing freeways (starting with Interstate 5 between Tracy and Santa Clarita) and use that money to fuel the growth and operating budget for mass transit. Ten years from now, when Californians travel around their state on bullet trains and wave at the slower, costlier, gas-guzzling vehicles stuck on the freeways, they will wonder what the hell took us so long.