The best way to sum up the conservative Republican reaction to both the state’s budget deficit and our economic crisis is “avoiding reality.” From elected Republicans to their media outlets to their fanatic base, California’s right-wing is finding itself having to become more and more extreme and divisive in avoiding the inevitable – higher taxes and more government spending as a solution to both our structural revenue shortfall and our worsening economic crisis.
And in the process, they’re also having to rewrite history to avoid blame for those problems. Faced with widespread public outrage over the 10,000 layoff notices sent to teachers this week, among other concerns, Republicans have now decided to accuse Democrats of causing the crisis – even though it was Republican policies that created both the budget deficit AND the economic downturn.
As always, one of the best examples of lashing oneself to the Yacht Party and its anti-tax zealotry comes from an Orange County Register editorial published last Friday, on Speaker NĂșñez’ oil tax:
The campaign to increase Californians’ taxes to bail out politicians who have spent the state into an $8 billion hole began in earnest this week.
Right here we see the first deflection of blame. Conservatives want us to ignore their role in the creation of the structural revenue shortfall. We are to pretend that they never rammed through Prop 13 in 1978, or $12 billion in tax giveaways made since 1993, including the $6.1 billion vehicle license fee cut.
Further, they’re not explaining which new spending is the problem here. As the California Budget Project explained last month, increases in spending came primarily in schools and in health care for the elderly. The fact is that we have a growing population of both young and old – and the Register is implying that they are responsible for our state’s plight, not the conservatives who systematically starved the state of necessary revenues.
The editorial goes on to suggest that pay cuts are the answer:
Mr. Nuñez should influence his friends at the California Teachers Association to agree to forego pay raises for a time. We don’t know how much money that would save, but considering public schools get about 52 percent of the state’s $102 billion budget, it should be substantial.
Aside from their “not knowing how much money that would save” (the likely answer is “not very much”), this is a very bad approach to our state’s other, related problem – the worsening economic downturn. More and more economists are coming to realize our basic economic problem is a lack of solvency, and the solution is to use government to raise incomes:
Too much debt and not enough income was the problem.
And the solution is simple: stop debt (this is happening on its own anyway). and boost income.
How do you do that when there isn’t enough money around?
By creating real activity rather than the money-shuffling kind.
And, as it were, there is a sector that is “real” and has an urgent need for action: infrastructure, and in particular energy-related infrastructure.
A plan that focuses on a few simple things:
* massive public support for energy efficiency refurbishment of existing homes;
* a massive, New Deal rural electrifaction scale plan to build renewable energy assets and the corresponding grid infrastructure;
* a similarly massive plan to develop smart public transportation, both locally and intercity
All of those things will require public action, public taxes, public spending, and public workers. Additionally, it means California’s teachers – among others – should most definitely get a pay raise as a key method of economic stimulus. Keeping taxes low accomplishes absolutely nothing productive or positive for our economy, while keeping teachers employed and creating new public works projects is probably going to be the only solution to our economic crisis.
If that sounds like the New Deal, you’re right. And significantly, the Orange County Register’s political roots are in former publisher R.C. Hoiles’ strident opposition to the New Deal. At a time when New Deal-style solutions are needed for a 1930s-style economic crisis, the Register is already staking out far-right territory, and can be expected to do more of the same, even as the number of Californians without a job and overburdened with debt continue to rise.
The Register editorial also aligns itself with the worsening trend of blaming public workers for budget problems – as if it were these hard-working Californians, and not Republican legislators, who insisted on tax cuts and blocked sustainable, responsible revenue solutions in previous fiscal crises. We already know the outcome of the Register’s blame-the-workers mentality, as we tragically witnessed in last October’s fires.
This denial of reality, of blame, and rewriting of history isn’t limited to right-wing editorial pages. Sacramento Republicans are singing from the same songbook. For example, Sen. Bob Margett’s latest newsletter makes this ridiculous claim:
Since the Democratic majority keeps spending more money than taking in, their budget “solutions” invariably consist of more borrowing, more gimmicks, and calls for more taxes. The mid-year reductions taken earlier this year put this approach in plain view. Borrowing and accounting tricks were utilized to yield $5.4 billion in new revenues, but they could only come up with $1.5 billion in reductions.
This, of course, is meant to deflect us from the fact that it was the Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who came to office in 2003 and cut $6.1 billion from the budget by cutting the VLF, and then turned to borrowing as a solution, costing us $3 billion a year in debt service payments.
Arnold himself has been blaming the legislature for the cuts, as if he wasn’t the one who proposed a $4.8 billion cut in education in the first place. Bill Cavala’s response to this is worth reading.
Finally there is the Republican base itself. Confronted with mass teacher layoffs and a declining economy that those layoffs will merely worsen, they refuse to accept that their anti-tax zealotry is the problem. Alongside the repetitions of worker-blaming and Democrat-blaming that I described above, conservatives insist on bringing the usual scapegoat in – immigrants. From comments on the Register’s article on OC’s 1,800+ teacher layoffs:
When I got to the heading ‘Disproportionate impacts’ I expected to see some points about how different schools are impacted. Of course the OC Register didn’t provide the examples how schools full of Illegal Immigrant children get a disproportionate share of the budget and special funding and it’s typically the middle and high income areas that take the brunt when it comes to cuts.
Finally, it’s time to recognize the real budgetary consequences of not enforcing our Immigration Laws. Would we have a budget issues if it were not for the vast numbers of Illegal Immigrant children in our schools?
Looks like if we started deporting all those that our breaking are laws we would not even need this many teachers .A friend of mine who is a teacher in Anaheim told me all the anchor babys were job security.whoops…
However, there is a inverse relationship between where we spend money on education and results. We spend more on Illegal Immigrants that consistently get lower test scores than American Citizens that we spend less on.
We do not have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. Before we cut essential Education programs for our American citizens we need to reduce the charity to those that broke our laws coming here.
Bigotry, blaming workers, and bad economics – these are the conservative responses to our state’s fiscal and economic woes. Anything to avoid blame and avoid reality, I suppose.
