Disclosure: I have done work for Courage Campaign on this issue.

Crossposted  at Daily Kos

As the FISA debate unfolds today one of California’s senators finds herself at its center. Dianne Feinstein has offered two amendments to the odious Senate Intelligence Committee bill, one of which would have the FISA court itself determine whether telecoms are eligible for immunity. Over at the Courage Campaign I have explained why her approach is so deeply flawed.

It’s bad enough that she wants a secret court, which average Americans like you and I don’t have the right to access, to determine whether our basic legal rights and privacy protections are valid. What’s worse is the underlying reasoning she is using. Feinstein believes that all the telecoms and the Bush administration have to show the FISA court would be that they acted in “good faith” – and voila, the telecoms are immune.

As the senator herself has explained, Feinstein’s amendment would kick the whole issue of telecom immunity to the FISA court. In her press release, she details her immunity amendment more clearly. It would lay out a series of three tests that the FISA court would use to determine whether immunity should be granted. Quoting from her explanation of the second test:

The FISA Court would examine whether companies that provided assistance to the government without a certification did so in good faith and pursuant to an objectively reasonable belief that its compliance was legal.

 

Although the first test asks whether the telecoms’ assistance to the NSA “met the legal requirements,” under Feinstein’s amendment immunity could be granted if it passes the second test – “good faith” – even if the telecom in question did not pass the first test. As the senator explains (italics mine):

If the FISA Court determines that the company did not provide assistance, or that the assistance provided met the legal requirements or was reasonable and in good faith, the immunity provision would apply.

Not “and,” but “or.” In other words, “good faith” would be sufficient for FISA to grant immunity.

We already knew that this amendment was unacceptable because it gave a secret court, which the public has no limited ability to access* (see update below), the power to determine whether our basic legal rights will be upheld. Now we learn that under Feinstein’s amendment it will be very easy for the FISA court, which virtually never turns down a government wiretap request, to grant telecom immunity. The telecoms will have every reason to claim they acted in good faith, and we know that the Bush Administration will back them up. This amendment is a recipe for immunity through the back door – or more accurately, through a secret court.

Robert Reich agrees. On a recent NPR commentary he had this to say about “good faith” immunity:

(The telecom companies said) they were only following orders. Only following orders? What if the government told telecoms to use their technologies to spy on American bedrooms, or turn over our bank accounts, or our personal photographs, home videos, anything else we store on computers or transmit through cables or over the Internet? The “only following orders” excuse would make telecoms extensions of our spy agencies.

Feinstein’s amendment sets a very, very bad precedent. It would allow lawbreaking by telecom companies merely because they followed a presidential order, regardless of whether the order was lawful. It denies Americans their fundamental legal rights to defend their rights in a public court. And it potentially would give Bush himself immunity, not just the telecoms.

If you haven’t contact Senator Feinstein and tell her these amendments are a bad, bad idea. Instead she should stand alongside Dodd in defense of our Constitution and our basic rights.

[Update] Under the Feinstein amendment, those already in litigation would be able to appear before the FISA court to argue against immunity – but the rest of us, who have not yet filed and may not even be aware of the extent to which our rights were violated, would not only be unable to appear before FISA, but if immunity were granted to the telecoms, we would never be able to seek redress for illegal violations of our right to privacy.

Back in November Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was going to undertake a new initiative to privatize more of the building and management of public works projects here in California. Known as “public-private partnerships” or “P3,” they’ve been employed around the world with poor results. At the time I denounced it as a dangerous giveaway, and Democratic candidate for AD-27 (should Prop 93 fail) Emily Reilly added her perspective on the failure of outsourcing design/build projects.

As the LA Times article on the announcement explained, Arnold was taking his cues from our neighbors to the (far) north, British Columbia in particular:

The Schwarzenegger administration is contemplating a plan, probably requiring state legislation, to create a California agency to oversee state and local public-private partnerships, aides said. Modeled after one in British Columbia, it would be staffed by professional financiers and other experts who could oversee the structuring of deals by both state and local governments.

But in reality, the BC model is NOT one we want to follow, as it instead proves that P3 is a costly waste that gives us nothing but higher costs and poorer quality services. So argues Bill Tieleman, one of the province’s leading left-of-center voices. Tieleman claims BC Premier Gordon Campbell, a right-wing champion of P3, has “pulled the wool over the terminator’s eyes” on these projects:

Here’s why: Despite Campbell’s boasts, public-private partnerships don’t work.

In the vast majority of examples here in B.C. and elsewhere, the costs are higher as the public gets hosed to provide private corporations with substantial profits.

Look at some of B.C.’s own bad examples.

The Abbotsford Hospital and Cancer Centre was to cost $211 million under the original P3 budget and open in 2005 – the current estimated cost is $355 million, a 68 per cent jump, and it will open this year instead.

The William Bennett Bridge in Kelowna – priced at $100 million, now estimated at $170 million, up 70 per cent.

The rapid transit Canada Line to the airport was budgeted at $1.55 billion but will now cost $2 billion, or 29 per cent more.

Or look to Brampton, Ont., which was promised a new P3 hospital with 608 beds for $350 million. It now has a hospital with just 479 beds for $550 million.

Read on for more details and examples of how this is already being implemented, without a vote of the Legislature…

As Tieleman explains, the fundamental architecture of a P3 means that it has no hope of being a good deal for Californians:

The higher costs only makes sense because can any corporation, even the world’s largest, borrow money at lower interest rates than a government? Of course not, but these enormous capital projects require significant loans to be completed.

The real reason governments use P3s is to take public infrastructure costs off their books and falsely claim they are balancing budgets and reducing debt. In reality they are borrowing money at higher rates over longer periods of time than if they had done them as public projects.

Read that again. To undertake a massive public works project, like a new Bay Bridge or high speed rail requires massive borrowing. Government can almost always borrow more cheaply than the private sector. Further, credit is becoming very difficult – and expensive – to come by in the current credit crunch. The low interest rates of the last 25 years are not likely to be seen again, certainly not on a consistent basis. Yet even before the current crunch, P3 projects have run into serious financial problems and cost overruns.

All P3 accomplishes is an accounting gimmick. The claims of savings to public budgets is Enron accounting at its finest.

Sadly, these plans are already being implemented at the state level. From notes taken at a recent meeting of the California Transportation Commission by RailPAC:

Deputy Secretary James Bougart from the California Department Business, Transportation and Housing announced the formation of a performance based infrastructure group that will form private public partnerships. The mission and methods partnerships will contain elements found in British Columbia and Ontario Canada. Commissioner Zarian asked if there was a list of private providers, but Mr. Bougart replied that some capital fund managers are interested in such partnerships and once the CTC has ‘real authority’ to lead, private contractors will be contacted.

So even though, as Tieleman noted, P3 in BC and Ontario has been a colossal failure, we’re plowing right ahead? And I assume it’s just happenstance that “some capital fund managers are interested.”

Over twenty years, California expects to spend $500 billion on infrastructure, formerly called public works.

Ah, newspeak rears its lovely head. When exactly did we all agree to this name change?

California has over a century of success with using public agencies to build public works. Our freeways are one of the world’s great engineering marvels, as is the California Aqueduct, BART, the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach, etc. But because Arnold isn’t willing to properly fund public works, we’re going to go down a path that brings us a lower quality service for a higher cost. Taxes are never fun, but they are FAR more affordable to Californians and bring much better, effective projects than P3.

Hopefully we’ll listen when friendly British Columbians point that out to us, and not let our government repeat the mistakes of theirs.

Just before the holiday break in December, the Courage Campaign hosted a conference call with several California bloggers and Sal Rosselli, head of United Healthcare Workers-West, and other members of the reform coalition to discuss the health care reform bill, ABX1 1, that is still pending in the legislature. The call spawned a follow-up discussion between some of the participants and Sal Rosselli over e-mail, which the participants (including Sal) wanted to post here.

Specific issues discussed include the relationship of UHW and other union leaders in the health care reform coalition to their rank-and-file, the financing of the ABX1 1 proposal, the political landscape against which this happens, and the relationship of ABX1 1 to single-payer care.

It’s my hope that the conversation Sal was gracious enough to help initiate can be continued here, with input from others on Calitics and in the netroots. Read what we’ve all said, and then weigh in with your own thoughts. These kinds of discussions between progressives are essential to the construction of a better California, even when – especially when – we have disagreements on policies. Thanks to Sal Rosselli for his continued engagement with us, and to the Courage Campaign for initiating this discussion.

Joel Wright, December 20, 2007:

Just wanted to note Sal’s response to my question about surveying UHW membership was quite troubling to me. Nothing personal to him or them, but I’ve seen that dodge by union leadership a lot. My experience on this issue has been consistent: when leadership is tops down, they almost always are not in tune with membership. Particularly on big issues. It’s akin to an elected saying “I know what my district thinks” because of the friends and donors they talk to.

Not to say UHW members don’t support the healthcare plan or the strategy. Maybe, maybe not. The point is leadership doesn’t actually know what membership thinks and they assume members will follow them. When the organization gets into a high profile, pitched battle like this, they sometimes find themselves distracted, having to put out backfires they didn’t expect because they didn’t get their internal ducks in a row first. So it says something politically very important to me that they haven’t gotten lock on with members on this. It’s a real vulnerability in the face of the high difficulty of getting the whole thing done, regardless how individuals in our team and the blogosphere view the plan itself.

Robert, December 20, 2007:

I had the same reaction to the response to that question as you, Joel. Similarly, I didn’t feel they directly addressed jsw’s points about the insurers. He’s right that the public is sour on health insurers and without clear means to “tame” them – means I don’t see in this specific proposal – it’s going to turn off voters from the idea they should be forced to pay into that system. There was an “action diary” at Daily Kos today about Cigna telling a 17-year old girl she can’t get a liver transplant, and it seems like that discussion and the discussion about giving health insurers a guaranteed place in the delivery of care in this state are happening on completely different planes.

There were any number of questions I felt like asking, but I was similarly left unconvinced by the response to my question about the funding sources. The employer contribution is going to decline as an overall number as CA continues to shed jobs. Already our unemployment rate is in the high 5% range, itself likely an understated number, and most economists now expect that number to rise throughout 2008. With a smaller payroll you get not only a smaller amount of money from employers, but you also have a lot more uninsured and jobless people wanting into the public system being proposed here. Massachusetts has already experienced this phenomenon – their public subsidies are currently running a $145 million shortfall. And they don’t have a $14 billion budget hole to worry about. And that doesn’t even begin to discuss the question of whether an ERISA waiver will be granted – the AB 1493 waiver hasn’t exactly turned out well for us has it?!

While I’m pleased that they are insisting that a minimum benefit package be defined in law, and not by a government board, it seems there’s too much acceptance of flawed principles to begin with. As far as I can tell this all comes down to a political assessment, that compromise with Arnold is necessary because we can never get the voters to accept something that is either more ambitious or that isn’t tied to an individual mandate. Single-payer is held out as the end of the Yellow Brick Road but it’s not clear how this actually takes us closer to it – and opponents on the left are portrayed, not surprisingly, as purists unwilling to accept a compromise.

-Robert

Sal’s Response, dated December 27, 2007:

Thanks so much for initiating the dialogue on healthcare reform efforts in California between our union and so many important contributors to the progressive blogosphere, both in-state and nationally.

We were very pleased to take part in Thursday’s phone conference and thank you and Joel and Robert for sharing their response thread with us.

To keep the conversation going, I want to speak to a few of the issues that were raised and fill in a few of the details that may have been missing from the phone conversation.

Joel raises the question of whether we might be out of touch with our members on the direction of our healthcare reform work, prompted by hearing that we haven’t yet polled internally on the legislation in its most recent form.

No one takes more seriously than we do the need to stay close to our members on this and other issues of importance and polling is one of the many methods we employ to do so.

Over the course of 2006 and 2007, we have polled our members multiple times in the course of developing our approach to healthcare reform, sometimes conducting membership-only surveys and sometimes over-sampling our members in the course of conducting larger public surveys.

Compared to other Californians that are similar geographically and demographically, and by ideology and party identification, our members show greater concern for the crisis of our healthcare system and greater tolerance for the expanded government role and the taxes and spending necessary to address it, but the difference is not as dramatic or durable as we might wish and does not translate reliably into stronger support for specific reform plans.

In the end, our members are subject to the same key dynamics that make it so difficult to maintain a solid public majority for any healthcare reform plan: the many of them who have coverage and who are more likely to vote are afraid that change could make things worse, and as they learn more about any plan, significant numbers of them focus on things that trigger these fears and push them to reject it.

It is this fundamental fear of loss and the resistance to change it produces that make it politically impossible to move to a single-payer system in one leap and place such a premium on giving the supermajority of voters who have health insurance greater security that any reform proposal will allow them to keep what they have.

That’s the hard reality of why our current approach, like that of John Edwards, whom we support, and those of the other leading Democratic Presidential candidates, is focused on taking incremental steps to rationalize our healthcare system by expanding access, containing costs, and improving quality while still leaving many features of the current system in place.

All that said, I want to make clear that we don’t believe polling is the only way or the best way to keep in touch with our membership, and that we use polls less to determine our direction than to learn better how to lead in the direction we think we should, based on our principles and our policy analysis.  We take responsibility to lead and keep ourselves accountable by engaging large numbers of our members not only in discussing, debating, and deciding the formal direction of the union, but in acting on it.

In the current instance, this means not only seeking the informed consent and engagement of our almost 100 rank-and-file Executive Board members and our more than 2,000 stewards who lead the union in workplaces and communities throughout the state – including my speaking personally with hundreds of them at numerous gatherings over recent weeks – but generating nearly 40,000 petitions in favor of our principles for healthcare reform, recruiting more than 7,000 new monthly political action donors since August based on our reform effort, and involving nearly 4,000 members directly in lobbying for healthcare reform at the Capitol and in the districts.

Union officials must be held accountable to serve workers’ interests, just as elected officials must be held accountable to serve the public interest, but I’m not sure either union democracy or U.S. democracy suffers primarily from leaders paying too little attention to polls, rather than leaders putting their fingers in the wind too frequently.

In the context of a coming recession, Robert raises the important question of whether the plan’s funding sources are sufficient to uphold its central promise: to make decent coverage affordable by expanding public programs to cover low-income children and their parents and providing tax credits that will allow middle-income families of four who earn up to $82,600 to purchase a basic HMO plan for no more than 5.5 percent of their income.

We, too, would like for the plan to be better funded and for its finances to be more secure under adverse circumstances and over a longer period of time.  In addition to the minimum employer contributions, the hospital provider fee, and the tobacco tax, we would have liked another broad-based funding source, but voters’ showed no appetite for other methods of raising significant revenue.

Given what’s on the table, we are especially concerned that the minimum employer contributions not be of a level and a kind that encourage employers to dump large numbers of their employees onto publicly subsidized care, shortchanging the system and making it unsustainable.

While the currently proposed minimum employer contributions are a marked improvement over what the Governor would previously support, they would eliminate the separate assessment for low wage and high wage employees meant to deter “crowd out” and secure additional funds for the purchasing pool.

We need to convince the Governor of the dumping risk associated with the current plan and win his agreement to adjust the minimum employer contributions accordingly.

It’s important to note that while the economic downturn and the state budget crisis create significant obstacles to healthcare reform, they also produce a greater urgency to pass the best possible reform now, reaping billions in new federal funds and sparing Californians the severe damage that market forces will cause their healthcare in a recession without reform.

Moreover, no social insurance program of such large scope – and certainly not one with economics, technology, professional practices, and consumer preferences that change as rapidly as those in healthcare – can be funded securely in perpetuity, with a sufficient margin to accommodate every circumstance.  Medicare is a case in point, as planners badly underestimated the increased utilization of services by newly insured people with greater longevity, but the social entitlement that the program established built a political base strong enough to secure its funding and make good on its commitment.

This brings us to another of Robert’s concerns, that it is unclear how this plan takes us any closer to single-payer.

The brief answer is that by creating the largest purchasing pool outside the federal government, a pool that would make healthcare more affordable for both low and middle-income Californians, it would unite their interests and build common cause for sustaining and improving our healthcare system through collective action.

By giving a significant cross-section of the public a direct investment in and a positive experience with a social insurance program that helps solve their healthcare problems, and by giving them the choice and the example of a public insurer alongside private insurance options financed through the purchasing pool, we will create the context and the security necessary for people to deal with healthcare reform systemically and to see the advantages of a single-payer approach, rather than react out of vulnerability and fear that make them resistant to change.

Finally, regarding the comments from Joel, Robert and Jeremy about the need to be clearer and more forceful in articulating how the plan “tames” health insurers, we agree completely.  Throughout the development and execution of the reform battle to date, we’ve carefully tracked the public’s anger at insurers and drug companies and kept in mind the value of naming our enemies and the danger of appearing to benefit them at consumers’ expense.

That’s the impetus for our campaign to expose Blue Cross’ fight against reform and for our achievement of good policy measures that include placing a cap on insurance company profits and overhead; ending denials of coverage and higher rates based upon pre-existing conditions; banning “rescission” of health insurance to avoid paying for needed care; and providing for bulk purchasing of prescription drugs.

We need to make these points more strongly, especially to our base and we thank you all for the reminder and your ongoing help in doing so.  However, making this all about the negatives of the insurance companies won’t cut it either, since these hits aren’t strong enough across a broad enough segment of the electorate to carry the day for us.

As negotiations move forward toward a final package, we’ll be doing more opinion research among our members and the general public, as well as trying to fix the things we know are both political and policy problems in the bill as it stands, namely: the lack of a “safety valve” to exempt people over 400% of the federal poverty level from the individual mandate if coverage becomes unaffordable to them; defining an appropriate minimum benefit package in statute; and protecting the purchasing pool and the state budget against the potential for more dumping of employer-sponsored coverage than the bill anticipates.

We’re trying to thread the needle and it won’t be easy, but having worked through the alternatives, we’re confident this is our best chance to make real change that would provide affordable, quality healthcare to nearly 4 million people in the largest expansion of coverage since the enactment of Medicare.  That’s an opportunity we can’t afford to miss, because the human cost in needless suffering is too great, and Californians and the caregivers who serve them can’t afford to wait.

Let’s keep the discussion going over the holidays and into the new year!

In unity,

Sal Rosselli

Robert’s response to Sal, dated January 8, 2008

Sal,

Thanks so much for not just your extended and detailed response, but for your openness with us and your commitment to an open dialogue about health care in California. In a broad sense, I think progressives in California have an opportunity to make some long overdue changes in this state and through conversations such as this we help build the coalitions that will make those changes real.

I should lay all my cards out on the table – as a Californian without access to affordable health care (i.e. “uninsured” but I don’t believe that term is the best one to use any longer), I am very much interested in efforts to provide people like myself with the access to health care that we need. At the same time, I am also concerned that whatever reforms we do undertake will actually work for us, and not leave Californians facing costs they cannot pay or a quality of care that is substandard or not sufficient to meet our needs.

Specifically, the ABX1 1 plan includes individual mandates to purchase health insurance. When mandates are involved, the plan adds a new kind of risk – that Californians will wind up having to buy something they cannot afford. And that in turn means that the subsidies that are going to be used to ease this burden on we who are uninsured and who aren’t able to afford insurance on the open market have to be reliable and sound – that we won’t find that, when it comes time to get the subsidies or public insurance care, that there’s not enough to go around.

That’s a problem Massachusetts is already facing. As reported in a New York Times op-ed last month by two Harvard doctors affiliated with Physicians for a National Health Program, Massachusetts is currently running a $145 million shortfall in its public subsidies. This impacts the ability of those who need subsidy to actually get them, and is one reason why over 200,000 Massachusetts residents remain uninsured even after the implementation of their mandated insurance plan.

My questions about funding stemmed from this basis. As California is entering a recessionary period, one that many economists believe will be characterized by higher unemployment than we saw in the 2001-02 recession, it seems reasonable to assume that the employer contribution will decline as an overall amount (due to shrinking payrolls) and more Californians will seek public assistance – either for subsidies to meet the mandate requirements or public health care itself, whether at hospitals or through an expanded Medi-Cal program. Given the higher cost of health care in CA and the much larger number of Californians without health care or insurance than in MA, it seems like a recipe for a big financial hole.

I agree with you that it’s the rare public program that is properly funded, and even nations with single-payer, like Canada and Britain, struggle with this problem, largely because of neoliberal economic beliefs that public programs should be starved to maintain low taxes on business. (Though Social Security is an example of a social insurance program that is properly funded, at least before Congressional raids on its capital.) But if there isn’t enough funding to subsidize people in a mandated insurance environment, it’s going to cause serious harm to the budgets of working Californians. Especially as under the revised ABX1 1, the process to be excused from the mandate requires petitioning a state board – MRMIB, I believe – whereas in earlier versions it was much simpler to be excused from the mandate, and in AB 8, there was no mandate at all.

Even in the absence of a mandate, a funding shortfall in a public health care program brings other risks – political risks. This is where the budget deficit is so key. Arnold is already demanding health care cuts. That will not inspire confidence in voters that the public subsidies and care will actually materialize to meet their needs. Further, if the system does run deficits – as MA’s public subsidies are – then it could sour voters on the use of government to provide and guarantee health care, and erode public support for it right when we need them to increase their support.

I think your comments on “dumping” and about the elimination of the separate assessments are on target, though I would go further. In an op-ed I had published in the LA Times last month (“Why Won’t the Times Talk Tax Hikes,” Dec. 9), I cited an LA Times/Bloomberg poll that showed 60% of voters would support higher taxes for universal health care. While those numbers might fluctuate when you talk specific taxes, it seems that we should work to ensure that the program is fiscally sound. The risk of a public backlash to a program that produces more deficits seems bigger than the risk of public rejection of taxes, especially when the public is demanding some kind of health care reform and willing to pay taxes for it.

Sal also speaks of the underlying politics of reform, that we have to address the “fear of loss and resistance to change it produces” when discussing health care. While I believe that there is more support out there for single-payer than is usually assumed, I see the value of an incremental approach. However, is this the best – or the only – form of incremental change that we can offer? At the federal level, SCHIP was a politically popular expansion of public health care options for children. A similar effort here in CA, such as the expansion of public care options, of eligibility for Medi-Cal – in short, everything in ABX1 1 except the mandate – would seem to be a much more useful and popular method of dealing with this crisis. Obviously we have Arnold to contend with, but that should not force us to accept a flawed plan as the price of getting something done this year.

Ultimately this may be a case where you and I will agree to disagree, though I also hope this is but the beginning of a longer conversation about how to provide universal, affordable, and comprehensive health care for Californians. Thanks again for your response to my questions.

-Robert

Last month I took the LA Times to task for framing the current budget deficit as a spending problem, and wondered why nobody at the paper seemed interested in focusing on the fact that what California has had for decades is a structural, deliberate revenue shortage.

David Lazarus has taken up the challenge. In today’s column he says what many of us have been arguing for many, many years: Prop 13 must go.

It’s pretty simple, though. Either we spend less money or we raise revenue, or both.

All things considered, our friends in Sacramento aren’t going to suddenly discover the value of frugality — unless packed schoolrooms, broken bridges and crumbling levees are your idea of satisfactory quality of life.

So that means we need to get our hands on some extra cash. And like it or not, that means taxes. That’s a bad word, I know. But it’s how things work in the real world.

Proposition 13 is as good a place as any to start if we want to raise some serious coin and we want to do it soon.

“It’s terrible economics,” said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Assn. “We have the heaviest tax on new investment and no tax on windfall.”

What he means is that Proposition 13 allows the state to reach deep into the pockets of people and businesses that buy property at market value. But it does precious little to get a piece of the action from those with long-held properties that have soared in value over the years.

Amen.

Lazarus does a good job of explaining some of Prop 13’s basic unfairness while also proposing some fixes that avoid hitting elderly and working-class Californians with unaffordable tax bills.

One proposal, which the California Tax Reform Association has already discussed, is to again assess ALL commercial property at market values, instead of giving them the same protections Prop 13 gives to residential property:

Assessing all commercial property at market values could add $5 billion more to state coffers, Goldberg estimated.

“The assessment of commercial property is the biggest hole in the state’s tax system,” he said. “It’s completely indefensible.”…

If the older portions of the Disneyland resort were assessed at the same level as newer ones, he observed, Orange County would be raking in millions of dollars more each year in revenue. This, in turn, would make the county less reliant on assistance from the state.

“It’s only fair,” Goldberg said.

Not only is it fair, but it’s fitting. This WHOLE tax and budget mess got its start not with Prop 13, but with the little-known AB 80, enacted way back in 1967. AB 80 was the Prop 13 of the commercial real estate market, limiting dramatically the ability of local government to use commercial property to pay for its services.

This began the cascading effect that brought us to Prop 13 and, ultimately, to the present crisis. Many California cities had artificially low residential property taxes in the ’50s and ’60s, using higher assessments on commercial property to fund services. When AB 80 disallowed that, the residential rates had to rise. The inflation of the 1970s saw the cost of providing services soar, and that had to come from higher residential property taxes. However, many homeowners had come to see the low taxes of the ’50s and ’60s as a kind of birthright. And so California in the 1970s was consumed by a series of property tax battles, especially at the local level. Prop 13 was the right-wing’s endgame, designed to radically settle the issue in favor of a small group of homeowners at the expense of state government and future buyers.

Even though commercial property values have already begun and will continue to fall along with the collapse of residential values, there is hardly any viable scenario that sees commercial property returning 1980 levels. In fact, at the moment, even the pessimists see real estate returning to 1998-2000 levels, maybe 1994 (the previous bottom) at worst. Assessing commercial properties at fair market value would still capture billions in new revenue even in a recession.

The Cal Tax Reform Association has a number of similar proposals that they claim can raise $17 billion, even without a direct frontal assault on Prop 13. I’ve mentioned their proposals before and will do so again later this week – it’s time we put them at the center of the conversation in California.

But on a deeper level, David Lazarus has begun a discussion that is 30 years overdue. Even if the discussion isn’t easy. Whenever anyone even mentions tweaking Prop 13, people tend to freak out – even at Daily Kos, so-called liberal Democrats in California attacked yours truly for daring mention Prop 13 reform.

The problem is that not enough Californians yet see how Prop 13 works against their interest. The savings on the property tax bill isn’t worth the lack of health care, the inaccessibility of education, and the decaying infrastructure that is starting to cripple our economy. Prop 13’s effect was to create a homeowner aristocracy in this state, where a lucky few who bought homes before, say, 1985 are able to withstand better the economic storms lashing the state, while the rest of us suffer to maintain their privilege.

Lazarus’ column was sparked by an LA Times report that Arnold planned to assess a “fee” on homeowner insurance policies to pay for fire protection. As Lazarus so aptly puts it:

A surcharge on insurance that’s based on a property’s replacement cost, and hence much of its market value. That may not be an honest-to-goodness property tax increase, but it’s about as close as you can come without getting your hair mussed.

It’s too much to hope that Arnold instinctively understands the problem of Prop 13, and in fact he has positioned himself as one of the staunchest defenders of it and its legacy. But as I explained back in October, much to the OC Register’s chagrin, the lack of fire protection is a direct consequence of anti-tax activism. If Arnold is willing to raise revenues for firefighting, he is implicitly opening a door that the rest of us should run through.

Right on, David Lazarus, for reminding us that we’re never going to get out of this budget crisis until we revisit Prop 13. At least someone at the Times gets it!

One of the dominant political developments of our time is the legislative branch’s abdication of its Constitutional responsibilities to the executive branch. What kid oakland called a “battle for governance.” It’s most pronounced in Congress, which has almost voted itself out of existence under the Bush Administration (even when Democrats control it).

But you can see it to some degree here in California, at the state and even the local level. Although designed to be co-equal branches, the state legislature has often deferred to the governor’s office on major legislation. Unwilling to challenge a weakened Arnold, Democrats in 2006 cut deals with him and helped his reelection, intentionally or not. In 2007 Democrats wound up having to give into the governor’s demands for a $1.3 billion public transportation cut and adopted much of his health care proposal, including Arnold’s individual mandate plan.

So far, though, the California legislature has resisted Arnold’s other power grabs – with crucial help from progressive groups, activists, and voters in the 2005 special election, of course. Now Arnold is trying again, using his “Year of Education” as an effort to seize more control over state government. In this instance his plan is to take control of the state Department of Education from the Superintendent of Public Instruction:

Another idea on the agenda that went nowhere in 2002 was handing the governor much of the responsibility for education. That proposal was part of the California Master Plan for Education, headed by then-state Sen. Dede Alpert, a San Diego Democrat, and opposed by Jack O’Connell, who was running for state superintendent at the time. He was on the master plan committee but withdrew his name because of that proposal.

Now, Alpert is the vice chairwoman of the governor’s education committee.

On Friday, O’Connell declined to comment on the new report until its official release.

Although the Chronicle frames this as a personal spat, there is a more fundamental issue here: democratic governance of education. The Superintendent is an elected position, designed for one purpose – overseeing public education. Obviously the governor is elected as well, but to oversee a number of different subjects. In a race for the governor’s office any number of issues may determine the outcome, but in a race for the Superintendent’s office, education is the only issue.

At root is a suspicion of, even a hostility to, the role of democracy in education. More and more schools around the country are being taken over by executives, in some cases unelected, on the unproven theory that strong leadership is more important for education than democracy and inclusion.

It’s an ironic story. Schools are consistently underfunded and their surrounding communities left to rot in poverty. When students predictably fail to achieve success at the same rates as their peers in better funded, wealthier locales, the media and politicians blame the schools, blame the teachers, and eventually, blame the elected school boards for the problem. Someone, usually a mayor or a governor, proposes a takeover of the schools “to produce results.” It’s happened in Newark, Washington DC, Chicago, and was proposed for LA under Antonio Villaraigosa.

Putting an executive in charge is only a good idea to those who think that education is or should be a top-down affair. In reality education is neither top-down nor bottom-up, it’s instead a collaborative effort where students, teachers, parents, administrators, politicians, and members of the public all have a role to play. In some cases the role is primary, in other cases it’s supportive. But in all cases education is something that only works when there is a lot of involvement, not when people follow orders from the top.

As public education is a public affair, the voters have a right to their voice in the matter. Locally, the elected school board is the way that gets done, the way that democracy functions in public education. It’s not perfect, and not sufficient – there is always room for more democracy at the school level and elsewhere in education – but it is at least a way for the public to have a role in planning and administering education.

School boards are inherently controversial. There have often been efforts by wingnuts to hijack these boards for their own agenda – the Dover, PA school board that wanted to force “intelligent design” on students is a recent high-profile case, but it’s happened many times here in California as well. And sometimes progressives get a hold of school boards and actually try to use them to address things like the achievement gap. When they do, however, they’re often attacked by a business-media alliance, as they were in Seattle last year. Accused of abandoning the core mission of schools to focus on “unnecessary” issues, progressive school boards are often targeted because they have what political scientist Samuel Huntington once infamously called “an excess of democracy.” Rein in democracy, it is believed, and we can finally “get things done.”

The Superintendent of Public Education is the closest thing to a state school board we have, at least in terms of democracy. There are MANY boards, commissions, and departments that have jurisdiction over education in this state, from the Department of Education to the UC Regents – but of these, only the Superintendent is directly elected. And since 1970, when Californians threw out the far-right Max Rafferty for the progressive Wilson Riles, the nonpartisan office has been held by Democrats. In contrast, since 1900 there have only been four Democrats elected governor in California, two of whom were named Edmund G. Brown.

Arnold’s attack on the office of the Superintendent of Public Education should then be understood in that context – the larger context of an attack on educational democracy, and Arnold’s desire to take power over education away from an office held usually by Democrats.

Yesterday I explained the funding elements of Arnold’s plan – how it involves eliminating specific program funding and instead provides block grants to schools. Oversight of this process is key to its success, and unfortunately, not all districts can be trusted to handle it properly. By removing the Department of Education from the Superintendent of Public Instruction Arnold proposes to make it more difficult for the public to have a democratic oversight role, and would wind up limiting the role of democracy in public education.

Democracy is difficult. Democracy can be ugly. But it’s also crucial not just to a free society, but to an educated society, and to the public education system that undergirds them both.

Education funding has been one of THE defining political issues of modern California. The struggle to produce equitable educational funding for all Californians consumed the state’s courts and eventually its politics in the 1970s. After Prop 13 was passed in 1978, it led to a series of battles in the 1980s to stop the crippling cuts that begin to hit the state’s schools, once the best-supported in the nation. The outcome was mixed – Prop 98 gave some measure of protection to school funding, but the Mello-Roos system also enabled new suburbs access to resources urban schools were denied.

These temporary stopgaps seem to have run their course. As the state budget is collapsing, Arnold has focused his attention on education funding, and plans to balance the budget on the backs of students, instead of making wealthy Californians pay their fair share. But it’s worse than misplaced priorities. At the core of Arnold’s education funding reforms is a Nixonian effort to cut off funding for California’s needy students. Arnold’s goal is to reverse the hard-won victories of an earlier generation, all in the context of hitting education with massive funding cuts to balance the budget.

First, a brief history. In 1968 John Serrano, a parent in Baldwin Park (an LA suburb) sued the state claiming that the method of funding schools denied equality to all California students. At the time, per-pupil spending for Baldwin Park schools was $577 for the school year, but was over twice that number – $1231 – in Beverly Hills. This was because 90% of school funding came from local property taxes, and in districts with higher property values, there was more money for local schools (even though Baldwin Park paid a higher property tax rate than Beverly Hills, land was worth a lot more in Beverly Hills).

The case wound its way through the courts and in 1974 the California State Supreme Court handed down the Serrano v. Priest decision. Serrano and its follow-up decisions mandated that the state reduce these property-wealth-related disparities. In 1977 the state Legislature provided for the implementation of the Serrano decision, but this was kneecapped by Prop 13, passed in June 1978.

There has been a lot of debate about the role of the Serrano decision and the tax revolt. Many political scientists and even some historians see a cause-and-effect relationship here; that Serrano broke the tie between local property taxes and local schools, and homeowners revolted by cutting those taxes instead of seeing them go to help students of color.

But the more historians and scholars look at this, the less certain the link becomes. Most Californians were not aware of the ins and outs of the Serrano decision. And scholar Isaac Martin in 2006 found no evidence to uphold the Serrano => Prop 13 theory. Instead, the property tax revolt is more about a reaction against taxes and government itself. Robert Self has shown in his excellent book American Babylon: Race and the Struggle For Postwar Oakland that Alameda County voters did turn to Prop 13 out of a broad rejection of the welfare state. Over in San Francisco rising inflation led the city to confront its public employees, including its police and firefighters, and voters in SF preferred to deal harshly with them when they struck for fair wages instead of accepting a property tax increase. Even today, anyone involved in California education is depressingly familiar with the opposition of a hardcore antitax faction who will oppose ANY tax increases for schools, no matter how badly they’re needed.

Prop 13’s effect was to cut 60% of property tax revenue immediately. Jerry Brown had been foolishly hoarding a surplus – one of the causes of Prop 13 – and in 1979 and 1980 he used it to help bail out the cities and school districts who were now facing a major budget crunch. The state now took over the funding of public education, and the state guaranteed the equality rules mandated by the courts in Serrano. But, and this point is important – even without Serrano there would still be a need for local schools to be bailed out by the state. Prop 13’s limits are too low to meet the state’s basic needs.

As the budget surplus disappeared, and the state entered recession in the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans both raided education funding to balance the budget. Teachers were fired, classes cut, schools closed. I remember some of this from my own childhood, seeing music classes and other such things cut from my elementary school and being told that “state budget cuts mean you can’t learn an instrument.” We had the vague realization that other, older students had more opportunities and that we were being screwed – if anyone’s interested in why our generation is trending so progressive, this might be worth a look.

The cuts began to worry developers, whose new suburbs depended on the promise of better schools to lure white flight. To assuage them the California Legislature enacted the “Mello Roos” act in 1982, named after its authors, Monterey Senator Henry Mello and LA Assemblymember Mike Roos. This allows towns to create “community facilities districts” that can levy “Mello Roos fees” to fund all kinds of infrastructure needs independently of Prop 13. Designed to make growth pay for itself, Mello Roos gives an enormous advantage to new communities over existing ones in terms of school facilities. In Tustin, where I grew up, the new high school looks more like a college than a high school, with stunning facilities that my 1960s-era campus simply doesn’t have. Older communities, especially those with less wealth, cannot compete.

By 1988, sick of constant state raids on education spending, voters enacted Proposition 98, designed to stop these kinds of crippling cuts. Prop 98 uses a series of “tests” to determine the level of funding for education as a portion of the overall general fund. Right now, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, Prop 98 accounts for 45% of the general fund. Prop 98 can be suspended by a 2/3 vote of the legislature in a fiscal emergency, and Arnold is planning to do that this year so as to avoid tax increases and balance the budget on the backs of students.

Prop 98 was only a stopgap, a measure intended to preserve something for education until politicians finally got their act together and solved the structural revenue problem. 20 years later that still hasn’t occurred, and the need for Prop 98 is as strong as ever.

By the 1990s a system had emerged where new suburbs generally had excellent schools – brand-new facilities that attracted teachers and, with new facilities that didn’t require as much maintenance as older ones, could spend more money on teacher pay. Older schools and urban districts such as those in Oakland, or south LA, however, were left behind. When the state economy and budget revenues did well, these schools would get some additional support. But when the economy and revenues dipped, these schools were often first on the chopping block.

California has never really been committed to helping all of its students succeed. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, from poor communities, or who have special needs have had to fight like hell just to get what opportunities in schools they have today. Serrano and Prop 98 were hard-won victories and yet both have been significantly undermined by a state that prefers low taxes to actually seeing students get the education they have a Constitutional right to receiving.

So it should be no surprise that Arnold’s plan for education involves cutting these students out once again:

— Increasing local control of school finances by ending the requirement that most education funds have to be spent on specific programs.

— Adopting “student-centered funding,” in which a base level of funding would go to all students, then additional funds would go to students who are poor, speak little English or have other extraordinary needs.

These are Nixonian plans. Nixon’s method of killing the Great Society was to stop federal spending on specific projects and instead “block grant” the money to cities and states to spend as they wished. The result was a gutting of federally-guaranteed poverty programs that were badly needed, but that had also been opposed by many localities that were happy to maintain racism and inequality.

Arnold wants to do the same with school spending. If funding for “specific programs” is not mandated, then those programs won’t get funded. If poor, ESL, or other special needs students have to get “additional funding” then guess whose funding is first on the chopping block – theirs.

Typically, the Chronicle presents this as a series of special interests fighting over spoils:

But most of the $41.4 billion spent from the state’s general fund on education is tied to certain categories, from adult education, to English learners, to gifted and talented. And each one has vocal supporters who don’t want to lose the money for the group they’re interested in helping.

“Those people will come off the walls if their money comes into one pot, and they’ll have a separate fight (for their constituents) in every school district,” said Kevin Gordon, president of School Innovations and Advocacy, a lobbying and consulting firm representing school districts.

This is very bad framing, because it suggests that adult education, English learners, and gifted and talented students are special interests with loud backers, instead of people whose needs ought to be met by society as a whole.

Underlying this is a desire by Arnold to favor suburbs over inner cities, to favor middle- and upper-class students over the poor and students of color. Arnold wants to deliver those voters – either core or wobbling Republicans – the education funding that currently goes to students who have the greatest need for it.

The fight over education funding is perhaps the starkest example of what California budgeting is really all about – robbing those who need help to subsidize those who don’t. Keeping taxes on the wealthy low so that everyone else suffers.

The middle class has too often bought into this, but is beginning to realize that they lose more than they gain by cutting education so as to cut taxes. Education is what builds the middle class, after all – California’s current middle class is still living off of Pat Brown’s liberal legacy of free education. Low taxes are nice, but when they come at the expense of your child’s education, which in turn comes at the expense of your own pocketbook (especially when the California economy worsens and the middle-class taxpayer needs government aid to survive), it is a bad deal.

Democrats need to make this case to Californians. Explain to them that education funding isn’t just about teachers and students, but is about our basic future. If the middle class is to survive, if students currently being left behind are going to be helped, if special needs students are going to get the care and attention they need, education funding has to go UP, not down. And special programs have to be BOOSTED, not cut, not made vulnerable.

As a teacher myself, from a family of teachers, I have never quite understood why so many people think the problem with education is bad teachers. Sure, I’ve had one or two along the way, but they were far outweighed by the good teachers. Teachers are the key to education. If they are happy and supported, and allowed to do their jobs, wonderful things can and often do happen. But if they are demoralized and attacked, well, teachers are human beings, and nobody does well in that kind of environment.

Arnold’s plan is all about punishment and attacks. It’s the idea that if we merely crack down and hurt people – hurt teachers in their wallet, hurt schools in their budgets – then suddenly they’ll improve. It’s a kind of shock doctrine approach to education. Although it defies logic that the solution to a school with low test scores is to close the school, that’s exactly what Arnold’s business allies are whispering in his ear – impose NCLB on California.

Nevermind that parents, teachers, and students all despise NCLB. One of Bush’s most damaging policies, it forces schools to teach to the test or face  crippling cuts in funding. Even if there is improvement, schools might lose funding. Jonathan Kozol, one of America’s leading experts on education policy, was quoted by Julia Rosen this summer about the pernicious impact of the law:

The justification for this law was the presumptuous and ignorant determination by the White House that our urban schools are, for the most part, staffed by mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific teachers if we place a sword of terror just above their heads and threaten them with penalties if they do not pump their students’ scores by using proto-military methods of instruction — scripted texts and hand-held timers — that will rescue them from doing any thinking of their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into test-prep factories.

Kozol goes on to explain how the actual effect of test standards and business-imposed teaching methods on schools is to make the situation WORSE, not better:

When I ask them why they’ve grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it’s the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of “state of siege,” as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

Here is where Arnold’s core attack on teachers is at its most pernicious. He relies on merit pay – the idea that we have bad teachers because they aren’t forced to compete with each other:

“Linking compensation to performance that would directly reward teachers for, among other factors, gains in student academic achievement … ” is a key recommendation in the draft report of the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence obtained by The Chronicle….

Merit pay is an idea that teachers unions have battled for years, saying it pits teachers against one another.

“It’s so tiring to hear about failed schemes coming around again and again,” said Fred Glass, spokesman for the California Federation of Teachers, representing 120,000 education employees.

Many who support merit pay look to Michael Bloomberg as a model. Thing is, as Sunday’s New York Times showed, Bloomberg did it by massively increasing spending AND teacher pay:

In city schools, for example, he has pursued greater centralization, stringent performance accountability measures and merit pay – the last of which has few adherents among Democratic candidates – while sharply increasing teacher salaries….Mr. Bloomberg has also presided over one of the largest expansions in the city budget in decades, increasing spending 23 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 2002. Early on, he also raised income taxes on upper brackets to help preserve government services during the post-9/11 recession, though the increase has since lapsed.

Meanwhile Arnold is planning to hit education with a massive set of cuts, suspending Prop 98 and making schools do more with less.

And how will merit pay be determined? Likely by the same way NCLB compliance is – tests. Lots and lots of tests.

There are not many parents who want their kids to go to school to learn how to take tests. Parents want their kids to go to school to learn to read. To write. To be able to do math. To learn about science. To learn skills and knowledge that will enable them to succeed and thrive in life. Not to take tests.

But when you look at education as a way to balance a budget, as a way to score points with white suburbanites, with your business allies, then you’re going to turn to these pedagogically offensive “reforms.”

Whenever teachers themselves discuss education reform, the refrain is always the same: why don’t they just let us teach? Teachers are already experts at bringing parents and students together in and out of the classroom to achieve great things. Why is Arnold trying to make teachers the villains and scapegoats of his own failure to properly fund public education? Why must teachers, and by extension their students, have to indirectly subsidize low taxes for the wealthy?

Of course, the answers to that question are all about Funding, and that’s the subject of tomorrow’s article.

First of Four Parts. Part Two: Teachers, Part Three: Funding and Part Four, Governance

The basic elements of Arnold’s education reforms have begun to make their way into the press, and unsurprisingly, they’re not good. Arnold intends to use his “Year of Education” to make a power grab at the expense of teachers, students who have different educational needs, and even basic democracy.

The most dramatic reforms appear to have been abandoned due to the budget crisis, as Arnold is in fact likely to propose balancing the budget on the backs of students. But other changes that don’t involve money will still appear in his State of the State address on Tuesday:

In his State of the State address on Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to announce an ambitious but controversial education agenda that includes merit pay for teachers, more local control of school finances, and essentially barring 4-year-olds from entering kindergarten.

Additionally, the AP adds some more proposals that seem likely to be unveiled:

Business leaders who advise Schwarzenegger say failing schools need to be held accountable first. They want Schwarzenegger, through his education secretary, David Long, to use the tools of the federal No Child Left Behind Act to punish schools with large numbers of failing students.

Many of those schools are in high-poverty neighborhoods and have a high proportion of black and Hispanic students.

2008 will indeed be “the Year of Education” in California, but not in the way Arnold intended. We will have to engage in a major fight if we are to protect education from crippling budget cuts and the imposition of a business-based agenda that parents oppose and that does nothing to actually improve learning and achievement.

The first thing to understand about education reform, before even looking at the specific proposals here, is that it so often misses the point. The problem with education in California isn’t that it is universally bad. I am a product of California public schools, from my first day in kindergarten in suburban Orange County in 1984 to my graduation from UC Berkeley in 2000 – and I had a great education the whole way. The problem is instead that it is uneven, and that students of color, and those from poor backgrounds, do not have the same educational opportunities or outcomes.

One of the most accurate predictors of student achievement is the income level of the student’s parents. Lower-income families tend to live in districts with inadequately funded schools, but also aren’t able to give students the kind of external support, such as test prep or computers, they need to succeed. Idealistic teachers who go to work in, for example, Oakland often burn out due to the lack of state support for their work and either find another career or take a job in Walnut Creek.

Those teachers who remain often give what they have to their students, but education is not a substitute for economic opportunity. To target poor children for aid but not their parents or their neighbors, as many have come to understand, is not a likely recipe for success.

We do indeed have an achievement gap in education in California. But it isn’t going to be addressed by abandoning the poor and students of color, by attacking teachers, and by reducing the amount of democratic control over education. California has an education problem because it won’t spend money on improving it, and Arnold, with his firm opposition to any new taxes, refuses to do the only thing that will help remedy the situation.

In that light, educational reform proposals such as those Arnold are proposing have to be seen in a different light. They’re proposed to achieve political goals, not educational goals. Over the next three days I break down the proposals according to three categories: Teaching, Funding, and Democracy. A lack of respect for each is at the core of Arnold’s plan, as is a desire to seize power over education in California.

Will Democrats rise to the occasion? Last year was to be the Year of Health Care. Arnold proposed individual mandates, and Democrats pooh-poohed it. But, 11 months later, there was the State Assembly, controlled by Democrats, approving a plan that incorporated Arnold’s basic proposals, with some slight differences in the details. If the Year of Education is to have a better outcome than the Year of Health Care, we need Democrats to stand firm for public education, for students, and for teachers.

Arnold has tried to promote a 10% across the board budget cut as the cornerstone of his plan to address the $14 billion deficit – but as Judy Lin noted in a recent SacBee article, he cannot do that:

But while such efforts have been talked about in the past, budget experts say straight reductions are impossible in a world filled with legal, financial and political obstacles.

“Can he get across-the-board cuts comprehensively? No,” said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, a nonpartisan group that advocates for poor and middle-class families. Not only does the state have to comply with various laws and court orders, it has debts to pay, paychecks to deliver, and everything from schools to prisons to maintain.

“I could go on and on and on,” Ross added.

The Schwarzenegger administration has pledged to spread cuts in a way that “no department shoulders a disproportionate share,” said finance spokesman H.D. Palmer.

Yet the governor’s aversion to taxes has left him little choice but to make cuts that are certain to attract political resistance on multiple fronts, from Democrats who control the Legislature to powerful interest groups such as the teachers and the prison officers union.

So what IS likely to face cuts when Arnold’s proposals are released next week? Education and health care.

A 10% cut to education budgets would require suspension of Prop 98, and would have a devastating effect on schools in the middle of the school year. Here I disagree with Judy Lin, the author of the SacBee article, who claims that the cuts to education would affect things like school buses and field trips – a 10% cut WILL mean cuts in classes and layoffs of teachers. There’s not that much flexibility in the budgets of most K-12 districts, certainly not in higher ed.

As to health care, Hanh Quach of Health Access California explains what a 10% cut would mean:

• A 10% cut in Medi-Cal eligibility would mean denying coverage to 680,000 of the 6.8 million Californians on Medi-Cal–largely low-income children, parents, seniors, and people with disabilities.

• A 10% cut in reimbursement rates in Medi-Cal would be hard, given that Medi-Cal has one of the lowest rates in the nation already (it’s one of the things we are trying to fix with health care reform).

• A 10% cut in benefits would mean having to deny millions of people key services. In the previous budget crises, proposals called for denying coverage for a range of benefits in Medi-Cal, including coverage for prosthetic limbs, medical equipment like asthma inhalers and diabetic test strips, and durable medical equipment like wheelchairs.

Given the likelihood of cuts being disproportionately visited on health and education, things that Californians have repeatedly demonstrated their support for protecting, it seems that Democrats have a strong opening to contest Arnold’s entire approach to the budget.

More importantly, Arnold is trying to reopen the current budget. Whereas in the summer Democrats were under pressure to get a budget done and ensure that schools and health care got the funding they needed, there is no such pressure now. Democrats can delay until July if they like and these vital public services and the Californians who depend on them will be spared. Dems are in the driver’s seat here, as long as they resist the temptation to agree to dramatic cuts so as to not jeopardize Prop 93’s chances.

What this also makes clearer is that spending cuts are not the answer – we MUST seek a revenue solution to this ongoing budget problem.