Buried in Arnold’s budget ideas spreadsheet as “Idea #10,” Arnold shows that for a “post-partisan” like him, no idea is really sacrosanct.  He clearly wasn’t wedded to the no new revenue idea before May 19, but he claims to be a born-again revenue hater.  What is “Idea # 10”? Well, it’s a fee on home insurance policies:

Fund CAL FIRE/CAL EMA with Emergency Response Initiative Fee.

Average cost per insurance policy holder would be $48 per year.  BY would backfill a portion of CAL FIRE’s base budget.  In out years, backfill E Fund costs and disaster assistance costs.

All in all, this is a fairly reasonable idea. CalFIRE desperately needs more resources as we head toward a future with increasing fire danger. Even with these additional revenues, Arnold is still proposing to let CalFire’s equipment get another year’s worth of rust as they are gutting equipment replacement for this budget year.

This is a great idea, yet completely ideologically discordant and intellectually dishonest. Only a few weeks ago, he said everything was on the table…except new revenues. Heck, even the Democratic legislative leaders have said there will not be any revenues. And I’m sure if you asked the Governor right now, he’d say no new revenue measures. So, what’s different here? Why is it ok to put a $48 fee here?

At any rate, the Legislative Analyst LAO thinks that this fee will actually be considered a tax anyway, and thus be subject to the limitations of Proposition 98 requiring some of the money to go to K-14 education.  Leg Analyst Mac Taylor suggests a more targeted fee for property owners that live in areas with high fire risk.

But the real question that this raises is not whether this is a good idea, which it probably is. The real question is if we can add revenue for CalFIRE, why can’t we add revenue for transit by adding a gas fee?  Why can’t we add revenue for CalWORKS (and the 3 times of federal dollars pulled down) by adding a sales tax on services?

When Finance Director Mike Genest suggests that only poor people get services from the state, perhaps he should consider CalFire, the one service that he and his boss think should get additional revenue. Certainly CalFire supports all Californians, but all those pricey homes built in fire-prone canyons require much of the assistance from CalFire. Why this fee? Why just for this purpose, as worthy as it might be?

As Brian noted, in the full list of the Governor’s slash and burn budget, the offshore drilling proposal in Tranquillon Ridge off the Santa Barbara coast remains.  After a key environmental group backed away from the plan, which originally was structured as a compromise proposal to allow an additional rig in exchange for ending all drilling in the channel by 2022 (which the Lands Commission determined was unenforceable), many expected the plan to be scrapped.  But it remains, despite the fact that the California Lands Commission spoke out yesterday, calling on the legislature to put a stop to this power grab.

The State Lands Commission on Monday lashed out at an attempt by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to allow the first new oil drilling in California waters since 1969.

Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, chairman of the three-member panel, called the governor’s effort “a naked power grab.” At a contentious hearing in Santa Monica, the commission passed a resolution urging legislators not to go along with the plan, which would revive a drilling proposal off the Santa Barbara County coast that the commission killed in January.

The Commission doesn’t out-and-out call this illegal.  But they hold jurisdiction over oil drilling, and the Governor is simply trying to go over their heads.  You can basically shut down the California Lands Commission if this goes through, because they will be rendered impotent.

And of course, while the Administration foregrounds the $2 billion dollars to be gained from allowing the leases in Tranquillon, he does not make a peep about charging an oil severance tax, to actually make the oil companies pay to take California’s natural resources out of the ground.

You can actually see the full list of proposed cuts by the Governor here (Note by Brian: I’ve posted that PDF over the flip).  He has engaged in several tricks to actually slow down the dispersal of the cuts, priming himself for the moment when the Legislature must hurry up and approve everything he proposes immediately.  It’s a neat trick.  He released the cuts in stages, with multiple changes, so the relevant committees could not get a full picture.  Finally, the full release comes with a little more than a week to go.  Noreen Evans, for one, is pissed, and Aaron McLear responds with a healthy dose of sexism.

At the budget conference committee Monday, Assembly Budget Committeee Chairwoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, vented some of her frustrations at chief deputy finance director Ana Matosantos.

Noting that the governor had made three separate revisions to his May budget, Evans curtly asked Matosantos “Are we done now?”

Evans’ cross-examination of Matosantos garnered an angry reply from the administration. “We will continue to revise our budget numbers as the situation deteriorates,” Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said. “It is our sincere hope that Assemblywoman Evans will be able to keep up.”

McLear is an ass, and his point is ridiculous – nothing’s changed in the three days between new documents of cuts.  This is a deliberate attempt to keep everything fuzzy and not permanent right up until the moment when it all must pass.  It’s a typical shell game.

As to the document, among some of the goodies not already announced:

• The state will increase withholding by 10%, essentially getting an interest-free loan from the citizens.  Employees can opt out, and I’m sure everyone will know to do that.

• The proposal to borrow $2 billion from local governments remains.  This at the same time when Arnold proposes budget “solutions” like moving inmates to county jails, INCREASING their budget burden.

• Eliminating general fund money to stop domestic violence.

• Like everything else, the savings in corrections are vague and potentially unworkable, and almost all the savings in the corrections budget are in precisely the kind of programs we need to expand, like rehabilitation, vocational training, and substance abuse programs.

• I’ve also heard about eliminating the state’s funding of vote by mail ballots, but that’s not in this document (and sounds patently illegal, if the ballots couldn’t go out).

It’s all good, though, because we can just get volunteers to monitor all the state parks.  Sounds like a perfect plan.

The sneakiest part of this whole budget deal, the capper, is that Arnold is proposing a LARGER budget reserve than in previous years, essentially mandating Prop. 1A despite its loss.  He’s actually capping spending.

In recent days, the governor has introduced new budget cuts, including plans to eliminate popular state programs like CalWORKS and Healthy Families, eliminate millions in funding for state parks, and to lay off up to 5,000 state employees.

But in Monday’s conference committee hearing, Evans pointed out that the governor’s latest proposal had a budget reserve of more than $4 billion, even while proposing cuts to popular programs that would not have to be eliminated if the reserve were smaller.

McLear defended the governor’s numbers. “There’s a need to have a reserve,” he said. “The swings in revenue are so dramatic, and we have to make sure we’re able to pay the bills.”

Times like these are what the budget reserve was invented for.

What will happen over the next two weeks is that the Governor will keep tweaking and tweaking, right up until the day where he says “Pass this now or else.”  And given the state of the Democrats in the legislature, I’m not sanguine about the reaction.

All Budget Cuts –

The Governor will be presenting his plans on slashing through the budget this morning at 10 AM.  It will be followed by the Democratic response and then the Yacht Party’s Leg leader response. Given the suggested cuts that have gradually trickled out of his office suite, the Horseshoe, you can be fairly comfortable with a few facts. The governor will provide his vision of striking the final blow against the state’s safety net. He will provide no further revenue options, putting himself firmly at the ideological heart of the right wing California Yacht Party.  And he will provide an image of a dark future in a state that could do much, much better.

Calitics will provide live commentary on the speeches. You can watch them live at CalChannel.

Ryan White wasn’t from California, and only visted a few times as far as I can ascertain.  However, he was here in 1990, just before his death, to host a post-Oscars with none other than legendary AIDS heros, the Reagans. Yup, one of his last public appearances came with the man whose legacy on the HIV/AIDS crisis was well summarized by Allen White in the SF Chronicle a few years ago as “Silence Equals Death.”

But while California had a long history of queer activism on AIDS, including the founding of two of the earliest AIDS-focused organizations in 1982, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the AIDS Project Los Angeles. It was Ryan White, a boy-next-door kind of kid that made Congress stop simply averting their eyes to the crisis that was occurring.  And just four months after White’s death, the Ryan White CARE Act was signed.  While White’s story was just one of many reasons for the passage of what has become a monumentally important piece of legislation to the many AIDS patients across the country, his story broke the mold of thinking that AIDS was merely isolated to one community. Incidentally, AVERT, an international HIV and AIDS charity based in the UK, has a great web section on the history and science of the AIDS crisis.

Yet, today, amidst the budget crisis, we are now facing the end of the Ryan White Legacy. In the latest budget proposals, state AIDS funding is in danger of being completely eliminated.

“Funding for all aids programs up and down the state will be cut, pretty much eliminated, and that’s got all of us very worried, because its quite serious,” said Dr. Judy Auerbach of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. (CBS5 6/1/09)

These cuts aren’t academic in the slightest, as the above news story points out, substantial cuts to AIDS funding will mean that people will not be able to afford drugs. They will miss doses or stop taking it all. Not only will they become sick and die, but the virus will grow stronger.

California was once the nation’s leader on AIDS care. Heck, go check out the Office of AIDS, and even despite all the cuts, there is still hope for the future and finding a cure. In San Francisco, the PrepareStudy is working to find a vaccine for HIV.

Ending funding for HIV/AIDS will quite literally kill people. There can be no debate on that subject.  And if that’s what Arnold and the Republicans want to do, they should have to say that to the faces of every single one of these people.

A while ago, I mentioned the regional centers. The Regional Centers protect California’s mentally disabled, both children and adults.  However, with the recent budget cuts, there simply aren’t the resources to protect everybody.  But that’s far from it.

In today’s California Report, the Contra Costa County Adult protective services tells the tale of a 5’7″ adult female who weighed only 90 pounds and had severe physical trauma. While you don’t get the visuals, you can understand why an in-person investigation is so important. However, under the new rules, social workers are required to investigate by phone only. While these great social workers are truly miracle workers, it is nearly impossible for them to protect everybody. In fact, the county grand jury now says that APS “no longer has the resources to carry out its legal mandate to investigate physical and financial abuse.”

state	rank	per capita spending($)
Alaska	1	16952
West Virginia	2	10245
Alabama	7	7872
New York	14	5804
Iowa	25	5051
California	26	5028
Pennsylvania	31	4583
Nevada	50	3209
FY07 Stats from Kaiser Foundation

Arnold is talking about “living within our means,” but what does that mean if we are letting people simply die? How are we living within our means then?  The fallacy of the right in this state that we are simply overspending has somehow been taken to heart by all sorts of moderates and even many progressives. But it is simply not true. As Jon Ortiz pointed out in the State Worker blog yesterday, we have the second lowest number of state employees per capita. We are solidly middle of the road in terms of state spending per capita.  In fact, we are 26th in state spending of the 50 states. Take these few examples in the table to the left.

As you can see, California is hardly overspending relative to other states in the union. We aren’t some sort of outlier.  The only thing that we have that is an outlier is our completely dysfunctional system of government.  We are living within our means. We are providing the state with slightly above terrible level of services. Yet, the myth of California “living outside our means” persists. Why? Well, you know why, I know why, everybody knows why. Yet only a few actually say it.  It is convenient to believe this myth. It makes scapegoats out of those who dare to use government services.

After all these years of “two santas” tax cuts, we simply have nothing left to give. We are at the point of completely cutting welfare, completely cutting state aid to state parks, completely cutting adult and child protection services.

That’s not anything resembling “living within our means.” That’s just unjustifiable societal manslaughter.

In his latest act of madness, Arnold is now proposing a five percent cut across the board for all state employees:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to propose a 5 percent across-the-board pay cut for state workers to save nearly $500 million in next year’s budget, a spokesman said Thursday.(SacBee 5/28/09)

The thing is that these “across the board” cuts are simply lazy. Resources aren’t as important in one place as they are another. That’s why we don’t simply grow or scale back the budget by a percentage each year. There are some programs that are more important than others.

At this point, it is imperative that progressives work to provide some visiblity for these crazy cuts.  One such group who is doing that is SEIU, whose workers just wrapped up their 48-hour Sacramento vigil to avoid the drastic cuts in in-home support services (IHSS).  Yesterday, I spoke to Eliseo Medina, about the situation here in California.  



While it wasn’t surprising to hear that this situation was really only different from other situations in other states by the willingness to work together by the governor, the bigger issue that grabbed my attention was the way the issue was sort of blown off.  Before the May election, SEIU leaders had a sit-down with the Governor, and reached out to work together for solutions to the budget situation.  But once the election passed, there was silence on the other end of the line. No word from the Governor or his nominally Democratic CoS Susan Kennedy. It was straight to the “cut to the bone rhetoric.”

The thing about IHSS is that there really isn’t a cost-efficient way to cut.  Here are the alternatives:

1) Cut wages from $12 to minimum wage, $8. You lose a slew of IHSS workers to other service sector jobs, even in this economy.  These people are generally reliable people, and that’s always in demand. And when you get more money working at In ‘N’ Out, why do we expect the dedicated IHSS workers to stick around?

2) Cut service levels. Even at higher wages, IHSS care is far cheaper than nursing home care. Up to 4 times cheaper. So when the governor threatens to cut both per client services and service availability, what he is really saying is that these people should simply go to nursing homes.

Funny thing about this is that when they get on MediCal, because they will, the state simply ends up paying on the other end. Guess what, there are laws about what you can do to people.  Under both California and federal laws, we have commitments to provide care. SEIU has already filed one lawsuit, and plans to bring another.  When you are cutting into the bone, it’s simply not as easy as Arnold would like to portray.

On the other hand, nothing is really easy these days.  SEIU is also facing a fight with the former leaders of UHW who have created their own union, NUHW. NUHW recently won a local election in San Pablo and there’s another election in Fresno.

I just appeared on KPFA with Eric Klein to talk about the Governor’s proposed budget cuts, along with several experts and stakeholders, including friend of Calitics Anthony Wright of Health Access California.  I agree with him that it’s almost hard to fathom the amount and severity of the cuts proposed for health care, especially at a time with the federal government is moving forward with a “do or die” plan to reform the health care market, increase access and lower costs.  The proposed Governor Hoover cuts would have the exact opposite effect, and the people gravely impacted by this will not have the luxury of waiting around for the Feds to catch up and fill in the gaps.

Two recent CBP fact sheets help break down the Governor’s proposed cuts to Medi-Cal and Healthy Families, in numbers that are easier to grasp. These fact sheets show:

More than 940,000 California children would lose health coverage if the Healthy Families Program is eliminated as the Governor proposes. More than 240,000 children in Los Angeles county alone would be affected. Want to know how many children would be impacted in your county? Check out the fact sheet to see.

In total, more than 1.9 million Californians could lose access to health coverage within three years through proposed reductions to the Medi-Cal Program and elimination of Healthy Families.

As the Governor said himself today, “behind every one of those dollars that we cut there are real faces.”

Kudos to the LA Times, by the way, for allowing the great unmentionable to get printed on their pages – the decisions made in Sacramento will truly be the difference between life and death for many Californians.

Schwarzenegger argues that the state’s declining economy and plummeting tax revenues have boxed California into a corner, forcing deep and historic cuts in the health and welfare programs that form the state’s social safety net. Without those tough measures, he says, California will cartwheel toward insolvency.

But a 10-person legislative budget panel, which is reviewing the governor’s proposals, listened during a long day in a crowded hearing room to scores of people who said their survival depends on programs set to be hit by the budget ax.

They heard from mothers of children with autism, representatives of people on dialysis, poor parents whose children see dentists on the government’s dime, former drug abusers set straight by a state rehab program.

And they heard from a woman named Lynnea Garbutt who has lived with AIDS all of her 24 years.

She has survived with the help of a state program that provides the expensive antiviral drugs she takes. Now, with that program facing elimination, she pleaded with lawmakers to save it — and her life.

“If these cuts take place, you’re not just cutting money from the program — you’re cutting my life,” she told the panel, her voice shaking and tears falling. “I choose to live. Please don’t make me die. My choice is life.”

This is how Yacht Partier Chuck DeVore responded – move out of the state.  Love it or leave it!

The cuts made to programs like Healthy Families (California’s SCHIP) would eliminate federal matching funds and double or triple the scope of the cuts.  And it would be one thing, by the way, if the Yacht Party simply held the line and said “we can’t afford it.”  But no, they want to spend billions of dollars, only on their own projects instead of saving human lives.

In this article in the San Diego Union Tribune, the same Republicans (and Republican governor) who would eliminate children’s health care and basic services for the neediest Californians, actually want the state to pony up the money for a water bond.

Schwarzenegger, says the article, is still fixated on a whopping $10 billion bond. And Senate Republicans are right there with him:

“Sen. Dave Cogdill of Modesto, the lead Republican on water issues, agreed. “It’s obviously a tough time to bring it forward, but we can’t wait,” the article notes.

We can’t wait? According to my calculator, If the entire $10 billion was sold together, the interest payment could be in the neighborhood of $660 million annually. That’s $660 million more that would have to come out of  schools, health care, and other items on the chopping block.

Similarly, the Yacht Party cried poor about programs that help people, but made room in the February budget for a huge corporate tax cut.

Everyone who has spent 10 seconds on this recognizes that there’s no good way to use current revenues to provide the basic level of services Californians deserve.  To the extent that I have hope that we will overcome the selfishness of the cruel and the impossibility of navigating a broken system, it comes from people, who are fed up and starving for leadership and change from a government that no longer serves their interests.  To turn the figurative starvation literal, Los Angeles teachers are going on a hunger strike to protest budget cuts.  We’re all hungry, and we’ll be a lot hungrier if Governor Hoover has his way.