Finally, there’s a budget proposal worth fighting for, and it couldn’t have come at a more critical time.

On Tuesday, Assembly Democrats, led by new Speaker of the Assembly John Pérez, proposed an innovative budget plan, that closes the nearly $18 billion budget gap while focusing on jobs, as an alternative to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s job killing, all-cuts budget.  

This proposal takes the economic high road by saving hundreds of thousands of jobs for teachers, police, firefighters and other workers, and creating jobs in the private sector that will spur economic growth and new revenues for the state without raising taxes on working families.

Speaker Pérez:

California has to produce a budget that promotes job creation and makes economic sense. We shouldn’t make budget decisions that cut jobs and short-change our overall recovery and long-term growth. The California Jobs Budget will protect and create 465,000 jobs in the private sector and local communities, while also protecting funding for schools, public safety, and a basic safety net.

The proposal would ease California through the worst budget deficit of a generation.  It protects working families from devastating cuts in service like home care and child care, and saves jobs for teachers, police, firefighters and others who provide vital services at the state and local levels.  It proposes only half of the Governor’s fee increase for UC and CSU students, and rejects his proposed $4.3 billion cut in education.  

This package would mitigate deep budget cuts by choosing working families over Big Oil and large multinational corporations.  A new oil severance fee will help fund a private sector job creation program.  And delaying unnecessary corporate tax breaks will save $2 billion that can be invested in job creation, child care, health care, and job services for the working poor.  

The Speaker’s office detailed the proposal in a release yesterday:

The California Jobs Budget closes the state’s $17.9 billion General Fund shortfall and ends the year with a $1 billion final reserve. The centerpiece of the California Jobs Budget is a $10.1 billion Jobs and Economic Stability Fund that will protect against the loss of 430,000 private sector, local community and school jobs in the Governor’s May Budget Revision, and which will also generate tens of thousands of new jobs.  The California Jobs Budget provides $1.5 billion for targeted Jobs Initiatives, repays debts to local governments and schools to avoid massive local government layoffs, and maintains critical employment services and training programs that get people back to work and keep them on payrolls and off government aid.

Predictably, Republicans and the Governor are already attacking the proposal in an effort to try to score some cheap political points as they enter negotiations.

Assembly Budget Chair Bob Blumenfield (D- San Fernando Valley) responded to those attacks yesterday:

The California Jobs Budget protects the private sector job growth we’ve begun to see and it prevents massive layoffs of teachers and cops.  Assembly Republican Leader Martin Garrick is saying he’d rather kill 430,000 jobs in a time of record unemployment than have California join other states in charging oil companies a fee for the oil they take, a fee that experts agree won’t impact consumers.  The irresponsible rejection of jobs and federal funds Mr. Garrick’s position represents is not what Californians want – and it’s not what California’s economic recovery needs.

By unleashing their attack machine without even considering the merits of this proposal and its potential benefits to our economy and middle class, Republicans have once again shown they aren’t interested in meaningful solutions to the budget crisis that will actually get our economy back on track. Instead, the Governor and his Republican allies continue their scorched earth campaign that would eviscerate the state as we know it. We simply can’t let them win. Not this time.  

As progressives and advocates for working families, this is the proposal we’ve been waiting for. And this is precisely the kind of proposal the people of California want. Recent polls show that Californians are seeking a fair budget solution that won’t destroy what we value most: education, public safety, our safety net and other important programs. The Assembly Democrats have stepped up to offer a budget that delivers.

This proposal is a bold and creative step forward that, frankly, we haven’t seen in prior budget fights. But it can’t pass on its own. We need to fight for it. It’s time for everyone who cares about our state’s future to rally around this proposal so that we can achieve where the Governor has repeatedly failed: delivering a budget that protects jobs, education the safety net and finally puts California on the road to economic recovery.

Angie Wei is legislative director at the California Labor Federation, which represents 2.1 million workers in 1,200 unions across the state.

 

In a Broder-esque column over the weekend, George Skelton took a little of this, a little of that, and a little Capitol craziness, and jammed them all together.  If you get beyond his Capitol story time of arm wrestling, you see that there are some very real concerns that are being glossed over.  In a discussion of Medical co-pays, this is very concerning

Maybe the $50 and $100 co-pays are a bit excessive for people living in poverty, officially defined at $10,800 a year for individuals and $14,600 for couples. But some co-pays are warranted. (LAT)

Except, as Anthony Wright later points out. It isn’t just the $5, for which Skelton dramatically underestimates the value of the money to those on MediCal, but the incentives.  If we start requiring these co-pays, it deters people from seeing the doctor early, and encourages them to wait until they can no longer ignore the problem.  This is a perverse incentive.

But Skelton gets to the point of choices. More specifically, that we are making extreme choices simply by sticking with the status quo. If we allow the corporate tax break from 2009 to set in, we are looking at $1.8 billion disappearing. And that makes the MediCal payments look like chump change:

Schwarzenegger had the right idea in January but since then has abandoned it. If things got bleak enough, he said then, the state should postpone roughly $1.8 billion in corporate tax breaks scheduled to begin in July.

Things are certifiably bleak. … {T}hey certainly shouldn’t take effect this July. Some things just make sense, regardless of which party you’re tied to.

We must understand that bumbling along is, in fact, making a choice. Let’s offer Californians a real choice, provide the state the services that we expect and require, and let the chips fall where they may.

It seems that’s the only way you get Arnold Schwarzenegger to do a damn thing these days. You want to change education? Add some tax credits. You want to cut spending? Add some more tax loopholes, and we’ll talk.

And, now, the Legislature has decided to just talk.  So, they’re throwing in a homebuyer’s tax credit (putting realtors over our children) and a sales tax exemption for environmental technology companies (putting another business sector ahead of our children). Yay!

Responding to a demand by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, state lawmakers Monday sent him bills establishing another homebuyer tax credit  and a sales tax exemption for environmental technology firms, satisfying him enough to win his signature on a transportation funding bill.

Schwarzenegger last week threatened to veto a Democratic gas-tax maneuver that would save the state $1.1 billion as it tries to close a nearly $20 billion deficit. The proposal was similar to a gas-tax swap Schwarzenegger first proposed in January, but the Democratic version provided ongoing funding for transit programs.

The Republican governor, in a letter, vowed to veto the gas-tax proposal in part because he said lawmakers had not sent him the job creation bills he wanted. (SacBee)

This, my friends, is called hostage taking in the vein of Lucy and Charlie Brown.  Arnold proposes a law, gets Dems to buy-in, and then pulls the old veto card out of his hat. Football yanked! Ha-Ha.

Get used to this Democrats. If Meg Whitman successfully implements her “Buy It Now” program for the governor’s gig, this is what every negotiation will look like. If you don’t do what she says, she’s going to veto everything. Or so she says. But if she’s going to go that route, she’d do well to learn from the master. After all, look where all this hard work has brought him. It takes real work to get to be the worst governor ever.

With dueling letters flying back and forth (here’s Sen. Steinberg’s), it is clear that there is a lot of work left to be done on the budget.  In fact, Steinberg is saying that they are at a “mini-impasse” now:

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, suggested Tuesday that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger bears blame for budget inaction after the governor rejected the most significant parts of a budget package Democrats have sent him in recent weeks.

The Republican governor on Monday told legislative leaders that he would veto a gas-tax swap that would have cut about $1 billion from the state’s $19.9 billion deficit through June 2011, saying that he wanted a bill that would have cut gas taxes by 5 cents per gallon.

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The Democratic Senate leader declared the situation a “mini impasse,” though he was confident that lawmakers and the governor would be able to resolve their budget disagreements. In particular, Steinberg said, lawmakers would seek to send Schwarzenegger another bill that helps “short sale” home sellers, perhaps without the corporate penalty provisions if need be. (SacBee)

I recommend you read the full Steinberg letter for additional context, but long story short, they’re trying to do a swap of gas taxes for fees.  Trouble is, that when other states tried doing a similar move, they ended up losing revenue and the oil companies ended up taking the additional money.

There are a few points of agreement that should be able to get some budget “solutions,” but there is still a long way to go to chisel down that $20B deficit.

John Fensterwald has a great story in the Educated Guess about what the parents in Cupertino are facing for their children. The district is K-8 only, and as the area is pretty wealthy, and fairly progressive, they’ve been able to pass a couple of parcel taxes for the district. In fact, last year they passed one for $4 million. But, that’s not going to be enough:

But now this K-8 Silicon Valley district, home of Apple Computer and some of the  highest performing schools in the state, is facing a $9 million deficit for next year. And that’s putting in jeopardy many of the programs parents consider essential: small classes, summer school, the GATE program for gifted children, librarians.

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To that end, the Cupertino Educational Endowment Foundation is asking parents to help put an initiative on the November ballot that would lower the threshold for passing a parcel tax from two-thirds to 55 percent  to make it easier to pass the next parcel tax.  And organizers are asking every family to donate $375 toward a goal of $3 million  to keep  small classes in grades one to three while saving 105 teachers who’ve been told they’ll otherwise lose their jobs.

Even in a place like Cupertino, where the district has always been able to find a way, there just aren’t the answers that there used to be. Sacramento has cut them out at the knees, and they’re trying to recover the best they can. Will Cupertino still have decent schools come next year? Probably, but if even the so-called “rich districts” are struggling to make ends meet, what does that say for the districts that are dependent upon the state?

If Meg Whitman wants to talk about too much state spending, how about she actually takes a look at our schools? You know, because hers went to private school, she’s not so familiar. And with each cut, with each lost resource, times become harder.

I have a friend who teaches at a public school in San Leandro. It’s a working class area these days, and the economy has hit the community pretty hard.  Students are coming to school completely without supplies, and the districts simply don’t have the money to pay for everything.  But, the teachers aren’t going to let the kids sit there with no pencil, and they end up footing the bill. While the Right wants to talk about how teachers are so spoiled, the fact is that they aren’t exactly making Kingly ransoms. And honestly, I can’t think of a profession that deserves every cent they earn more than teachers.  But, even with that being said, teachers are being forced into spending hundreds of dollars each semester to provide simple school supplies for their classrooms.

This isn’t right.

Robert mentioned the looming teacher layoffs, but there will be some layoffs that will be coming down the pike right away.

In low-key votes, lawmakers slashed nearly $1 billion from the state’s prison system, chiefly from inmates’ medical care, and approved a $540 million reduction in state workers’ paychecks. The state Senate had approved those measures last week, and on Monday the Assembly passed them on party-line votes. (SJ Merc)

In this series of votes, the Assembly didn’t look at the Amazon.com tax nor the plan to change the way the gas tax works.

What it did do, slashing prison health care funding, is perhaps without controversy in the Legislature, but the federal courts might look at this slightly differently. Further cuts to the salaries of state workers, who have already seen cuts due to the furloughs, will increase the strain of many workers who are just struggling to keep their heads above water.

Given that Sen. Steinberg has already said that he wouldn’t seek broad tax increases, it appears that cuts are going to be the name of the game.  And Arnold doesn’t even want to look at simple majority tax/fee exchanges. While the stimulus from DC appears to be doing some good, the biggest of the 50 Little Hoovers is right here in Sacramento.