As a student who is currently enrolled in a California State University, I have witnessed the devastating effects that the higher education crisis is having on this state. My student fees have increased with the coming of each new semester. My professors have had to completely redesign their courses so that they can teach as many students as the fire code will allow in a classroom at a time. My fellow students and I are “crashing” any open classes left and right, trying to get enough units to reach full-time status so that we can qualify for financial aid and health insurance.  

My fellow students and I are idealistic and optimistic. We believe in hope and change. And we want a candidate for governor who will make higher education reform the top priority in their campaign. As the situation stands Meg Whitman has not made higher education a priority in her plan to govern California and it is doubtful that she will ever see the direct correlation between the health of the state’s higher educational system and the condition of our state’s economy.

Jerry Brown, however, still has the time to make higher education reform the pinnacle of his gubernatorial platform. Brown should learn from San Francisco Mayor and Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s campaigns for Governor and Lieutenant Governor. As a candidate for both offices, Mayor Newsom made higher education reform one of his top concerns. And as a result, Students for Gavin Newsom established chapters at 36 colleges and 35 high schools up and down the state, making it the arguably the largest grassroots student movement ever organized in the state of California.

While it is true that the majority of people who are most likely to vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election are senior citizens, it is far more beneficial for Brown to court the youth vote by running on higher education reform. We are living in an era where a bachelor’s degree is no longer preferred-but required-in order to land most jobs. So not only is this higher education crisis threatening the economic well being of California’s students now but it will threaten the economy of this entire state and this whole country in the future, if something is not done to solve it.

There are several solutions to help combat the state’s higher education crisis. One of the most obvious is adopting an oil severance tax-which would tax the oil as it is pumped from the ground. California is the only state in the country that does not have this tax and it is costing us dearly. Another solution is to repeal the requirement that the state legislature must have a two-thirds majority in order to raise taxes or pass a budget. We are all familiar with the culture of partisanship and greed that plagues the politicians in Sacramento. It is high time that we make these politicians work for us, their constituents, rather than working against their colleagues in the halls of the State Capitol Building.

There are no small or easy ways to solve California’s higher education problems. The time has come for audacious, sweeping higher education reform. The time has come for candidates who embrace the big and the bold and are unafraid of taking risks.

Students are too often accused of being politically apathetic and blissfully ignorant of what is going on in the world around us. But as anyone who has recently stepped foot on a college campus knows, times have changed. We want a candidate for governor who recognizes that higher education reform is the answer to the problems that California has been dealing with for far too long.

California’s young voters, myself included, need to know that Jerry Brown has a plan to truly reform higher education in California. Jerry Brown needs to know that if he wants young people to turn out and vote for him in November, higher education reform is the way to get us into the voting booth.

     

   On November 19th, 52 UC Davis students were arrested after peacefully protesting the new 32% fee increases established by the UC Regents. As a second year undergraduate, I was hopeful that students were beginning to see the bigger picture: California is broken.

   Students, so far, have been forcing most of the blame on the UC Regents. While it is true that the 20 Regents who voted for the increase certainly deserve a heaving portion of the blame for borrowing tens of millions (from a non-CA bank, NY Merrill Trust) while forcing students into a cycle of debt in order to protect UC’s eerily superb bond rating, the only way for students to move towards enacting change is to recognize that UC’s woes are symptomatic of the larger disease that has infected the entire state.

   The UC student, to widen the umbrella for a movement that might have the capability of rallying support for reform, should understand that he or she risks turning people off by angling attacks towards the Regents and the Regents only. It is important to recognize that while it is a travesty that UC is becoming an unaffordable option for many California families, it is nearsighted to think that UC fees are anything more than a slice of the pie that is California’s broken political system. The state workers that have been furloughed, the elderly Californians that are losing their access to Medicare, the thousands of previously middle-class Californians that have had their homes foreclosed, and the over 12% of California that is unemployed might tell students that UC is not the only government program that is underfunded, mismanaged, and increasingly unavailable to the people who need it.

 To the single mother making $30,000 a year or the undocumented immigrant working in poor labor conditions for a less-than-legal salary, the plight of the students might seem distant and unimportant. The reality of the situation is that students are making valid points, but they are doing so in a way that turns off the millions of Californians that should be turned on by the students’ overarching message of reforming California.

   When the student recognizes that the immediate and long term problems caused by UC’s fee increases are tied together with the struggles of working families, immigrants, the elderly, homeowners, borrowers, the unemployed, water drinkers, and dozens of other California communities and interest groups, then, perhaps, we will see forward progress.

   The first point that needs to be made by students (that might catch on) is that the programs that made our state great in the 50s and 60s cannot continue to exist without proper funding.

   The message should be loud and clear: raising revenue does not mean higher taxes for everybody, it means looking at who and what gets taxed in this state, and what kind of people are hurt when programs lose funding. Here are three problems that have been generally accepted among the progressive community to be at the heart of the problem:

   Lack of an oil-severance tax in California. Who wins? Big Oil. Who loses? The People. AB 656 (Torrico) would use a 9.9% tax on Gross Product to generate up to $1 billion annually for programs like UC, CSU and CCC.

   2/3rds majority required to pass anything that raises revenue. Who wins? The CaGOP and Big Business. Who loses? Again, The People. Republicans who are indebted to special interest groups that represent Big Business are able to crush the programs that help make the California Dream a reality for many working Californians. AB 656 is expected to be an easy kill for the Republican minority, even though California is the only state in the union that does not have an oil severance tax (including Sarah’s AK and GWB’s TX).

   Proposition 13. Who wins? Big Business. Who Loses? The People. The remains of the Jarvis Taxpayer Revolution act as the most regressive and harmful tax policy in the state. With the veil of providing economic safety for elderly residents without a fixed income, the anti-tax era cursed California’s future with budget shortfalls and program cuts. It is apparent, now, that Californians can’t have our cake and eat it, too.

   So, students should be asking the question: Why is it that Chevron, Monsanto, and Walmart are allowed to raise revenue while the State of California isn’t? Why is it that CEOs are getting pay raises while the People are getting both pay cuts and program cuts?

   The students are right: the State of California has left them for dead, but they are not alone. Almost every Californian uses some sort of state-sponsored program, whether that be a UC, a public elementary school, a library, or the DMV. If you’re one of those people, and if you haven’t gotten a pay raise, then you should be ticked off, too.

I mentioned in passing that I didn’t particularly like the Democrats’ budget counter-proposal.  Let me go into some detail on that.  

The Democratic budget provides a $3.8 billion dollar reserve.  I recognize that, with state personal income tax revenues falling off the cliff (though by more in several states – man, Arizona’s getting crushed – than here), that $3.8 billion will probably need to be used down the road, when this budget projection fails to match reality.  But we’re on fire right now, and using more of that reserve in this package would eliminate cuts that will probably contribute to more of an economic slowdown and bigger deficits down the road.

Of course, the reserve is so big because that’s clearly the back-up plan for the legislature in case the $2 billion in taxes on oil severance and cigarette companies, so they can pay for their externalities, fail.  I guess the problem is that those tax increases are only $2 billion dollars, and only around the margins instead of actually moving to a more progressive tax structure.  However, there are of course short-term exigencies here – e.g. the 2/3 rule.  But I’m assuming that putting the oil and cigarette taxes up is designed to provide fodder for future campaign ads – “X voted against kids and for Big Oil and Big Tobacco.”  Well, why wouldn’t you HEIGHTEN those contradictions, then?  There are plenty of other options – a nickel a drink alcohol tax, adding tax brackets between $47,500 and $1 million, etc. – that could be put into a model budget.  Why not create the budget you WANT instead of the one you have to have, at least at first?

Finally, the budget sets aside the $2.5 billion dollar annual tax breaks for the largest corporations in America, secured in the last two budget agreements in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  That doesn’t come close to sharing sacrifice, and it’s really disappointing to see the Democrats shield big business on this.  Their tax hikes are so small that all of them could have been covered by repealing the tax breaks.  And a point of information – while normally repealing such tax breaks would require a 2/3 vote, because this is a modification of an existing budget and not a new budget, I’m not so sure that remains the case:

A couple of other points worth noting. First, the package of proposals is a modification of the state budget; the new fiscal year spending plan was actually enacted in February. As such, all proposals that are not a tax increase — most notably, the spending reductions — can be passed with a majority vote in each house. Trouble is, that would mean they wouldn’t take effect for 90 days… thus delaying aid to the cash-strapped state. For the cuts to kick in immediately, it will take a supermajority vote — which shifts some of the pressure over to the GOP about matching votes to their rhetoric about cuts, even if the rest of the package isn’t to their liking.

Looking for some information on whether that applies to repealing tax cuts as well, I’ll get back to you.

UPDATE: John Myers writes in to tell me that his understanding is it would take 2/3 to repeal those corporate tax credits.  I pretty much figured this, but it seems weird that you cannot cancel what was enacted in the same budget cycle with a simple majority.  In addition, treating repealing a tax cut like a tax increase and covered by Prop. 13 sounds just very wrong to me – an extension of conservative dogma that ought to be challenged in court.  But yes, that’s the most perverse part of our budget dysfunction. Hat tip to John for the info.

(As a side note, we will see what it’s like if you lowered the 2/3 threshold for the budget and not for taxes – and that is, EXACTLY THE SAME.  Taxes are part of the budget process.  Walling them off makes it just as hard to pass a budget, especially if you’re in the kind of hole that California is in.)

That the failed enterprise zone program is still funded at $500 million dollars annually is a sin.

Finally, there are very few solutions here – outside of the vehicle license fee for state parks – that incorporate the majority-vote fee increase items passed in January and vetoed by the Governor.  They have veto bait in this deal, so I don’t see why you wouldn’t add the fee increases as well, which would have savings in the billions.

Some of the solutions that the Democrats came up with are fine, some gimmicky (delaying paychecks for state workers one day from June 30 to July 1, 2010 “saves” the state $1.2 billion dollars in this budget), but some still unconscionable – basically all of the education cuts sought by the Governor remain.  There are $1 billion in Medi-Cal cuts that would need a federal waiver.  And there were options to cancel those cuts.

The Democratic leadership thinks Schwarzenegger will cave and accept this budget.  Keep in mind that, other than the $2 billion in tax increases, Republicans are somewhat irrelevant in a modification, and the fight will focus on whether that $2 billion will come from the budget reserve or additional cuts.  Republican votes are needed to put the modifications in immediately, which maximizes their savings.  So all these fiscally conservative Republicans can say now and waste the state lots of money.  Their choice.