Back in May one of the main reasons Calitics, the Courage Campaign, and numerous other progressive organizations mobilized to defeat Proposition 1A was to prevent the massive cuts that had already been made from being locked into place, as they would have had the spending cap of Prop 1A become part of the state constitution. As was reported at the time, Prop 1A would have created a budget deficit of nearly $20 billion by 2013, mandating long-term program reductions. Stopping that from happening was one of the key victories in the May 19 battle.<\/p>\n
And yet those long-term cuts may well happen anyway. The billions in cuts being made right now in Sacramento are unlikely to ever be restored. The news that Republicans don’t want to repay the education funds<\/a> is just the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n As the United Ways of California noted<\/a> on their twitter feed last night, it took 7 years to cut the number of uninsured kids in half. That work has been undone by the Legislature last night. The work done in the late 1990s to ensure that federal welfare reform did not destroy the safety net for the poor is being undone with the attacks on Cal-WORKS. Years of battling to properly fund IHSS is out the window. And many decades of work to fund public education is now being undone as well, including 50 years of the Master Plan for Higher Education.<\/p>\n So why am I skeptical those funds will ever return? Consider the political consensus in Sacramento, which Democrats are working very hard to reinforce. It is a consensus that holds that budget cuts are necessary and taxes are bad, that California “overspent” in recent years. When you have people like Jerry Brown going on CNBC to say that California had a spending problem this decade, you’re witnessing the creation of a powerful political urge to resist new spending for many years to come.<\/p>\n Economic recovery will eventually arrive, though not for several more years. When it does, there will be intense pressure from Republicans and their allies in the state media such as George Skelton and Dan Walters to resist using increased revenues to increase spending. Even if the state runs multi-billion dollar surpluses, Democrats will come under pressure to put it in a rainy day fund – or to rebate it in the form of permanent tax cuts, as was done in 1978 and 1998. Any restoration of lost spending will be framed as “new spending” that somehow the state “cannot afford.”<\/p>\n In short, what we are witnessing is the construction of a new normal, a political spending cap that lacks the force of law but carries with it the equally powerful force of precedent and conventional wisdom. Given that the state is already committing itself to billions in spending in future years to repay the robbery of local government funds with no identifiable source of repayment, it will be even more difficult to restore the other program cuts.<\/p>\n This is something you would think Democrats would be keeping in mind as they vote for all these cuts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in May one of the main reasons Calitics, the Courage Campaign, and numerous other progressive organizations mobilized to defeat Proposition 1A was to prevent the massive cuts that had already been made from being locked into place, as they would have had the spending cap of Prop 1A become part of the state constitution. As was reported at the time, Prop 1A would have created a budget deficit of nearly $20 billion by 2013, mandating long-term program reductions. Stopping that from happening was one of the key victories in the May 19 battle.<\/p>\n And yet those long-term cuts may well happen anyway. The billions in cuts being made right now in Sacramento are unlikely to ever be restored. The news that Republicans don’t want to repay the education funds<\/a> is just the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n