Maybe I'll Win and Maybe I'll Lose
and Maybe I'm In For Cryin' the Blues

by Sheila Kuehl
August 8, 2011

This is the ninth and final essay in a series setting out the many twists and turns in the road toward passage of California's 2011-12 budget.  This essay identifies a few of the winners and some of the many losers.

Nevertheless I'm In Love With You, California

Perhaps a number of old-timers recognize the lyrics in the title of this piece.  It's a song about the ways in which a person in love rolls the dice, so to speak, but can't help staying in the relationship.  Sound familiar?

No, I don't mean personally, that would be snooping.  I mean that most of the thirty-eight million of us living and working or studying in California want to be here, mostly want to stay here, and have no idea how to stop the downward spiral in education and services caused by bad fiscal policies, tax cuts but no tax restorations, the decimation of working families as jobs were off-shored for greater and greater profits and a constant rotation of inexperienced legislators. 

The 2011-12 budget signed just a month ago delivered a series of gut punches to populations who were already on the ropes.  Just like a bad day in the stock market, there were many more losers than winners.

...but All Are Losers

Neville Chamberlain once wrote, "In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers."

The biggest losers in California's new budget were undoubtedly the hostages: the millions who rely on some sort of social service or were hoping to attend one of California's once-praised public colleges.  In March, six billion dollars were cut from health and human services, CalWORKS grants to the working poor were further reduced (a family of four now receives $638 a month), childcare programs were decimated, and UC and CSU lost over a billion dollars, combined.  Still to come were the cuts imposed in the 2011-12 budget.

For 2011-2012, signed in June, it was more of the same.  The courts were cut so deeply they began discussing the closure of courtrooms.  UC and CSU got another trim, meaning, of course, the real losers are the young people and their families who, with the constant fee increases, can no longer hope to improve their lives with a college degree.  The state parks budget was trimmed so mercilessly that 70 parks were put on the closure list. The losers here: families who visited, picnicked, walked, learned and often breathed a cleaner air, at an affordable rate.

Child care was trimmed again, another hit to working families, as well as to many of the 200,000 Californians now working in early childcare and education. This cut, alone, is a prime example of how an all-cuts budget deepens the jobs crisis in California.  So, list California's growing unemployed as another group of losers in the state budget.

It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To

The political parties were also losers, though not in the life and death, immediate-impact sort of way.  The Republicans were so intractable, they lost every opportunity to gain any of their agenda, and were reduced, as always, to simply criticizing what others had done.  How did this happen?  In the run-up to the budget, a few Republican Senators seemed to be honestly carrying on discussions with the Governor about what they might demand in exchange for allowing voters to decide if they wanted to extend the temporary vehicle and sales tax increases of 2009.  The rest of the Republicans, shored up by a visit from Uber Enforcer, Karl Rove, simply refused, resulting in no gains for the Republicans at all in their agenda to eradicate environmental regulations or lower taxes for the rich.  Of course, if you assume their agenda is to make the poor poorer (as Teddy Kennedy once said of Ronald Reagan, "He must love the poor, he made so many of them,") then they are wildly succeeding.

The Democrats made major cuts in March and then more cuts in June, while loudly bemoaning the fact that they were unable to do anything else under California's current requirement of a 2/3 vote to raise a tax.  They repeated their reluctance to keep punching those who had already lost so much in the last three budgets, and then seemed forced to do it again, anyway.  The Democrats also looked a bit foolish when, after somehow assuming that the Governor would sign the June 15th budget even though it contained some inventive revenue provisions, Brown became the first Governor in the history of the state to veto a budget.  All the Democrats rallied, of course, and finished a new budget in time, but the cuts are bloody, the revenue assumptions are rosy, and the possible triggers could further devastate K-12.

Much Better To Be With The Winners

Sam Donaldson once wryly observed, "It's much better to be with the winners than with the losers."  And, as the Cowardly Lion said, "Ain't it the truth.  Ain't it the truth."  There were really only a few winners in this year's budget.  The first group could loosely be called "people with money".

If you had an income that put you in the top one or two percent of earners in California, you paid a lower percentage of your income in taxes than did your secretary, your office workers, your domestic help and your kids.  The failure to spread the tax burden more fairly, coupled with the extended federal tax break, made you a big winner.

If you were extracting oil out of California wells and selling it at the largest profits in the history of the oil industry, you paid no extraction tax, the way you would have if that same oil were drilled in Texas or Alaska.  You were a big winner.

If you were a bank or a hotel or any other sort of large corporation and you were acquired by or merged with some other large entity, chances are none of your commercial property was reassessed for property tax purposes.   Of course, when you or I, little individuals that we are, buy a home, we immediately begin paying property taxes on the new assessed value, because it's not difficult to identify the fact that ownership has, indeed, changed hands.  Many large corporations, however, make it difficult for assessors to prove that more than 50% of the shareholders are different people.  Often a holding company is formed with the name of the old company specifically to take advantage of Prop 13 and pay at the same, low, 1978 rate.  You are a winner if you don't play by the same rules as the rest of us.

The Losers Who Think They're Winners

If you were earning the average amount for a California family, about $43,000 a year, you are, as of July 1st, paying 1% less on taxable purchases and a fraction of a percent less in vehicle license fees.  Perhaps you spend a quarter of your income on sales, so you're saving about $107.  However, because there are millions of you, the loss of that $107, multiplied, meant bloody cuts to the budget.  Result: you can no longer afford the wildly increased fees at CSU and UC, and the cost of community colleges is just about out of your reach, too.  There are forty kids in your child's classroom where there used to be thirty, or even twenty.  His teacher was laid off and he has a string of substitutes.  Sadly, you may not even make the connection. 

If you are schools, you feel like a winner because you were not immediately shot in the riot.  Everyone did everything they could to protect education, including the tax shift noted in my last essay.  The schools, however, teeter on the edge of a trigger that can be pulled at the end of this calendar year if the revenue assumptions in the budget don't come to pass.  So it could be a temporary reprieve.  Ready the blindfolds.

But, Hey!  Where's Your Usual Optimism?

Well, I am an optimist.  But my definition may be just a bit different than others.  To me, an optimist is a person who knows how terrible the world can be and is, therefore, simply never disappointed.  I keep saying to people, "What did you expect?"

It has never been more important to reject the pronouncements of those who, unbelievable as it may be, actually want to do away with public education, public service and government, itself.  Many regular folks, caught up in the rhetoric, have no idea of how much the government contributes to their lives. 

My favorite example is the man at the tea party rally who shouted "Keep the Government out of my Medicare!".

Goodnight Gracie.