With the belated victory of Kamala Harris as Attorney General, the full results of the 2010 election are in for California. There many things that progressives can be proud of - a sweep of statewide offices, picking up another Assembly seat, defeating prop 23 and passing prop 25. On the other hand, there are also some major disappointments - the defeat of prop 19 (marijuana legalization), the defeat of prop 21 (a VLF to fund the state parks), the defeat of prop 24 (rolling back corporate tax breaks), and the passage of prop 26 (2/3rds requirement for fees). Prop 26 especially complicates what this victory means for California.
Indeed, our situation is a lot like the national picture after the 2008 elections - we have an executive who straddles the line between the left and right wings of the Democratic Party, a big legislative majority, but not the ability to break the fiscal deadlock and really be able to govern our state.
In part 1 of a New Deal for California, I discussed why any effort to rebuild the state must begin with a frontal assault on high unemployment as the only reliable means of achieving budget stability - as opposed to self-defeating quests for balance via austerity. In part 2, I studied how the quest for a more perfect democracy is inextricably linked to a renewal of democratic control over the state's own revenues.
Today, I want to discuss two areas of policy that are among the largest spending categories in the California state budget, but which also represent two faces of the state, and two approaches to developing its youth, and two sets of values - namely, education and prisons.
Arnold's recent proposal to put a floor under higher education at 10% of the state budget and a ceiling over prisons at 7% of the state budget is only the most recent example of a long trend of discussing the two in the same breath. As I discussed in the linked article, Schwarzenegger's approach is fundamentally flawed, a mirage of egalitarianism masking a reality of utter callousness. A moral society cannot pay for the future of its most talented youth through the deliberate immiseration of its least advantaged.
However, a New Deal for California will have to grapple with the reality that California will either educate or incarcerate its young, and that the power to choose lies with us.
In part 1 of “A New Deal for California,” I argued that Democrats needed to put forward a stronger message about what we wanted to do, a larger vision of what Democratic government would mean for the state, beyond the immediate issue of dealing with our structural inability to pass a budget. Both for practical and political reasons, that vision should include the aggressive pursuit of full employment for all Californians.
That’s a good start, but I don’t think a New Deal can stop there, or rest on a fragmented policy-by-policy case for Democratic rule. Rather, I agree with George Lakoff that we should frame our message around the idea that California is experiencing a crisis of democracy. However, I would push further than Lakoff to argue that democracy isn’t just about majority rule – democracy means both a government that does what the people want, and a government that has the ability to do what the people want. California’s problem right now is that we don’t have either.
In the wake of the passage of the Affordable Choices Act into law, there are a lot of questions about how we go on from here. Obviously, one line of activism focuses on ways to improve the health care reform act. To some progressives so morally outraged at the defeat of the public option that they’ve given up on the Congress as hopelessly wedded to corporate interests, obviously, this isn’t so appealing.
However, if the progressive movement can be clever and strategic for a second, and is willing to work from within rather than to cry defeat, we can actually work on the state level to move the goalposts of the health care debate in the direction of single-payer before we even get to the next round of national legislation.
The current state of California politics can be summed up in a simple comparison: in the Republican gubernatorial primaries, we see one candidate promising that their first action upon becoming governor is to put 40,000 people out of work and the other complaining that this isn’t enough; in the Democratic convention, we see a party divided over whether to fight for majority rule for budgets or for budgets and taxes.
As a state, California seems caught between the scissors of an increasing need for public services to provide a basic level of social protection for the sick, the elderly and the poor and to restore our high-road, high-wage economy based on superior public education and green technology, and a paralyzed, undemocratic, and irrational political structure that is unwilling and unable to take the necessary actions to meet those needs.
We know that the strategies proposed by the GOP’s gubernatorial candidates won’t work because they are essentially a retreat of the last seven years of failed policies – Schwarzeneggerism without a human face.
Yet Democrats lack a forceful message about what we want to do beyond the immediate issue of the budget.
(Note: finding precise figures and statistics about Blue Gold is not particularly easy. If my numbers here are off, I will gladly revise the piece)
My previous post about the U.C’s policy towards post-docs and other researchers whetted my interest in the travails of the public university, especially as it deals with the universal budgetary crisis faced by higher education during the recession and the underlying process of privatization faced by many public institutions.
The result is a new mini-series of posts about how to rebuild the public university going forward. And a good place to begin will be to make an important distinction about what isn’t a viable strategy for the renewal of the public university – the much-ballyhooed Blue Gold Opportunity Program that U.C President Marc Yudof has made his calling card.
While I have never been intellectually attracted to centrism, and while I've made my distaste for High Broderite bipartisanship-for-the-sake-of-bipartisanship very clear, I haven't yet addressed one major element of what I call "process politics" that I think is pernicious - the cult of "reasonableness."
The idea of "reasonableness" as it plays in politics is that the party of government (not necessarily the party "in" government, but the party that believes in government) has to behave in a reasonable manner, passing budgets on time, playing by the procedural rules, and make compromises to make things happen, even if it means making compromises before legislation is even introduced, so as to seem "reasonable."
My problem with "reasonableness" stems from the fact that it stands in direct opposition to the way that politics actually works.
In part 1 of this series, I discussed the possibility of creating state economic recovery bonds that the Federal government could buy to lend its ability to deficit-spend in recessions to the state governments to counter-act their natural pro-cyclical tendencies. In part 2, I expanded on how we could adapt state governments to Keynesian economic policies by passing anti-recession budget reform initiatives allowing limited deficits during times of economic recession, establishing state banks to provide borrowing capacity for state governments, and establishing state job insurance programs.
So what remains to be done for Keynesian economic policy to be brought to the benefit of state government?
In part 1 of this series, I described how a Job Insurance system could work if it was organized nationally by the Federal government. However, as I suggested in 50 State Keynesianism, Part 2, it is also possible to run job insurance systems on a statewide basis if the Federal government balks at establishing a job insurance system.
Given the severity of the unemployment situation, and the likelihood that even should economic recovery begin in the second quarter and continue unabated that we will have persistent high unemployment, I believe that action on job insurance is necessary regardless of whether the Federal government can act.
This is a more thorough examination of the job insurance concept, done on a national level, but you can easily scale it to California or any other state.
Introduction:
In my previous posts about unemployment insurance reform and 50-state Keynesianism, I made brief reference to something called “job insurance.” Several people requested a fuller explanation, which is only fair considering that I had rather tacked on the idea without fully developing what I meant.
So here is a blueprint for how job insurance is supposed to work, as a major solution to the problem of declining job growth and increasing economic insecurity. To start with, let me explain what job insurance is not – it is not the temporary “transition trade assistance” (inadequate and ill-conceived at the best of times) referred to by most workers as “burial insurance.” It’s not the “wage insurance” that semi-penitent neoliberals have dreamed up to compensate for the fact that the new jobs being created by their post-industrial economic order pay less than the blue collar factory jobs of the past.
What job insurance is, in reality, is the missing link in our Social Security system.
Note: This is a cross-post from my group blog, The Realignment Project, and part 2 in a series about how to bring Keynesian economic policy to the state level.
Introduction:
In this post, I'm returning to a theme I initially explored in June, back when California was grappling with its budget crisis.
Now, after nearly two months of additional struggle, we finally passed a bill that cut $26 billion and raised no new revenue, and now we learn that the governor has possibly illegally cut a further $500 million, taking the axe to children's welfare ($80 million), health care ($400 million), Cal Grants (cut in half), HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment ($52 million), and domestic violence shelters (cut by 80%). In addition to the moral insanity of attacking the most vulnerable of our citizens at a time when they are most in need of support one must add the economic insanity of believing that you can reduce government spending by $31 billion in the course of a single year (including both the February and July cuts) and not effect the state's economic recovery.
Lest this be seen as merely a California problem, a recent report by the National Governors Association notes that the collective budget shortfalls of the fifty states comes to a collective $200 billion shortfall. Given that the total Federal economic stimulus for this year only comes to about $400 billion, we are forced to recognize that our system of state government budgeting and finance is creating a massive economic undertow, weakening the impact of Keynesian stimulus by cutting spending and raising taxes (although they've been doing a lot more of the former than the latter).
Note: this a cross-post from my group blog, the Realignment Project.
"Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, — the balance-wheel of the social machinery. I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make men disdain and abhor the oppression of their fellow-men. This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor."
- Horace Mann, 12th Annual Report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education (1848)
In my previous post about education, I mentioned that the education reform debate has largely skirted the problem of affordability of higher education, preferring to direct their attention more towards college preparation and the K-12 system. As I said at the time, one of the things that unsettles me about the "Educational Equality Project" type of education "reformer" is the extreme economistic trend of their thought - education is about getting jobs and making the workforce more production, hence the extreme emphasis on reading, writing, math, and science, as opposed to anything about art and music, or history. I may be overly broad here in my description, and if I am, I apologize, but it's to a point. The purpose of public education is not to meet the needs of the labor market - it is to meet the needs of democracy.
Note: this is a cross-post from my group-blog, The Realignment Project. Check it out, and if you see something you like, pass it on!
In thinking through my recent post about the California budget mess, and in following the politics of what is now the second full round of budget negotiations this year, one of the frustrating elements of budget politics (at least for progressives) is the lack of connection in the minds of the electorate between taxes (which they generally dislike or can be persuaded to vote against, although as progressives have pointed out, this is not always true) and spending (which they generally like, in pretty much all cases). Even though it’s impossible to increase spending on public priorities, cut taxes, balance the budget, and decrease borrowing at the same time, voters apparently would like to do just that.
The problem for progressives, though, is that this makes it very difficult to raise taxes, even when it’s going towards public policies that are really popular. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see the California state legislature ’s Budget Conference Committee increase the VLF (Vehicle License Fee) to save the state’s parks from being shuttered. Not only was this good in and of itself – parks are a public good that people should be able to enjoy, closing the parks loses a lot more in tourist revenue than it saves n parks dept salaries and maintenance costs – but it was also a rare case of a tax increase that’s explicitly targeted to a public policy. Henceforth, the debate over increasing the VLF, which was one of the factors that brought down Gray Davis and brought in Arnold Schwarzenegger, is no longer just a debate over whether taxes should be higher or lower, as the Republicans would prefer. Now it’s a question of which is better, $15 less on your VLF or state parks – and that’s a debate we can win.
