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.
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.
Yeah, I know the plural is crises, but crisii just sounded better. Anyway, looking back over the last few months, it is hard to see anything other than the fits and starts in response to one crisis or another. And the media seems to pick up these issues and drop them just as quickly. It's not hard to see why we simply drift from one issue to another without the regular legislative process that is really quite valuable.
We had the budget crisis, and then another budget crisis, and then all eyes were moved on over to the prison crisis. And now it seems that the prison crisis is over, because all I'm seeing is the urgency to pass water legislation.
"We do have a 5 p.m. deadline for signing a conference report. We have until Friday midnight (the deadline for the legislative recess) to potentially complete the whole package," Steinberg said at a Labor Day hearing in the Capitol.
Some Republicans on the committee were concerned that majority Democrats intended to ram through a water package by crafting it piecemeal, rather than as a comprehensive policy-finance plan requiring bipartisan support.
"We are mindful of the logistics," Steinberg told Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Fresno, the ranking GOP water expert in the Senate, who wondered whether a final water package would be truly bipartisan. (Capitol Weekly 9/8/09)
First, the parallels to the national health care fight are frankly rather annoying. Why do we need a bipartisan bill? Democrats have large majorities in both houses, and frankly, the California electorate has given them a mandate. If we are going to be forced to bring along the Republicans, why not the "Utopian Manifesto" party (PDF)). Yes, I understand that the Republicans actually have some votes in the Legislature, but we can't impose these supermajority requirements where we don't have them. It's a pain enough when we are forced to deal with them, why add additional ones?
If the Republicans don't like it, well, they should try to win enough elections to be the majority in one house or another so they can get a real say. Otherwise, I suppose they'll just go back to the refuge of scoundrels in the California Constitution: the super majority requirements.
But beyond that, why is this all being done in the last week? Is this really the best way to produce quality legislation? At some point are we going to actually engage the public in these discussions rather than rushing to get something, anything, to the Governor's desk by the deadline?
I understand the need for this legislation, but this is a really big deal. This will impact how many people can live in the state, whether there will be viable agriculture in the state, and how we deal with climate change. Big decisions are best handled through a regular process not some herky jerky hurry up and wait mess. It just breeds some other crisis somewhere down the line when it turns out we overlooked some significant policy detail.
Let's try solving some problems the old-fashioned way some time, think how retro that would be.
Note: this is a cross-post from my group blog, The Realignment Project. As California grapples with the Herculean task of trying to solve its budget crisis, there’s a sense of complete impasse on what to do – Republicans won’t vote for tax increases, there isn’t enough space in the budget to cut without eliminating some fo the basic functions of government, the governor won’t sign off on a majority budget. There’s been suggestions that the state could get some sort of financial backing from the Federal government, either in the form of a stimulative infusion to fill up the $24 billion gap, or in some form of a guarantee of California’s bonds so that the state can borrow money for routine cash needs without having to pay exorbitant interest rates, and hopefully so that the state can re-start its stalled public works projects (including the High Speed Rail line that was voted in back in 2008). Politicians, pundits, and the public from other states have reacted negatively to this trial balloon, arguing that California is responsible for its own fiscal crisis and that it would be wrong to help one state and not the other. In essence, the reaction is “this isn’t our problem, we shouldn’t have to pay to fix it.”
However, I’m going to argue that it actually is all of our problems, that we are all in the same boat, and that there’s a way to fix it.
(Welcome Assemblyman Ted Lieu to Calitics! And yes, enough is enough. - promoted by David Dayen)
"Enough is Enough"
Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street famously said, "Greed is good . . . Greed is right, greed works." Real life Wall Street, however, reminds us that excessive and unregulated greed wrecked havoc in the mortgage industry and took down our economy. The core cause of the chaos in our financial sector was the unregulated selling of unsuitable and risky subprime home loans that resulted in a massive wave of foreclosures.
During the mortgage boom, industry players became addicted to the drug of high-yield, adjustable rate subprime mortgages that they foisted on borrowers. Raking in massive quarterly and annual bonuses, corporate executives didn't care if borrowers could repay the mortgages a few years later. It was greed on speed, the future be damned, and now all of us are suffering the consequences.
David mentioned this below, but it deserves deeper elaboration. Don Perata's agreement on a spending cap is one of the worst possible outcomes of the budget crisis. A spending cap has been a core demand of the Grover Norquist far right. In Colorado, where a spending cap had been in place for several years, it nearly destroyed state government and had to be suspended.
If Democrats agree to this, they will be agreeing to the destruction of the state of California, finishing the job Prop 13 started 30 years ago. I cannot stress strongly enough how bad an idea this is.
It's also unpopular with voters. Arnold's spending cap, Prop 76, went down in flames in 2005 with 62% of voters rejecting it.
But what is the spending cap about? And why is is such a horrible idea? An excellent LA Times article from 2005 explains how spending caps are at the core of the right-wing plan to drown government in a bathtub:
Hard-line fiscal conservatives say they hope to reinvigorate the types of populist uprising that led to the approval by California voters of landmark protections against property tax increases through Proposition 13 in 1978 and the passage of term limits on politicians here and in several other states....
The proposals put strict limits on how much state budgets can increase each year. Anti-tax activists see such controls as a means to scale back spending on education, healthcare and social-service programs that even the staunchest free-market Republicans have been reluctant to cut.
Schwarzenegger and his advisors, already battling charges that their spending cap is part of a conservative agenda the governor is trying to force on Californians, have resisted forming alliances with the national groups. But the groups have eagerly embraced the governor's crusade.
"We think California is very important," Armey said. "It is a trend-setting state. Getting it done in California will set a very good example for all these other states."
The article also mentioned the impact on Colorado, which enacted a spending cap in 1990. By the 2000s the cap was gutting government, as intended. The problem is that the spending cap readjusts to a lower level during a recession - but cannot be easily increased once the recession ends, meaning the spending that was cut during the lean times can't be restored.
It is Grover Norquist's way of drowning government in a bathtub. Even though Prop 13 has had a destructive impact here in California, leading to a structural revenue shortfall, we have been able to muddle through and protect education, transit, and health care from total collapse. Norquist's spending cap would deal the final blow to those services.
It would not solve our budget problems - as Colorado found it would make them much worse. In November 2005 Colorado approved a 5-year suspension of the cap, as even Republican governor Bill Owens realized the state couldn't survive with the spending cap in place.
For Democrats to consider accepting a spending cap is unconscionable. If Democratic leaders agree to a cap as part of a budget deal they deserve to be recalled from office. The current budget crisis is severe, yes. And we need a solution. But a spending cap will produce worse budget crises in future years while leaving California public services in ruins.
Dems should take comfort from the 2005 special election results. Californians do not want a spending cap. Don Perata is totally and completely wrong to agree to one. Let's hope other Democratic leaders, especially those in the Assembly, refuse to give away the state to the Norquist crowd.
Last month I took the LA Times to task for framing the current budget deficit as a spending problem, and wondered why nobody at the paper seemed interested in focusing on the fact that what California has had for decades is a structural, deliberate revenue shortage.
It's pretty simple, though. Either we spend less money or we raise revenue, or both.
All things considered, our friends in Sacramento aren't going to suddenly discover the value of frugality -- unless packed schoolrooms, broken bridges and crumbling levees are your idea of satisfactory quality of life.
So that means we need to get our hands on some extra cash. And like it or not, that means taxes. That's a bad word, I know. But it's how things work in the real world.
Proposition 13 is as good a place as any to start if we want to raise some serious coin and we want to do it soon.
"It's terrible economics," said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Assn. "We have the heaviest tax on new investment and no tax on windfall."
What he means is that Proposition 13 allows the state to reach deep into the pockets of people and businesses that buy property at market value. But it does precious little to get a piece of the action from those with long-held properties that have soared in value over the years.
