Across the board 10% decrease is a short-sighted suggestion

With Courage and Commonsense, California Doesn’t Have to Balance the Budget with a Meat-Axe Wielded at Children and the Vulnerable
California Progress Report - Oakland,CA,USA 2-11-08
By Jim Beall, Jr., Member of theCalifornia State Assembly, Feb. 10, 2008

California faces a massive $14.5 million deficit and the Governor’s chief reply is to ask for an across-the-board 10 percent cut for all of the state’s departments, a meat-axe approach that endangers our youngest Californians – foster care kids, students with disabilities, and children receiving CalWorks benefits.

The Governor’s proposal continues an unspoken policy of whittling essential human service programs that have suffered budget cuts year after year only because they serve vulnerable people who have no political leverage in Sacramento.

This craven policy must stop. And it can be stopped, if the Governor and the Legislature have the courage to attack our state’s problems on a comprehensive basis while trimming bureaucracy and eliminating special interest tax breaks. Budget cuts alone don’t solve problems, they merely ignore them.

Under the Governor’s scenario, the poor and disabled who receive assistance will become multiple victims of the proposed cuts because they rely on more than one state program to improve their lives. Nearly $4 dollars out of every $10 in cuts will come from services and programs that help Californians with low incomes.

More than 78,000 children in California were living in foster care in 2006. Families who have taken in these neglected and abused children have seen their child care rates fall under one-eighth the cost of institutional care, the only other option.

For six years, foster care families had not received any raises in their rates until I was able to get a 5 percent increase included in last year’s budget.

Now, the Governor wants to eliminate that increase and take away another 5 percent. In all, the Governor’s proposal would reduce the foster care budget by $141.7 million, not counting another $53.4 million lost in federal funds.

The state’s reduction translates to about $50 a month less per family. All told, the cuts mean a 22 percent loss in purchasing power for a foster care family, according to the County Welfare Directors Association.

But cuts to foster kids don’t stop there. The Governor also wants to lower the clothing allowance for these children as well as slashing funding for the care of children who require special medical needs or supervision.

This will force many foster care families who have habitually dipped into their own pockets to pay for clothing, transportation, and food for their foster kids to reconsider the sacrifices they have made and whether they can afford to continue doing so.

“When you think of the cuts,’’ said Lois Raap, the 2007 National Foster Parent of the Year and a senior attorney with Legal Advocates for Permanent Parenting, “it gives foster care families three choices.

“You either provide less for the child who comes into the home. You can stop caring for the child and hope someone else can afford to do it, or you lower the living standards of your whole family, and, really, we don’t know where to make that kind of cut.’’

Additionally, if any of those foster care kids happen to be among the 680,000 children statewide with disabilities requiring them to enroll in special education classes, they’ll feel the budget axe again.

The Governor’s proposal trims $358 million from special education programs and forces local school districts to find – if they can – a way to backfill to meet federally mandated requirements. For many districts that adopted their budgets for this fiscal year long ago, it will be an impossible task.

The cascade of cuts also target Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT), a comprehensive and preventative health program for people under 21. Foster care children with mental illnesses who have benefited from EPSDT services will see that program trimmed by $53 million.

Also on the agenda for cuts are 150,000 children who will face new limitations on their CalWorks benefits. Families not meeting program rules for 6 months to a year will see their grants cut by 50 percent. Children whose parents have reached their 60-month limit of CalWorks benefits will also have their assistance reduced. These sanctions unfairly penalize the child for their parent’s actions.

Sacramento needs to re-order its priorities. Short-term solutions won’t solve long-term problems. We have to take a holistic view of state government.

During the past four years, spending for prisons has climbed 74 percent compared with less than 9 percent for human services. About 173,000 people are in prison yet millions of Californians use and depend on our human service programs.

The majority of the inmates were incarcerated on drug- or alcohol-related crimes. Yet, the administration refuses to deal with the state’s growing substance abuse and alcohol problems in a comprehensive way at its earliest stages. In fact, the Governor’s cuts signal a troubling shift in the opposite direction.

His budget would slash $13.3 million in funding for Proposition 36 funding, an initiative passed by 61 percent of the voters six years ago. The proposition, known as the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, lets non-violent offenders choose substance abuse treatment instead of jail, a chance to get clean and stay clean.

The across-the-board cuts would whack $3.1 million in funding from drug courts where offenders are directed into supervised treatment programs, enabling defendants to continue working and caring for their children, instead of being put behind bars. These courts are designed to not only rehabilitate lives wrecked by drugs but also to stop the repeat offender, a strategy that saves taxpayers millions in prison and law enforcement costs.

The Governor’s continued failure to deal with the huge numbers of people being incarcerated for drugs in a comprehensive way has contributed to our spending problems.

While the Governor recommends cuts, he pays scant attention to raising revenue, a point cited by the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. I agree with the LAO. We have to look at ways to legitimately raise revenue, including examining the $17 billion in antiquated tax giveaways to special interests.

Let’s look at a few of these tax dodges:

• The state loses $50 million a year because the rich do not have to pay sales tax when they buy a luxury yacht.

• Every oil-producing state levies an oil severance tax on petroleum companies pumping oil out of their ground except California -- a policy that costs us at least $400 million annually in lost revenue.

• Non-residential property owners escape $4 billion or more in taxes because their properties are not re-assessed as often as residential properties.

If the Governor demands our children, the disabled, and the poor to make sacrifices, then he ought to make the same demand on those who profit from loopholes in the tax system.

We cannot continue to balance the budget on the backs of our poorest and most fragile people. It is wrong; it is reprehensible.

But if the Governor and the Legislature work in unison and attack the root causes of the deficit, we can produce lasting solutions to ensure no other generation of California children will be put at risk again.

Assemblymember Jim Beall, Jr. (D-San Jose) is currently serving his first term in the California State Assembly. He represents the 24th Assembly District, which includes the cities of Campbell, Saratoga, and parts of Santa Clara, San Jose and Los Gatos. He is the Chair of the Assembly Human Services Committee and is dedicated to improving conditions for children, youth, families, and seniors.