No gold in state
May 21st 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO
From
The Economist print edition
Voters reject a ballot they could not comprehend
Hair-raising stuff
point during his desperate campaign for six ballot measures meant to reduce California’s gaping budget deficit, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, pleaded with voters not to make California “the poster child for dysfunction”. But on May 19th they did exactly that.
Confused and bored by the wonky and tangled wording on the ballot, most voters ignored the election entirely. Those who did turn out rejected all measures except one that freezes legislators’ pay during budget-deficit years—a ritualised form of venting general anger. Mr Schwarzenegger, already unpopular before this crisis, may well now be remembered as a failure. On election day, he fled the state for the more flattering photo opportunity of joining Barack Obama in the White House Rose Garden to announce tighter national fuel-efficiency standards for cars.
As a result of California’s election, the state now faces a $21.3 billion gap between revenues and spending. Life, which has been no picnic for many in this state since the recession began, is about to get a lot worse. There have already been two rounds of budget cuts since last autumn. A third, savage, round must now follow.
Mr Schwarzenegger has already hinted at the cuts he will propose to the legislature. The easy part is to release prisoners. California’s 33 prisons, with about 168,000 inmates, many of them locked up because of inflexible sentencing laws passed by voters, are scandalously overcrowded. Mr Schwarzenegger is thinking about freeing 38,000 people. Half of them are undocumented immigrants whom he would transfer to federal custody.
But “the real money is where the pain is”, says Jean Ross of the California Budget Project, a research firm in Sacramento. In health care, for instance. Just as Mr Obama is trying to give more people access to medical care, California will be taking it away: by cutting funding for Medi-Cal, the state’s programme for the poor, and changing eligibility rules for another programme so that 225,000 children are likely to lose coverage. And this at a time when many of their parents are losing their jobs and their employer-sponsored insurance.
Other programmes, from help with birth-control and HIV-prevention to counselling against drug abuse and domestic violence, will be made smaller or eliminated altogether. Child-welfare programmes will be cut by 10%. This means fewer investigations into allegations of child abuse and less supervision of foster care, even as more children are likely to be abused in difficult economic times, says Linda Canan at the Napa County Health and Human Services Agency.
Cuts in the education budget will probably shorten the school year by a week, require teachers to be laid off and cause classes to get bigger. The University of California, a network of ten campuses, will face cuts equivalent to 50,000 fewer students and perhaps 5,000 fewer staff.
It doesn’t end there. A plan, previously rejected, to drill for oil off the coast near Santa Barbara will be revived. And a statewide yard sale will be held. State properties, from a big coliseum in Los Angeles to concert halls and fairgrounds, will be auctioned off. Even the San Quentin prison, built during the gold rush and housing the state’s death row, may go. Jeff Denham, a Republican state senator who votes resolutely against any attempt to raise taxes, has for years wanted to move the prison to a cheaper place inland in order to sell its “ocean-front property” in the bay north of San Francisco. He may now get his way.
