That should have been in the headline of this story: Governor's budget taps cities' funds San Francisco Chronicle 01/09/04. But at least the lede included the information that Schwarzenegger's first budget includes $3 billion in unspecified service cuts.
After ousting Gray Davis less than a year after he had been re-elected governor, Schwarzenegger has been spending his time fundraising to pay off his campaign debts and to fund the endless set of initiatives he wants to sponsor. Thursday he proposed his first budget (for 2004-5), dealing with a $15 billion budget deficit, and it includes $2.8 billion in unspecified service cuts.
He couldn't do it. He could not even propose a balanced budget. He does propose to cut local government funding by $1.3 billion to throw some of the decisions on service cuts and revenue increases onto someone else.
In the 2004-5 budget, he wants to slash health and social services (e.g., drug rehab and AIDS medicine) - what respectable Republican thinks that any of their kind of people might need those? - and relies on fancifully optimistic projections of federal aid and renegotiated tax revenue from Indian casinos. (Apparently raising casino taxes doesn't count as raising taxes, which Schwarzenegger promised not to do.) And he wants to boost fees for university and community college education. (Fees aren't taxes, you see.) Plus he has to basically not spend $2 billion in school funds mandated under a previous statewide initiative, one of those schemes California voters love, designed to put government on auto-pilot because we don't trust The Politicians (you know, the ones we elect).
Let's not forget: Schwarzenegger's first act as governor was to fulfill a promise to the auto dealers' lobby, one of his main contributors, to cut vehicle license fees by an annual $4 billion dollars. And the best he can do to cover it is to suggest unspecified cuts. He doesn't even know how to finance his very first act as governor. Actually, if you add in the $1.3 billion he's dumping on localities to decide what to cut, he couldn't specify how to pay for any of it.
1 comment:
How long do you think it will be before the recall petitions start circulating?
This strikes me as odd: everyone agrees that we live in a high-tech world that requires advanced education and training yet the politicians keep making it harder for ordinary citizens to send their children to college.
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