bg/ish: Governator Slashes Budget, Hope For Working Class
great article over at the Socialist Worker this week detailing exactly how boned we as Californians are thanks to the recent cluster-f*** our State Legislature vaguely disguised as budget meetings.
"Last year, Arnold the Destroyer signed a budget with $7.1 billion in cuts to education, heath care, welfare and other key social programs. This year, it will be $15.1 billion in spending reductions overall--including cuts of $8.6 billion for K-12 public schools, $2 billion for community colleges and 10 percent across the board in the University of California and California State University systems, as well as elimination of cost-of-living increases in welfare programs for poor, elderly and disabled Californians.
Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger is still demanding $1.4 billion in pay cuts from unionized state workers--and threatening massive layoffs if workers don't concede.
Alongside these harsh cuts are equally horrific regressive tax increases, worth a total of $12.8 billion, which will hit the poorest Californians the hardest. State sales taxes will go up by a full percentage point, state income taxes will increase for everyone, vehicle license fees will nearly double, and the dependent care tax credit for parents and families caring for disabled loved ones will be cut by two-thirds.
The fiscal crisis in California is so severe that even these cruel measures won't close the state's $42 billion deficit by themselves. Schwarzenegger is also counting on borrowing $5 billion from a projected increase in California lottery revenues as a result of expanding and "modernizing" the lottery--yet another measure to pick the pockets of working people to pay for the crisis...
One might think that when a Republican governor proposes such a blatant attack against working people, you might hear at least token opposition from local Democrats. But Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg managed to marshal unanimous Democratic support for Schwarzenegger's budget."
look, as long as these political suits and their cronies continue to fleece the working class people of our state and nation, while giving kickbacks to corporate interests, our current economic state is not going to change, it'll only get worse.
what irks me about the California budget situation, is that all it really took was a long impasse, then the governator yelled "Fire!", well, more like "Layoffs!" and then everybody fell into line without really examining what the true needs of this state and it's people are, or reevaluating where we can gain revenue from.
plus i'm not so sure the governor knows he's actually governing real people with real needs or if he's just some political figurehead who approaches each day no differently than if he were on the set of one of his crappy films in Hollywood.
...wait, i'm pretty sure.
Read the complete article here.
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