REVERSE MIGRATION
A good friend is moving from California back to Texas this weekend. After years of working at a miserable job that we both hate, she has had enough. She and her husband are going back to Houston. Right-wingers always make it sound so simple. If you don't like your job, whatever, just quit. The problem is you need to find some income somewhere. The jobs aren't here now. Fresno has a miserable economy even in good national economic times. Thanks to Bush at the national level and a series of right-wing policies in this state, the economy lies in shambles. The Golden State has turned into lead.
This commentary by Marc Cooper is at www.thenation.com:
Aggravating matters, Governor Schwarzenegger took an intractable "no new taxes" position and then went a step further, saying the crisis was an opportunity to make "structural reforms." Translation: the governor demanded radical shrinkage of the public sector, including virtual abolition of CalWorks, the state welfare program, and a rollback of state employee pensions. He even threatened the "nuclear option": suspension of Prop 98, which requires that 40 percent of state revenues be channeled into schools. Four years ago, when Schwarzenegger attempted to impose a similar far-reaching conservative agenda through a set of referendums, he was mightily slapped down by voters and forced to apologize. Now, it seemed, he was trying to hold the state hostage to these draconian changes as the price of a budget deal. "He just got it in his head that his time is up and his legacy must be long-term reform," said Bebitch Jeffe. "So he's using the short-term budget as leverage. Either he doesn't understand, or he's taking a mammoth risk."
"Some of the cuts proposed by the governor are unimaginable," said Barbara O'Connor, political analyst at Cal State, Sacramento, a few days before the budget deal was reached. "In the end," she predicted, "it will be declared a win-win. No one will love it. Everyone will accept it."
Maybe. Because in the end, while Schwarzenegger was proposing Armageddon, the Democrats settled for mere catastrophe. When the budget details were unveiled, it was like viewing the emaciated corpse of a once great state. There are no new taxes. But hammer blows hit the poor, the elderly, the infirm and students and will keep them staggering for years. The deal called for almost $8 billion to be taken from education; more than $1 billion from state worker pay; an equal amount from Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program; $375 million from CalWorks; $226 million from home healthcare, in which patients and caregivers will now have to be fingerprinted; $124 million from Healthy Families health insurance, which means thousands of children will be wait-listed for coverage; and more than $4 billion confiscated from local governments, which will create a ripple effect of collateral damage. The proposed taxes on oil extraction, tobacco sales and vehicle registration were penciled out; the budget was balanced only through a set of accounting gimmicks, which merely kicked the crisis down the road a few months. The only winners in this deal were felons, who won a $1.2 billion cut in prison funding, which would reduce the prison population by some 27,000.
