Causecast

by MAEGAN CARBERRY, Contributing Writer

Usually I’m proud to be a native of the Golden State, but since California became a gay-hating, bankrupt bastion of inefficiency I’m finding it difficult to stick up for my people. What in the world is happening on the left coast?

The most recent embarrassment was yesterday’s news that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated millions of dollars of funding to programs that support California’s poor children.

According to The Associated Press and The Sacramento Bee, the Governator’s vetoes included the loss of: $80 million from child welfare programs; $61 million from county funding to administer Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid; $52 million from AIDS prevention and treatment; $50 million from Healthy Families, the low-cost health insurance program for poor children; and $6.2 million more from state parks.

You know a situation is dire when a state can’t protect its children, and as the San Francisco chronicle notes in today’s editorial on the budget, “all the easy cuts were performed billions of dollars ago.” But if we can’t even keep our CA kids healthy to receive their second-rate education at one of our nearly-dead-last-in-the-nation public schools, it does not bode well for the future. How will we compete and lead?

Schwarzenegger is willing to cede the struggles to “assistance from philanthropic organizations and other sources,” as the Chronicle reports. Let’s hope the state’s compassionate rich people and cause celebs are aware that this is their job and are prepared to step up their efforts.

It is kind of like a scene from a bad, well, non-action movie, an analogy the LA Times played well in a Monday editorial addressing the broader implications of this budgetary hack job.

“A state budget cycle, like a ‘Terminator’ movie, is normally best understood in one of two ways: Either as a stand-alone feature with a constant cast of characters and a beginning, a middle and an end; or as an episode in a longer story arc whose true meaning the audience grasps only after sitting through the whole series and then talking it over with friends and strangers. But the California budget cycle that just ended … no, that’s not right … the budget cycle that appears to have reached a crescendo of sorts over the last week does not provide the satisfaction of an end, and no one can seem to remember the beginning. It’s all middle, with no break between the episodes, and the dialogue is merely a continuing loop. Nor does it seem to have a place in a longer, comprehensible narrative. Yet Californians are stuck in this movie, and we’ll remain here until we think, write and finally act our way out of it.”

From the outside, it does look pretty bad. I moved to New York in January, and I find myself constantly defending the values and priorities of California life. The Times hit the criticism on the head:

“Wags and pundits from Nevada to New York, with the schadenfreude we’ve come to expect when California weathers tough times, scold the state for its mythical hedonistic lifestyle and its presumed something-for-nothing, self-absorbed, live-for-today culture. This narrative instructs that the California dream is over, that we’re just like everyone else, and that we must do penance for daring to mend or strengthen our social safety net, or for having adopted Proposition 13, or perhaps for some shadowy character flaw or existential sin.”

The editorial goes on to cite several reasons why this won’t happen, which did assuage some of my more immediate fears. However, I remain deeply concerned about the situation.

It’s one more round of budget cuts in a tense-but-routine matter of state operations, but the children at stake here represent a whole generation of ability and leadership that we are jeopardizing in a manner that will virtually guarantee inequity. The great promise of California is its progressive values and the limitless, sunny future we offer dreamers. We can’t leave our kiddos with this nightmare.

Photo courtesy of the Office of the Governor, California