U.S. can't allow California to fail
The voters have spoken, and now it's the Legislature's duty to do their bidding: Balance the state budget by any means necessary, as long as it does not involve any of the strategies described in those five defeated propositions.
Essentially, fix things without new taxes or transfers from specific, voter-approved funds. What does that leave? Cuts and precious little else -- to the tune of $24 billion.
State government can, must and will slash deep into many services, trimming fat, eliminating redundancies and squeezing every bit of value from what's left. It'll be painful, but in many ways it'll be healthy.
But faced with cuts this daunting, it will also be harmful. These cuts cannot be accomplished simply by cutting legislators' perks or furloughing state employees. These cuts cannot be accomplished by scaling back entitlement programs, a favorite target of big-government critics (and not without some justification).
What's left after the smoke clears won't come close to serving California's needs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has floated a list of proposed cuts that threaten to send the state down a path from which we will be hard-pressed to recover. For decades.
Schwarzenegger suggests axing public education, including community colleges, by a devastating $5.3 billion. He proposes taking down the Cal-Grant program, which enables thousands of low-income students to attend college. He threatens to wipe out the Healthy Families program, leaving 940,000 children without health insurance.
Those are short-sighted plans, because they place California in much more dire financial circumstances than any tax hike ever could. Overburdened schools, especially community colleges, discourage students from pursuing the type of training that will enable them to become self-sufficient, taxpaying citizens. Eliminating Cal-Grants deprives the state of the limitless potential of those with the ambition to rise from difficult circumstances. And shutting down Healthy Families merely redirects the sick to the state's ER's, where costs are high and outcomes less promising.
The federal government needs to consider stepping in -- in much the same way it has decreed that the nation's largest banks are too big to fail. A fiscal implosion in California would cause similar devastation across the U.S. We can't allow it to happen.
