Gov. Schwarzenegger’s budget is out today, and it amounts to more spending with again failing to resolve our state’s structural deficit. It’s great that we have $5 billion more to play with, but imagine how we could fix things if for once we could leverage that money with a steady stream of increased revenues from making our tax system more fair.
We haven’t delved into the proposal very completely yet, and we will, but right now it looks like more surface-level spending (a marketing campaign to try to enroll more kids into Healthy Families is nice, but it won’t do much for the other half of uninsured kids who aren’t eligible) with a lot of grandiose rhetoric. The best news I’ve seen so far is equalization of funding for community colleges, which will help many of those that were very near to total collapse due to lack of funding, and the forced efforts to reform California’s youth prisons.
I feel like a broken record at this point, but I will say it again: we need to have a conversation about what services we want in this state and what we’re willing to do to pay for them. Anything else falls short of what we deserve as a state.