A Visit to California’s Budget

I visited California’s state budget over Memorial Day weekend. Okay, technically speaking I didn’t visit the budget itself; I visited some of what it pays for.

Specifically, I went for a hike inPortola Redwoods State Park, a lovely and little-known bit of nature nestled in the mountains about halfway between Cupertino and the Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the parks that nearly got closed in the state budget crisis a couple years ago.

Like most state parks, it’s not spectacular in the way, say, Yosemite is. It’s just a nice place to get away from city madness and see trees, creeks, squirrels and waterfalls. Clearly a lot of families – mostly families of color on the day I was there – felt the same way.

I’m glad Portola Redwoods got saved. I’m not glad that hundreds of millions of dollars inservices that make life a little more bearable for the elderly, disabled and poor still haven’t been restored. And I’m ticked off (feel free to mentally insert stronger language here) that these choices are even necessary.

They aren’t necessary, actually. Though the worst of our budget crisis is mercifully past, California needs more revenue coming in each year. That idea has been demonized by political factions bent on trashing government, but government is simply the things that we as a community decide to do together – things like schools, parks, child care and help for the elderly. Those things are worth paying for.

California can pay for these things if we choose to. There are lots of ways we could do it without putting the burden on working families, ranging from an oil severance tax to reforms to Proposition 13 regarding commercial property taxes. I’ll spare you a detailed discussion of these alternatives for now, but the point is they’re out there and we need to start thinking about them. Otherwise we’ll face an endless spiral of bad choices in a deteriorating state.

By Bruce Mirken via Greelining.org