Open Season On the Poor: Really?
Published in: California Progress Report, September 9, 2010
http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/?q=node/8141
By Michael Herald
Western Center on Law and Poverty
In budget impasses of the past, there was often a contingent of liberal members and advocacy groups who would suggest that the way to kill a bad budget was to put it up for a vote. The reasoning was that conservatives would never actually cast votes to do the awful things being proposed. Anyone dumb enough to vote to eliminate services for the elderly or cut child care would pay for it at the ballot box.
Well last week they actually did take up the Governor’s budget in the Legislature, complete with all its’ warts, and darned if almost every Republican felt just fine about eliminating CalWORKs, eviscerating IHSS, and firing 400,000 working Californians. It was truly astonishing. If budgets are about values, the Republicans showed they value corporations over people. And it’s not really that close.
Assembly minority leader Martin Garrick is the latest Republican member piling on the poor. He, of course, has some fine mentors in Governor Schwarzenegger, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and even the forgotten Steve Poizner. All three have taken turns bashing the poor in the media, never letting the facts get in the way of a great strategy for winning over voters.
So there was Mr. Garrick last week bravely repeating his YouTube video mocking points about waste, fraud and abuse in IHSS, CalWORKs and Medi-Cal. He even claimed that CalWORKs had to be shut down because families were using their CalWORKs EBT cards at Indian casinos. In Mr. Garrick’s world the fact that 99.94% of all withdrawls were not taken at casinos is irrelevant if it convinces people that the big lie about waste, fraud and abuse is true. Hey what’s a little fib if it allows you to vote to kick the stool out from under 1 million poor kids and protect big corporate tax breaks at the same time? That’s a win-win.
Of course, not to be out done (by anyone), Ms. Whitman has released her own hit piece on the CalWORKs EBT issue. Again she sites the news reports as evidence that there is waste, fraud and abuse that only she can prevent. (It is always so cute to see a billionaire tell poor people they are getting too much of something.) But perhaps she missed the San Francisco Chronicle story that showed the Administration had been asleep at the wheel for five years after counties told them of the problem. No worries, we’ll just blame it on waste, fraud and abuse.
Ms. Whitman continues to argue that California helps too many poor families and that we must reduce our program. She frequently cites New York as a state we should emulate. Now, it is true that California serves five times as many poor families as New York. Wonder if Ms. Whitman knows that New York taxpayers pay $15 a month in taxes for their welfare program compared to $13 in California? Is she aware that New York spends $6,620 on each case while California spends $4,733 per case? So what is that Ms. Whitman wants to emulate, the higher taxes or the inefficient government? Maybe it’s both.
Of course what really is bothering the minority party members is the spending on CalWORKs. The sad truth is the program has made the critical error of spending less than it did before. That’s right, less. California spends $1.6 billion less from the state treasury on CalWORKs today than it did 16 years ago. And that just won’t do for the Republicans because it destroys their narrative that government spending is out of control. They simply can’t have the word get out that a highly effective program being administered by the state and local governments saves money while also helping California’s poor to become self-sufficient. Heavens’ to Betsy what will the people think then?