California’s Budget Crisis: The Cost Side is a Crime!
9 Comments Published July 1st, 2009 in National and International Issues.Things that Iran and California have in common.
California is officially bankrupt today. They can’t meet ordinary expenses and public services may become a bit ragged. If you were planning on visiting … don’t. They should nail up signs at the border saying, “Closed for Stupidity”. (Try Zion National Park instead! The Obama administration is giving away free weekends on July 18-19 and August 15-16!)
I documented one of the biggest reasons why an economy bigger than all but eight of the other countries on Earth can’t collect enough money to pay their bills in Getting What You Ask For. Back in 1978, right-wing mob leaders were able to redirect California property tax frustration into a free lunch for rich people. It’s been frustrating to me to read the articles about the California melt-down and see how few people recognize this fundamental linkage.
But that’s just why revenues are down. The cost side is also out of control and we can chalk a big part of that up to the same right-wing tunnel vision troublemakers.
I’ve documented the fact that the US is first in the world in putting our citizens behind bars before.
“There are FAR more people in jail in the U.S. per capita than anywhere. In 2005, there were 767 of us in the clink per 100,000. This is number 1 in the world by a long shot. Here’s a few comparisons with other industrialized nations: Australia – 126, Canada – 107, England/Wales – 148, France – 85. Why is it necessary to house more than nine times as many people behind bars than France?” (We’re Number 1!!)
California is ground zero for this kind of insanity. According to Wikipedia,
“From 1982 to 2000, California’s prison population grew at a rate of 500%. To accommodate this population growth and the war on crime, the state of California built 23 new prisons at a cost of 280 million to 350 million dollars apiece. The state of California constructed 12 prisons between 1852 and 1964.”
Why? Because right-wing lynch-mob leaders have stampeded California voters into insane ideas like the “three-strikes law” that takes control out of the hands of professionals and puts it into an inhuman mathematical formula. They’ve frightened suburban voters enough to sell the idea that they can simply warehouse the people who harvest their lettuce and clean their hotel rooms in vast prison camps and do nothing about why they’re there. Country Club martini drinkers have been convinced that it’s necessary to jail recreational marijuana users (while simultaneously creating wealthy marijuana sellers and even more crime) in blind denial of the evidence that it’s just not working.
Back in the 70’s, California was doing things right. The prison system used a concept called “indeterminate sentencing.” Judges could give defendants sentences controlled by parole boards that would decide when someone could be released.
But then the “eye-for-an-eye” crowd took over … basically the same people who cut off your hands for crimes against Islam in Iran … and in 1980, the California legislature “enacted legislation that said the purpose of incarceration was punishment alone, formally writing rehabilitation and treatment out of the penal code.” (Washington Post, June 11, 2006) In 1994, the “three strikes” law required 25-years-to-life sentences for most offenders with two previous serious convictions. Writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune (April 27, 2006), David Beck-Brown, an advocate for addiction treatment, documented one example where a man was convicted of stealing a bicycle twice and buying drugs in prison once who qualified for “three-strikes” and would be kept in prision for the rest of his life. Beck-Brown estimated the cost to taxpayers would be a cool million – even if your moral code isn’t bothered by jailing someone for life for recreational drug use.
California could save a lot of money by simply converting death sentences to life sentences. John Van de Kamp, former LA county district attorney and California attorney general, estimated this would save California $125 million a year. Considering that few executions are actually carried out and most death row inmates are actually just serving life sentences anyway, it would be a pretty good deal for California.
But no-o-o-o-o! Right-wingers need their pound of flesh. Maybe California ought to go all the way and behead them in public like they do in the Middle East! Another thing Iran and California have in common is a deep financial crisis that their respective right-wingers are trying desperately to blame on other people.
I don’t dispute that the conservatives in CA have to bear their share of the blame of the current mess there.
However, it should be noted that since 1970 the Democrats have had constant control of the CA Senate.
Except for one two-year period the Democrats have had control of the CA House since 1970.
Arnold may be a republican but he is not especially conservative.
The three-strikes rule sounded good to me when it was proposed, but seeing how it has actually worked — it is bad law and should be repealed.
You’re absolutely right. Thanks for adding this.
You might note that I didn’t say “Republicans” in the article for exactly that reason. As I’ve noted in other blogs, the Democrats can be as blind and stupid as the Republicans. But, due to California’s initiative-happy way of doing public business, most of the really bad stuff really was a mob psychology operation and not the legislature anyway.
But it gets worse!
Jerry Brown, the DEMOCRAT who is now Attorney General, was responsible for most of this garbage in the first place when he was governor. He’s now appealing the decision by a panel of federal judges that would force California to release 50,000 or so prisioners because keeping them in the overcrowded and underfunded prisons is “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Constitution.
Jerry says it ain’t so. That’s because he’s not there.
And I’ve got enough material for a whole ‘nother article about Ah-nold and his flip-flopping on this issue. It’s a great example of exactly how “The Gravel Pit Theory” works in the real world.
On POTUS on Serius radio today they had a guest, who has a program, I believe, on NPR, and who now lives in California, who blamed most of California’s problem on pensions paid to retired “public servants.” He said they justify their large pensions by saying that when they were employed, they didn’t make as much as they could have in the private sector, so now they are “evening things out” by getting large pensions. One person who had been an Administrator in a small city in California is receiving $455,000. He said by law these pensions must be paid and that the only way to undo this is to amend California’s constitution.
Self-justification is America’s most popular sport. (Bush, always a sporting person, is a world-class champion at self-justification.)
From my point of view, there’s truth and not-so-true stuff.
One “truth” is that it would be extremely difficult to change these pensions now. The reason is that they are legal “contracts” and voiding a contract is pretty hard. On the other hand, the pensioners at General Motors got their contracts voided … because the other party to the contract went bankrupt. It would be hard for a whole state to be actually and legally “bankrupt”. (I know I used that term in my article – ‘literary license’.) Smaller units of government – cities and counties – have occasionally gone bankrupt. In those cases, the state takes over. In our system of government, states are theoretically “soverign” however and I’m not sure there is any possible mechanism for a whole state to go legally bankrupt.
But California is coming awfully close. It seems to me that the IOU’s actually do violate the strict terms of the contract (pension agreement) because they’re not actually “payment”. They’re a promise of future payment. (I wonder if someone has pursued this through the courts. Maybe we’ll find out if it’s possible for a whole state to go bankrupt.)
The “not-so-true” stuff is the assertion that they might have made more in the private sector. Ummmm … I choose not to believe this.
During most of the employment of your NPR public retiree, the average wage level of public sector employees was, in fact, lower. For example, a 1997 study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that, “compensation differs between the public sector ($25.73 per hour worked) and the private sector ($17.49 per hour worked)”. I found it very interesting to note that the same study found that, “the incidence of paid sick leave, medical and dental care, and life insurance was much higher among public sector employees than among private sector employees.”
This matches my experience. A very great many (certainly not all) public employees “retire on the job” about as soon as they’re hired. They don’t choose that career path to work. They choose it to avoid work. Most of them probably couldn’t get a job in the private sector in the same career path. (I developed computer software in my career. I hired a lot of people and interacted with programmers working in the public sector occasionally. In general, the public sector programmers I knew just didn’t have the skills.)
One of the reasons prison costs are so high in California is that the public sector employees there have an exceptionally strong and capable union. I mentioned to “RP” above that I have enough material for a “whole ‘nother article about Ah-nold and his flip-flopping”. That’s one of the big places he’s flip-flopped. When he first came into office, he was a bold advocate of revamping the way prisons in California operate – and cutting down the salary cost of the guards who run them. After the prison guard union put together a 10 million dollar war chest to defeat him in the next election, he did a 180 degree turn on this issue. The union remained “neutral” in the election.
This is what I mean by politicians “selling their soul” to get re-elected (the “Gravel Pit Theory”). I’ve written here that California did the right thing to elect Ah-nold originally because he wasn’t a career politician. And that’s right. In his first term, he did go after his priorities. But to get RE-elected, he has caved in on issue after issue after issue. (Somebody else would be in office right now if he had not.) He followed the tried-and-true formula of pandering to the Republican base and not disturbing existing power structures in the re-election.
Even Obama isn’t totally immune. Has he said anything about the corrupt, but very powerful DEMOCRATIC Representative Rangel (or RP’s favorite nemesis, Representative Murphy)? No! (On the other hand, it’s really not Obama’s job to reform Congress. He has his hands full with the Administrative branch of government.)
Here in Color Country, we see the same things happening. For example, the unelected Washington County Water Commission – now digging a tax grave for all of us with the Lake Powell Pipeline project – recently got a new chairman. It’s so interesting that the most qualified candidate just happened to be the son of the former chairman. But when candidates opposed to the Pipeline ran in the last election, they came in a very, very distant second.
People get the government they deserve.
I really wonder what will happen in California. Where and when does California think they are going to get funds to make good on these IOUs? Those people being paid with IOUs will themselves be forced to take out bankruptcy, I would think, in the not too distant future because who would accept their IOUs as payment for their obligations?
It was not my assertion, nor the assertion of the guest on the Serius interview that public employees make less than private sector employees. That, the guest stated, was the justification of the public employee retirees to justify their huge pensions.
And yes, the guest on Serius did mention that the public employees union was very powerful. Can’t remember for certain, but he might have said they are the most powerful lobby in California.
Most California banks (Bank of America, for example) will accept the IOU’s through July 10, but not after that.
The public employees unions in California in general are very powerful. The prision guard union is really tough. Not even the Terminator turned out to be tough enough for them.
And so after July 10, what? People are supposed to go to work, be paid with an IOU which NO ONE will accept as payment for anything. . . ?????????
What a mess!!!!!
These IOUs are only being issued to employees of the State of California, am I right? What percentage of California’s work force are affected by this?
There must be a bevy of activity right now in California surrounding this issue. What is going on? And why is this mess not receiving more press? It seems to me we have a crisis fomenting that is going to affect all of us (given California’s size and influence) and it’s not being talked about anywhere!
Oh Ye of little faith!
Don’t you know they’re going to play nice and agree on the golden compromise well before then?
(Ah-nold and the legislature only have the BEST INTERESTS of the people of California at heart.)
Hello. Great job. I did not expect this on a Wednesday. This is a great story. Thanks!