Current mood:

worried

I know some of my friends live in Campbell and west San Jose...
...which are in the district of CA Sen. Abel Maldonado, the one Republican who might conceivably be persuaded to vote for a sane budget fix.

See the California Tax Reform Association for some suggestions on what might be included in an immediate package to help resolve the budget crisis, rather than gutting the entire social safety net, if the GOP was not absolutely refusing to allow consideration of new revenues.

The Governor has proposed the elimination of CalWorks, which would immediately lead to 39,510 very low income children and parents losing their housing in Santa Clara County, and take $171 million out of the local economy.  The elimination of Healthy Families (CA's implementation of the federal Children's Health Insurance Program) would result in 32,220 children losing health coverage in Santa Clara County.  Schwarzenegger has also proposed elimination of all Medi-Cal funding for treatment of women with breast and cervical cancer, and for kidney dialysis treatments. In addition to being cruel, defunding these programs will cause losses of federal revenues of $3 for every $1 of state money.  The Governor is also proposing to take millions of dollars that are normally collected by the state on behalf of cities and counties, and returned to fund local gov't functions (your standard "police, fire, libraries, etc" list).

Something is going to give here. Either the entire system of government as we have understood it for the last five decades is going to shut down within the next year or two, or we are going to have to break the logjam we've had for the last 15-20 years where a crazy anti-government fringe has been allowed to prevent us from pursuing any kind of sane, coherent policy agenda.