from http://www.robertscheer.com
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SCHWARZENEGGER JUST ACTS LIKE HE CARES FOR THE POOR
Scripted campaign over, Arnold now aims to balance budget on backs of
those who can least afford it
January 15 -- We should have known from his movie roles that
California's new governor would be nothing more than a blowhard bully boy.
Lacking the guts to take on the entrenched special interests, as he promised
when he played the heavily scripted role of outsider candidate, he now
proposes to do what all cowardly politicians do: balance the budget on
the backs of the poor.
A Los Angeles Times headline Saturday said it all: "Budget Ax Will Fall
Heavily on the Poor, Ill." The story on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
budget plan explained how it "promises higher costs and hurdles for
thousands of Californians, from some children with cancer who will no longer
get state help paying for chemotherapy to high school graduates who
will be shunted to community colleges instead of universities."
Those kinds of cuts, including reneging on an already approved
cost-of-living increase for mothers and children on welfare, are not only
hardhearted, but they won't save enough to dent the state's $14 billion
revenue shortfall for the 2004-05 budget. They are window dressing to give
the governor the cover of making what he termed "painful" spending cuts
while selling his $15 billion bond initiative -- which is a way of
raising taxes without appearing to do so. Another scam involves the $1.3
billion in property tax revenue Schwarzenegger proposes to steal from
cash-strapped local governments and school districts -- you know, the
people who bring you police, firefighters, street repairs, schools, parks
and all that other frivolous stuff.
"It's perplexing to me that the governor would say that public safety
is the top priority of the state of California and do something like
this that really jeopardizes our ability to provide public safety to our
citizens," said Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, who had praised the
governor's promise of a few weeks ago to restore funding to cities and
counties. That was before looking at these budget numbers.
Unchallenged are such questionable expenditures as the continued
irresponsible expansion of our prison system far beyond our needs; under the
governor's proposal, the youth and adult corrections budget would
increase by 8 percent, causing no pain for the powerful prison guards lobby,
which will now switch its allegiance to Schwarzenegger.
"The aged, the blind, the disabled and poor women with children are
paying for a big chunk of the loss of revenue from the vehicle tax," state
Senate Leader John Burton told me Monday. "Them and college students
and people needing medical assistance. The reality is the only way to
balance this budget without exploiting these groups is to raise taxes on
the wealthy, and the governor doesn't want to do that."
Put another way, if you have a few Schwarzenegger-branded Hummers in
your garage, you've just received a tidy windfall at the expense of those
who can least afford it -- such as mothers trying to work their way off
welfare through the CalWORKS program. A mother in Los Angeles raising
two kids would see her transitional family aid drop from $704 a month to
$669, according to the Los Angeles Times. That wouldn't even support
the governor's stogie habit, even if he cut back to two decent cigars a
day.
What hypocrisy for mega-millionaire Schwarzenegger to refer to
"painful" budget cuts. His kids, after all, are not enrolled in the Healthy
Families program, which encourages working poor parents to get needed
dental and vision care for their children, nor another initiative that
helps working families meet the extraordinary expenses associated with
treating severe medical problems like cerebral palsy and cancer -- both of
which would be curtailed in the governor's budget. His kids will never
have to drop out of community college because of the fee hikes he's
imposed or suffer from the deep cuts in Medi-Cal funding for the health
needs of the poor.
No, the pain that Schwarzenegger claims to feel is the fake suffering
of actors in movies -- blood and bruises that can be wiped away when the
filming stops. Perhaps that is why he evidenced so much wisecracking
good humor at his press conference announcing the budget cuts, which are
not likely to hurt anyone in his circle.
"It has been terrific," he told the more than 100 reporters, domestic
and foreign, who yuk it up at his cornball jokes. "I have enjoyed every
single day of this job."
Well, good for him. Perhaps he could stop grinning long enough to
imagine how much fun it would be to support his family for a month on $669
or be unable to pay his children's medical bills.
copyright 2004 Robert Scheer
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
If America is safer since the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein, why did Bush raise the threat level to orange over the holidays? It seems threats come from Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, NOT Hussein's baathist insurgents. Doh!! -- Claudia Dikinis 12/29/03
