Stuff the Bankers, Starve the Kids

All sorts of startling conclusions are
being drawn about the failure of California's ballot funding
initiatives last week. Newt Gingrich hailed it as another Boston Tea
Party, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insisted that it
condemns California, one of the world's largest economies, to banana
republic status. But if it was such a big deal, how come the voter
turnout was so low?

Maybe because the statewide ballot
initiatives were a bit of a political practical joke played by a
Republican governor and leading Democrats pretending to be dealing on a
statewide basis with the consequences of a national economic crisis
that can be solved only through massive federal intervention. There is
no way that the people of any state will vote to increase their taxes
in the midst of a deep recession, and certainly not when the funding
demands seem to have little to do with solving the problem at hand. As
a subheading in the ever-sober Economist magazine put it, "Voters
reject a ballot they could not comprehend."

I tried, and after reading the opposing
argument in the literature supplied at my nearly empty polling station
I voted for the ballot propositions that our governor, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, had requested. I assumed that this would help our
vastly underfunded inner-city schools. Later, my son Chris, who teaches
in one of those schools, told me that I might have been wrong and that
the convoluted paragraphs of the all too typically obtuse California
propositions could not improve matters much at all.

So, filled with doubt and guilt, I took
solace in the fact that in terms of the money involved it wasn't that
big a deal, and that surely the feds, to whom we Californians send more
in revenue than any other state, would bail us out as they have the
banks. Heck, the entire projected California budget shortfall comes to
only $21 billion, a tiny fraction of the banking bailout. Yes,
only-what is $21 billion in federal loan guarantees for California to
skirt bankruptcy compared with the $45 billion given to Citigroup,
along with $300 billion more in guarantees for that company's toxic
paper? Or how about the $185 billion doled out to AIG? If Citigroup is
too big to fail, isn't the state of California? Does anyone seriously
believe that the national economy can snap back to health if California
is in the dump?

The cause of California's, and almost
every other state's, predicament is an economy ruined by deregulation
policies that were secured by the lobbying efforts of Wall Street, led
most prominently by Citigroup. So, I expected a federal government that
has spent trillions salvaging the banks that got us into this mess to
find the relatively minor sums needed to bail out California and other
states that have been the victims of Wall Street's dangerous games.

But I didn't count on the tough-love
steeliness of President Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod, who told
Californians that "there's a limit to what the government can do" when
it comes to bailing out our state (as opposed to the banks). Or of
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: "Obviously, the state has to
make some very tough fiscal decisions ... [given] the budgetary
constraints that they have."

Tough for whom? Not the politicians of
either party. The results of such decisions are tough for the poor of
America, two-thirds of whom are kids, left to the tender mercy of the
states, thanks to the sweeping "welfare reform" and other programs put
into place by the Clinton White House in one of that Democratic
administration's signature triangulation ploys.

The Los Angeles Times summarized the
direction of those difficult choices in a story headlined "Poor would
be hard hit by proposed California budget cuts," which stated that
Schwarzenegger "is considering a plan to slash California's safety net
for the poor by eliminating the state's main welfare program, health
insurance for low-income families and cash grants to college students."

Bail out the banks, but not the 500,000
poor families with children served by the CalWorks program, which will
be dismantled, or the 928,000 children covered by the Healthy Families
program, slated for oblivion.

At a time when the feds are spending with
such abandon in an effort to stimulate the economy why is it tolerable
to leave states in a position where they are forced to fire teachers?
As the Los Angeles Times reported: "Schwarzenegger has proposed
slashing state spending on education by $3 billion to help close the
budget gap, and the state would pay dearly for canceling classes,
firing instructors, cutting class days and shortening the school year,
experts said." How can there be federal funds readily available for
banker bonuses but not to keep teachers in the classroom with their
students? It must have been the kids who caused the meltdown.