There’s a chilling comment from political consultant Dan Schnur in the Los Angeles Times. In a fascinating story by Tony York, Schnur talks about the difference between image and reality in California’s budget wars:
“Cut $1 billion out of Medi-Cal and most voters won’t notice. Take away some cellphones and make legislators sit on a picnic bench, and they pay attention,” he said.
Yep: Jerry Brown is saving the state a few million dollars by cutting cell phones for state workers and replacing a fancy conference table in his office with a cheap one. And that’s gotten a lot of press — as Jerry, the old master, knew that it would. We still live in a state, and a nation, where symbolism matters more than substance.
Republicans still get away with saying that the governor needs to cut state employee pay and benefits — although you could fire (that is, cut all pay and benefits) for every one of the state’s 240,000 employees and you wouldn’t be close to balancing the budget. (What nobody says is that the majority of state spending in California goes for local programs — what legislator wants to call on the governor to cut funding for his or her district? Not even the Republicans do that.) Little cuts like Brown’s mean nothing, and are easily wiped up by the daily, unpredictable ebb and flow of tax receipts.
And yet, Brown has to send a message that he’s being frugal, so he gets rid of his conference table (did he sell it? For how much?) And it works.
And, of course, nobody ever talks about how much the state wastes in corporate tax breaks; it’s much easier to take away some Caltrans worker’s phone.
I wish Brown could really tell the truth in his State of the State speech — that the stuff people get agitated about is chump change, that a huge cut to Medi-Cal means people dying (but not today, and you can’t prove the link, and poor people die all the time and the press never notices), that cuts to education mean more poverty (and crime, and public expense) in the future, that we’ve already cut (or pupt off with gimmicks) about $30 billion in spending, and that the state has a serious revenue problem.
But he knows he can’t do that. People won’t vote for his tax plan unless he looks like he’s somehow punishing state workers and flagellating himself. Good thing the Jesuits trained him.