Stop Selling the People Short : In Reworking Budget, California Can Still Meet Human Needs

The California Legislature has less than one week to finish the job of the current legislative session. At the top of its list of priorities--and that of Gov. George Deukmejian--must be the reworking and completion of the state budget for 1988-89. For, as it now stands, the budget sells short the people of California, especially the most vulnerable. And it embodies the failure of our elected officials to carry out their solemn moral responsibility to protect basic human rights, to see to basic human needs and to secure basic justice for all members of the commonwealth.

Many Californians find themselves in desperate straits and sliding backward economically, despite the state’s continuing and remarkable growth in productivity and wealth. To help them it is urgent that budget cuts in life-sustaining areas be restored in several areas: low-cost housing; education; the state occupational safety and health program, and AIDS research, education and care. Tax policy should encourage the generation of new, permanent and meaningful job opportunities. Support and promotion of the nuclear family should form the fundamental framework of budget decisions.

According to a study by the Assembly Human Services Committee, real family income has fallen more than 8% since 1973, while four times as many persons slip down from the middle class as those who manage to move up into it. More than 3.5 million Californians live in poverty--13.6% of us, according to the Institute for Research on Poverty. Large numbers of people who have put in long years of faithful hard work must now rely on charity or welfarebecause of layoffs and changes from a manufacturing to a service economy. And in the most productive agricultural region of the world, thousands of Californians go hungry. Women and children make up a good part of the lengthening soup kitchen lines.

Meanwhile, working people are exposed to greater hazards on the job because of the elimination of funding for Cal/OSHA. And those who work the land--and the deteriorating rural communities nearby--suffer from the state’s failure to implement and enforce toxic-chemical regulations.

Homeless people wander our streets in growing numbers. Many are employed but they cannot afford to put a roof over their children’s heads. This affluent state’s failure to address the critical shortage of low-income housing and access to shelter is morally indefensible. Housing costs have simply exceeded the means of many of our citizens. A recent study by the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that in 1985 very-low-income families outnumbered available rental units within their means by 288%, a shortage of 789,406 homes for the working poor. But our state budget ignores all this.

Health care is even more prohibitive. Individuals and families have found that program changes and shifts in public policy have terminated their eligibility for medical service. In the past 10 years, Medicaid service to the poor and the near poor has shrunk from 65% to 45% of that population. And most cannot afford private health insurance.

California now ranks 36th among the states in the providing of prenatal servicesto women who are poor. Yet, $15.4 million for prenatal and maternity care to low-income mothers and another $10 million for services to medically indigent persons were cut from the governor’s state budget revision.

The budget reflects the same irresponsible neglect for mentally ill persons, persons with AIDS, students looking to education as a way out of poverty and the more than 1 million aliens in California who are eligible for citizenship but need classes in English and civics--for which school districts lack funds.

To call for a realignment of priorities in the designing of a people-oriented budget is not to be asking for more handouts and giveaways. When state government carries out its responsibility to ensure that basic needs are provided for, it is making an investment in people, our most valuable resource. Money spent up front on ensuring food, housing, health care and education will save many times that amount in future years by avoiding the health and social problems that occur when these basic needs are ignored.

The issue of meeting elemental human needs transcends partisan politics. California’s elected officials--Republicans and Democrats--have the time and opportunity to pull together for the sake of the people. They have it within them to rise above politics and to discharge enlightened political leadership in the reworking of the state budget.