ORANGE COUNTY VOICE / BARBARA CONSIDINE : Nowhere to Cut Spending? Let’s Target Personal Perks

Amenities for officials, executives subtract from social programs and help keep poor people poor.

There was a big flap recently about Orange County officials and their big car allowances. As these top officials were driving away in their $823-per-month benefit packages, their aides were scratching lines through one basic health service after another. What difference does it make? Plenty.

Financial resources are finite. So what you take out ultimately affects what others get. The tired explanation when critical programs are cut is that there simply is nowhere else to reduce spending. William Aramony, former head of United Way of America, probably used that rationalization when he greedily cut back the contributions to local United Way agencies while he continued to lavishly reward himself with luxuries. But what about some of the smaller, more innocent excesses?

I serve as a volunteer board member for a city agency that pays $45 per month. I know everyone on that board with me is there because they want to be, not because they need the $45. I had them stop giving me the $45 as a tiny, symbolic gesture.

The city automatically makes up boxes of business cards for us too. I figure I’ll make a good dent in them about the time they open the 21st-Century time capsules. And those cards are modest next to some of the other, more fancy ones I’ve seen.

None of this exactly amounts to snatching infant formula out of a baby’s mouth or forcing 15 people to live under one roof. These are small things done with good intentions by well-meaning people. So why even bring them up?

There’s a garbage heap of all these supposedly indispensable amenities out there that adds up to a lot of infant formula and affordable housing. And this little stuff leads to a trail of the bigger, not-so-well-intentioned stuff, like the excesses of Aramony and the salaries and benefits pulled down by city managers as they slash away at community programs.

On a role model note, an Orange County union boss raking in $75,000 per year while the rank and file were handed all sorts of hardships was recently ousted by a reformer whose first action upon taking office was to slash her salary nearly in half.

Maybe we should start with government. We can all agree that that money belongs to all of us. The county supervisors’ cars are just the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s say we manage to part people from their perks and as a result end up with this pot of money for social programs. Welfare is not the answer. I think most people would agree it’s not good for the human spirit to feel incapable of maintaining oneself and one’s family. The problem lies in people working a full 40-hour week at the minimum wage while the cost of very basic things like housing and health care are priced for people who make more like $20 or $30 per hour. The result: overcrowding, minor illnesses turning into medical catastrophes, and the damning message that you’re incapable of taking care of yourself and your family.

Do we really have to make so much money, drive fancy cars, and have company-paid membership in the health club? In many areas, such as affordable housing where programs are practically nonexistent, and health care where programs are being slashed so drastically, isn’t it time that developers, city officials, insurance execs, physicians, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical companies and the medical equipment industry begin considering scaling back their unnecessarily extravagant personal perks and salaries?

We as consumers contribute to this mess as well. The longer we have our heads in the sand about the limits of modern medicine and our own mortality, the faster we hurtle toward a health care system that serves no one. We can’t have it all.

I don’t need to go into detail of how to create housing in Orange County that’s within the reach of a minimum wage earner or how to provide accessible health care. Activists have been doing a fine job of explaining this all along. It’s just a matter of us having the political will to do so, and the willingness in some small way to risk living simpler, less materialistic lives.