Today’s Agenda

Budgets, to most of us, are boring spreadsheets, columns of figures. It’s hard enough to pay attention to a household or corporate budget, much less what the city, county or state is doing. But in bad economic times, like Southern California is experiencing now, the hard choices implicit in the budget process come into sharp focus.

A lot of oxes are being gored, and they all feel legitimate pain. Crime is up; how can we cut police? Or firefighters? Mentally ill homeless flood urban streets; social services are more crucial than ever, say their advocates; schools are badly overcrowded. Quietly off in a corner are libraries, the subject of Community Essay. L.A. County librarian David Wysocki argues that libraries are one of government’s few positive institutions: Their message is “We believe in your potential,” not “We’ll clean up after things go wrong.” Despite this, he says, libraries are about to be slashed to ineffectiveness by budget cuts that may close half the remaining branches in the county, eliminate book purchases and halt multilingual programs. Where will budding entrepreneurs go then for information, he says? Where will we send kids whose school libraries no longer function?

These are not questions we should have to be asking, even in these hard economic times, says Robert Arnold, senior economist and co-founder of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. But, he says, most people hate to hear his simple prescription: “To get recovery, you have to get the federal government to cover the deficits of the state and local governments,” he says.

But won’t that increase the deficit? Well, yes, says Arnold: “There’s a broad consensus among economists that over the next 5 to 10 years we need to reduce the deficit, but the short-term answer is that we need to increase the deficit. We should just not be allowing the state and local governments to cut back on all of these vital services.

“The budget problem isn’t in isolation--it’s the slow economy,” Arnold continues. “The answer to the budget problem in the state is to get recovery nationally.”

But what if the federal government won’t act?

“If we can conceivably borrow to get us over the hump, the state and local governments should do it,” Arnold says. “California is still going down economically, with the nation going up. We’ll just aggravate everything by cutting these vital services.”

These aren’t words that Sacramento or Washington want to hear, but Arnold says politics is simply at odds with reality.

Do teen-agers today want to become police officers? Although a few say in Youth Opinion that they dislike police, there’s mostly a sense that they have to put too much on the line, including their lives. “It’s not worth it,” says one respondent. “If people had to put up with as much as cops do, they might have a different perception of law enforcement,” says another. But Rekesha Lewis answers flatly, “I plan to be a cop,” like her uncle, an Inglewood officer. “Through him, I can see how a police officer is supposed to act.”