It’s Really Serious When Liberals Back School Cuts

SACRAMENTO

State Sen. John Vasconcellos is a big, old shaggy-dog liberal, the kind you’d naturally turn to for help in trying to save schoolchildren from the governor’s budget ax.

At 70, he is the Legislature’s dean, a member since 1967, the year Ronald Reagan became governor. He got his political start as Gov. Pat Brown’s travel secretary.

A legislative throwback, the Santa Clara Democrat never worries about public opinion polls -- and not just because he’ll be termed out next year and plans to retire in Maui. He’s first and foremost an independent-minded policy wonk and crusader for “progressive” causes, some off the beaten path.

In the late ‘80s, Vasconcellos got lampooned in “Doonesbury” for sponsoring legislation that created a state commission to promote self-esteem. “Self-esteem,” he says proudly, “revolutionized the culture.”

But more relevant here, for 15 years into the ‘90s, he chaired the old Assembly Ways and Means Committee, which stripped apart and rebuilt governors’ budgets. Nobody knows more about state spending and taxes than this bleeding-heart lib.

So when Gov. Gray Davis asked the Legislature last month to cut and juggle current state spending to save $3.4 billion this fiscal year -- including $1.7-billion in school aid -- an ed-biz friend tapped out an urgent e-mail. Please help us protect education, she pleaded.

Michele Borba, a Palm Springs education consultant and former teacher, didn’t get the reply from Vasconcellos she expected. She was stunned.

Vasconcellos wrote back that “if we’re able to hold the schools’ cut to $1.7 billion, it’d almost constitute a miracle ...

“Educators and others should wake up and recognize the reality with which we are coping -- the enormity of our budget shortfall.”

Davis has estimated the current-year deficit at $10 billion, with a total shortfall of $35 billion through the next fiscal year. Nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth G. Hill pegs the two-year shortfall at $26 billion.

Too much time and energy have been wasted in the Capitol fretting -- politicking -- over which shortfall figure is correct. It’s irrelevant. The Legislature has failed to even offer a $10-billion solution. (Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson promises one by Feb. 1.) The shortfall number changes every week anyway.

Choose either figure -- Davis’ or Hill’s -- and the red ink is deep enough to drown state government.

Of the $78-billion general fund, 70% flows to local governments and schools.

Close all the state university campuses -- UC and CSU -- and you’d save only $5.8 billion in general fund money. Empty the prisons, and you’d get just $4.7 billion.

Fire all civil servants -- shutting down state government -- and you’d save maybe $11 billion, Hill told me last year.

Vasconcellos laid out the harsh details to his friend Borba, including the point that California already spends only the federally required minimum on welfare payments to poor families.

“I ain’t voting to cut food for kids or care for old folks,” he vows. “We can’t just starve kids in the street and wonder why there’s no law and order.”

Says Borba: “I didn’t realize the extent of the budget crunch. I didn’t have any comprehension how devastating this is, nor do I think the public has. Everyone would sit with their mouth open.”

A recent internal Democratic poll found that 90% of voters believe that state government wastes half the tax money. It’s a myth fed by demagogic politicians and radio talk hosts playing to the crowd. The governor’s unpopularity also doesn’t help.

Few seem to realize that the so-called Sacramento spending spree the last decade included roughly $7.5 billion annually in tax cuts. A slash in the vehicle license fee amounts to about $4 billion. (Assembly Democrats want to raise it back up.) There also are income tax credits for children and their care, for self-employed people’s health insurance, for manufacturers’ investments.... Just about everybody has had their hand in the vault.

Vasconcellos has begun a one-man campaign to spread the word that “the scale of the cuts needed is daunting

“People are coming in and asking, ‘How can you save us?’ I tell them they can’t all be saved.”

He has issued a newsletter and held a reporters’ briefing -- both virtually ignored -- and plans more. “If some people read it and it filters into their consciousness, that’s worthwhile.”

You know we’re in dire straits when a Democrat like Vasconcellos acknowledges the need to cut spending for school kids.

We also need some Republicans who will admit the need to raise taxes.