For State’s Aged, Blind, Disabled, a Lump of Coal for Christmas

The letters to 1.2 million Californians began arriving shortly after Thanksgiving. These were not holiday greetings. They were messages of bad news written in government gobbledygook.

The letters were sent to the aged, blind and disabled who are living on the edge, clinging to government benefits for subsistence.

The mangled message was this: Normally, you’d be getting a cost of living adjustment (COLA) starting Jan. 1. But don’t look for it. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature grabbed the money to balance the state budget without raising taxes.

Merry Christmas.

You couldn’t have surmised this, however, from reading the letter sent by the federal Social Security Administration. It read like something written by a chimpanzee using a Ouija board. Nonsensical. Diabolical for anyone attempting to comprehend.

But that’s not the most important point here. After all, it’s the thought that counts. And the thought: Sacramento needs the money more than the impoverished aged, blind and disabled.

“Has anybody written anything about this?” asked a caller, Jean. “Nobody knows anything about it.”

I told her this had been written about when the governor and the Legislature compromised on a budget last July.

“I may have to move because of it,” she continued. “I’ve got a $65 rent increase. I’m one step closer to the street.”

Jean didn’t want me to use her full name or her precise community because, she said, “I have a little bit of dignity left. I still have some friends in L.A. Can you just say I’m from the Palm Springs area?”

Jean, 60, says that for several years she was a buyer for the old Bullock’s department stores in L.A., but became afflicted with a painful disease of the connective tissues. When she no longer could work and afford L.A., she moved to the desert. On good days she uses crutches, but increasingly needs a wheelchair.

“I don’t have very much of a quality of life, to be honest with you.”

Here we should pause for some basics about these complex government benefits:

The federal and state governments make sure there’s a minimum monthly income for anybody who is aged, blind or disabled. If a person doesn’t have enough outside income or Social Security to reach the minimum standard, the feds kick in what’s called Supplemental Security Income, or SSI. States also have the option of adding extra money, and California does. That’s called the State Supplementary Program, or SSP.

The combined SSI-SSP program, administered by the feds, guarantees most California recipients at least $812 a month.

Starting Jan. 1, these folks would have gotten an additional 4.1%, or $33. But the state will reduce its share equal to the amount the feds will increase theirs. So the result will be a wash for recipients: no net boost, at least for three months.

On April 1, there will be a 3% hike, $24, all of it federal money. If not for the state’s miserliness in “suspending” its own COLA, however, beneficiaries would have gotten another $9.

The governor and Legislature already have decided to do it all over again in the next budget year, starting July 1. That was part of the budget deal they cooked last July. The agreement saved roughly $179 million in the current fiscal year. And it’s projected to reap $441 million in the next budget year, according to the legislative analyst’s office.

In fact, this was one of the biggest budget-balancing maneuvers Schwarzenegger and the Legislature executed last summer. When the governor brags about balancing the budget without raising taxes, he did it by digging into the pockets of the aged, blind and disabled. That and reneging on his funding promise to schools, which saved $3 billion.

The administration’s rationale for freezing SSI-SSP benefits is that they’re higher here than in any other big state.

But the real reason for socking the needy is that “they’re easy to pick on,” says former Senate leader John Burton (D-San Francisco). “They don’t have a political action committee. They’re faceless and voiceless. It ain’t like raising taxes on somebody, which is hard.”

It amounts to this: SSI-SSP recipients don’t attend fundraising dinners and write big checks for the campaign coffers of politicians. So they’re relegated to the end of the line when the budget’s divvied.

Burton, an old-school liberal, was the author of California’s first SSP program back when Ronald Reagan was governor. When he was booted by term limits last year, the poor immediately felt it. The powerful senator made protecting the aged, blind and disabled his price for any governor dealing with him.

Ironically, the benefit freeze is happening at the same time legislators are enjoying a 12% pay hike, from $99,000 to $110,880. Try telling SSI-SSP recipients that an independent commission -- not the Legislature -- raised the salaries.

“If you could have seen the look on their faces,” says Terri Lantz of West L.A., who works with the disabled. “Everyone was trying to make sense of that and it just doesn’t make sense.”

Chris Brown, 51, of Culver City, was born with cerebral palsy and gets around in a wheelchair. Regarding the lost COLA, he says: “It’s not much, but we didn’t have much to begin with. It’s getting harder and harder for people like me to lead independent and productive lives.”

Karen Taylor, 48, a cerebral palsy patient who lives with her mother in Crenshaw, says: “I won’t be able to go to the movie and out to dinner, as I like to do once in a while. I’ll just have to stick with the basics.”

Basics? “Buying medication. Helping my mother with my portion of the food.”

Bah humbug! This Christmas, Sacramento plays Scrooge.