Is gov.’s budget picking on the helpless or using them as bargaining chips?

Let’s give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger the benefit of the doubt. When he proposes to pick the pockets of the impoverished aged, blind and disabled, and welfare children, he’s just playing political games. Right? He’s not really sincere.

That is not how this self-described centrist actually expects to make ends meet in Sacramento. Mustn’t be.

He’s not literally “very proud” of his revised $145.8-billion state budget proposal, despite his persistent claims.

Grabbing $1.3 billion in transit money to finance other state programs? Ending a measly $39-million state subsidy of property tax breaks aimed at encouraging farmers to keep tilling the soil, rather than selling out to developers?

These are just moves to pile bargaining chips on the negotiating table. That’s got to be it.

Otherwise -- at least in regards to the elderly, disabled and kids living on the edge -- he’d be either a dunce or a bully, picking on the politically weak. We know he’s not the former. Don’t even want to think about the latter.

It is true, however, that because the poor don’t attend political fundraisers and write big checks, they tend to be muscled to the end of the line when the budget is divvied in the Capitol.

Democratic leaders believe the governor merely is using the weakest among us as haggling chips, and I concur.

Legislators with any experience at all “know the drill,” Senate leader Don Perata (D-Oakland) told reporters after Schwarzenegger had laid out his revised budget Monday. “The governor is very fond of saying that this is part of the Kabuki [theater]. And we [legislators] usually get accused of being the people who dance the Kabuki. In this instance, he’s our dancing partner -- and he’s leading.”

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) was less generous. He called the budget “mean-spirited” and “reminiscent” of the governor’s unproductive partisan brawling two years ago.

Nunez especially objected to Schwarzenegger’s plan to make a voluntary, extra $1.6-billion payment on bond debt, asserting that the governor “wants to pay off Wall Street early even if it means kids on Main Street have to do without.”

Nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth G. Hill also thinks it’s bad policy for the state to pay early on a loan -- like “making an extra mortgage payment when you can’t pay your utility bill.”

Even with all the governor’s proposed program cuts, Hill calculates the state will be running $3 billion in the red for the fiscal year beginning July 1. Schwarzenegger is more optimistic, pegging the operating deficit at $1.4 billion.

Nunez subscribed to the bargaining-chip theory.

“This is all about pressuring us,” the speaker contended -- not just on the budget, but on the governor’s proposals to privatize the state lottery and to sell the EdFund, the guarantor of student loans. Add to that trading list, he said, the governor’s desire to obtain legislative ratification of six Indian gambling compacts.

Nunez ridiculed the tactic.

“The way you’re going to entice me to agree to leasing the lottery for 40 years and approving casino compacts is to stick it to poor people? This leaves a sour taste in my mouth. We’ve been doing business too long to be playing these kinds of games.

“I’m now less inclined to do the lottery. Less inclined to do the EdFund. The compacts are up in the air. He’s just a little too clever when looking for leverage. He’s so clever he’s ticked me off.”

Schwarzenegger’s most pathetic proposals are the cuts in benefits for the poor. They include:

* Eliminating a scheduled $25-per-month inflation adjustment for 1.3 million aged, blind and disabled living off SSI-SSP -- federal Supplemental Security Income and the State Supplementary Program.

Rather than the $888-per-month benefit expected to begin next January, individuals would get $863. Couples, instead of $1,558, would receive $1,514. For most of these people, that’s their only income.

The state would pocket $185 million.

* Not only freezing benefits for welfare recipients, but knocking an estimated 155,000 children off the rolls. They’re the kids of parents who did not meet their work requirements. Total welfare cuts: $589 million.

* Freezing wages for In-Home Supportive Service workers -- people who help 389,000 low-income elderly and disabled live independently, rather than in very expensive nursing facilities, where the public pays and digs deep to do it.

Instead of earning an expected $12.10 per hour, these home-care workers would remain at $11.10, making their recruitment even tougher since the job entails rolling over helpless bodies, changing bedpans, dressing people and lifting them into wheelchairs.

The state would save $14 million, chump change for Sacramento.

As Schwarzenegger aides, legislators and lobbyists spun reporters after the budget’s release, a heavyset man sat in an electric wheelchair at the rear of the spin room. He was Herb Meyer, 76, of Marin County, an activist for home-care services.

In 1994 he was a healthy, retired business exec enjoying the good life -- crewing a large sailboat on San Francisco Bay when a big wind came up. The jib line he was handling yanked him into the bulkhead, snapping his head back.

“Suddenly I entered the world of disability,” he recalled. He became a quadriplegic and soon used up virtually all his assets on healthcare. At that point, he qualified for the safety net: Medi-Cal and in-home services.

“When you’re in a wheelchair,” he learned, “people sometimes just look right over your head. They don’t see you there.”

Like some tax-averse politicians.

“I voted for the governor twice,” Meyer said. “If I had the opportunity to meet with him, maybe I could explain our side of this. Maybe he would understand it.”

Maybe he’d understand that Meyer is more than a political chip.

*

George Skelton writes Monday and Thursday. Reach him at george.skelton@latimes.com.